PSA on Competitive, Not Discussed NIH proposal outcomes

As you know, Dear Reader, the current and following rounds of NIH study section meetings have adopted temporary* new triage/streamlining rules.

Previously, approximately half of proposals are Not Discussed at the meeting, based on the average of preliminary overall impact scores from the assigned reviewers.

This has now been extended such that approximately 70% will Not be Discussed.

Along with this change, NIH has instituted a new “Not Discussed, but Competitive” designation for the ~middle third, ie the top half of the ND.

The first set of scores are being returned to PIs now and I’ve heard some chatter that all of the ND proposals are first marked in eRA Commons as ND. The “Competitive” designation has been showing up a day to many days later.

This has led to some folks asking if I know what is going on.

From what I can tell, the SRO dashboard or whatever still only allows them to enter ND. The SRO then has to send their list of “Competitive” NDs to some sort of eRA commons person who can make the adjustments.

So calm down, everyone, there is not some sort of post-meeting re-juggling of the ND list.

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*I remain skeptical that this will be temporary. Cutting meetings down to one day will be seen as a win. Alternately, getting through a larger set of apps assigned to one section will permit the reduction in total number of sections will be seen as a win. And the “competitive” ND is supposed to allow greater Program flexibility to pick up grants. This dovetails with the recent diktat about strict-payline ICs no longer doinn in that.

Change NIH study section members, change review outcomes

We are now starting the second year of the Trump Administration’s assaults on the function of the National Institutes of Health. The initial assault, as you know, was directed at any NIH efforts that appeared to have anything to do with Equity, Diversity or Inclusion and eventually led to the cancellation of funding opportunities, of long standing policy statements and of funded extramural awards.

One of the arguments, implicit or explicit, was that the new regime found that the way grant selection was conducted was bad and led to the funding of non-meritorious proposals. One of the points of attack was on grants that were funded outside of the strict order of peer review with the argument, implicit or explicit, that peer review conveyed merit and any FOA or initiatives or variance from peer review enacted by NIH Program Staff was bad investment and bad science. because of a lack of merit.

I, for one, have been waiting to see if the regime decides that a good way to change review outcomes is to change the peer reviewers who are doing the reviewing. And to see how they might try to change the reviewers.

The first hint of this last year was that the regime necessarily had to question the process of peer review to attack their other targets. I.e., this questioning was driven to some extent, and perhaps even mainly, by the distribution of NIH funding in Blue versus Red states, to coastal elite institutions, and to the Ivy League institutions. In the view of the regime the Blue states and their various enemies received too much NIH funding. The only way to harmonize this with their “pure merit” and “gold standard science” conceits was to now reject the outcome of peer review, which has been the main impetus for said disparities of funding.

Higher levels of review, i.e., Advisory Council, were attacked in the sense of purging some members who just so happened to be non-majoritarian. The boards that review intramural research laboratories were likewise decimated, again with a suspicious high level of attention paid to non-majoritarians, especially if they had DEI type professional activities to draw suspicion of the regime. A news article in Nature published today details how Advisory Councils are not being re-populated to account for purging and attrition based on completing terms of appointment.

Interference with study section membership has been less public so far, and it was not even clear the extent to which meddling had occurred through much of 2025. Now sure, study sections were cancelled early last year and then hastily re-scheduled. The October 2025 government shutdown led to another round of cancelled study sections, which are being completed now-ish. There is no public indication of any demands to alter the membership of re-scheduled meetings that I have seen.

The only structural things of note were first, the decision to disallow the ICs to run their own study sections and second, the deletion of all diversity criteria save “geographical” from the traditional list required of SROs when empaneling members for a term of service. Yes, the regime is not being very consistent in declaring one type of affirmative action totes okay and another type totes illegal.

But when it comes to appointing study section members, the outcomes are never transparent. Sure, we can track rosters over time for any given study section, assuming we are downloading the list every year or can round up periodic summary statements. But we don’t know who the SRO has proposed, whether anyone has been rejected by higher-up review at CSR, whether internal policy and instruction has intimidated the SROs into avoiding certain classes of nominee, or whether specific demands for geographical diversity have been issued.

We don’t know if the slates of new appointees who were supposed to start their term of service with the Oct/Nov rounds were empaneled. We don’t know if SROs have had to make it up with extra ad hoc recruits.

This brings me, at long last, to the actual topic of the day.

I was recently informed by a peer that they had been told by a SRO to stop accepting ad hoc study section requests this year so as to improve their chances of being approved as an empaneled member in the future.

WHAAAAAATTTT????

Snooping around a bit, I conclude that this is based on the chain of logic I started this post describing. Something is wrong with the people who are doing the reviewing. The wrong reviewers are having too much influence. Anyone who has reviewed in the past is tainted or under suspicion. SROs are selecting these wrong people.

And, apparently, the approval process has been refusing SRO requests merely on the basis that the proposed panel member has done SOME reviewing as an ad hoc lately.

So the solution to improve the merit of review is to change who is doing the reviewing. To people without much prior review experience.

We are not talking about the sort of excessive reviewing behavior that Noni Byrnes described long ago, when removing the continuous submission privilege for substantial service. Byrnes noted back then that 18% of R01 PIs had not served on any study sections in the prior 12 years and 30% had served 1-5 times over the past twelve years. She also noted that 94% of reviewers had served 36 times or fewer over the past 12 years, observing that “The small number [1%] of reviewers above the red line have served at 73 or more meetings in 12 years; this is the sort of excessive review service that raises concerns about undue influence“. And finally, the continuous review privilege being retracted from those that ad hoc required 6 sections in a rolling 5 possible rounds (18 mo period). This was described by Byrnes as a policy of “encouraging excessive ad hoc review service within a short time frame“. Not sure why meeting the rate of 3 per year is excessive for ad hoc but not empaneled…but I digress.

I don’t have a lot of details. I don’t know if the current issues with SROs proposing individuals with ad hoc experience will hit on people with any reviewing in the past year. I don’t know if SROs are doing the whole “excess of caution” thing and telling someone who they are considering for future appointment to keep it tight, when this may not be strictly necessary.

And no, I have no idea how the regime will be harmonizing their insistence on the highest merit and gold standard science on the one hand with their apparent desire to reduce the number of reviewers with prior study section experience on the other. Many of such peer reviewers were undoubtedly proposed for their prior study section appointments on the basis of the merit of their scientific accomplishments. Who knows, maybe the plan is to create a can’t-win scenario where SROs have to use noobs who are then criticized for being less accomplished on paper compared with the usual reviewers.

I leave you with a career focused observation. It is probably a good idea, if you are asked to ad hoc on a study section, to inquire of the SRO if this has any implications for your potential future appointment to any NIH study section. There are two reasons for doing so. First, if this is actually a thing and you do want to have a chance of being appointed to a study section, you need to know the real scoop. Second, if every SRO gets this response from half of the people they approach throughout the year, well, maybe that will be useful in getting this thing sidelined.

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Update: I pulled one of the figures from Byrnes’ blog. Since NIH content has been regularly memory-holed this past year.

Source: https://www.csr.nih.gov/reviewmatters/2020/01/24/broadening-the-pool-of-nih-reviewers/

Please, NIH reviewers, if you do ONE thing, do this

I’m finally getting around to completing a post-study section survey and I noticed a number of questions are related to the online / zoom review format.

Questions such as “rate your attention span….[from]really struggled to concentrate to…no problem concentrating”. And ratings on “reviewer engagement” and “productivity of discussions”. Statements to evaluate such as “discussion helped the panel evaluate the applications”.

A full on request for your preference for in-person versus Zoom.

If you do one productive thing, people, do what you can to communicate to NIH what a total disaster it has been not to have in-person study section meetings.

Considering the impact of Multi-Year Funding at NIH

Somewhere in the back of my head I have been thinking that the worst impact of NIH allocating ~50% of funds via Multi-Year Funding would be FY2026 if, and that is a huge IF, the overall budget stays about the same. As we all know, every year a subset of all of NIH’s funded grants reach the end of the competing award period and come off the books. This then clears up money to award new grants.

For today’s pondering, we’re going to imagine the spherical cow of R01 awards. Proposals that all cost the same as each other and have the same budget for each awarded year. This conveniently allows us to translate the “half of funds awarded” mandate to “half of grants awarded”. Because the NIH is required by Congress to average 4 years of competing support per award*, we will imagine the R01s all are funded for four years. Finally, even though the real Multi-Year awards have ranged in duration, we’ll consider an all-or-none system. Either the traditional first year, or all four years charged to the Fiscal Year.

With me so far?

Suppose that our imaginary NIH Institute or Center funded 400 R01s in total in the prior FY, before multi-year funding was mandated. Let’s make that FY2024 for discussion purposes.

This means that in FY2025, there are normally 100 grant years expiring and therefore available for new awards. Under normal years, this would mean 100 new R01s. To get to the new key numbers, we need to allocate these grant years on a 4:1 basis. Multi-Year awards get four for every one awarded traditionally. So if we divide by 5, we can arrive at 20 regular new R01 and 20 funded for four years. This would mean a 60% reduction in the number of new awards.

In FY2026, we expect another 100 grants to be expiring from the pre-FY2025 awards and only 20 awarded as normal in FY2025 that will encumber a second year. This gives the IC a total of 180 grant years to work with. Divide by 5, do some rounding and I make it out to be 36 multi-year and 36 regular new R01s. Thus 72 total FY2026 awards instead of 180, leaving us with another 60% reduction in the number of new awards. The positive spin here, of course, is that instead of the 40 new grants in FY2025, the IC is funding 72, or 80% more awards.

Ahem.

Moving right along, another 100 grants expire in FY2027. Adding the regular-funded awards (20 from FY2025r and 35 from FY2026) we end up with 245 available grant year. This means the IC can fund 49 multi-year and 49 regular awards. So close. We’re now at 98 new R01s issued, just a couple shy of the 100 that should have been awarded under the old way of funding grants. The 98 out of 245 is once again a 60% reduction in what could have been funded if the NIH suddenly decided to go back to the old way.

By the time this IC gets to FY2028, all of the awards made prior to FY2025 have expired. There are only 20 from FY2025, 35 from FY2026 and 49 from FY2027 that will need the out-years covered. Out of the 296 award years, the IC will then issue 59 as multi-year and 59 as regular. Yes another 60% reduction from what would have been under normal funding. And now we’re at 18% more grants than would normally have been funded.

I think my mind had been protectively pushing me to think vaguelyabout the increasing available grant-years moving from 180 to 245 to 295, instead of the steady 100 per FY, without considering the impact of the continued demand for half of funds to be devoted to multi-year funding. It turns out there will only be an increased number of grant years available in the fourth year….but that is just before everything goes tipsy-turvy as the original FY2025 Multi-Year awards expire for the following FY.

In terms of our lives as PIs who are seeking grant funding, that 60% reduction in awards every year is crucial. It means paylines and success rates will be reduced dramatically. This is why NCI announced that their payline of, what, 7 percentile would be 4 percentile at the end of FY2025. I don’t know that we will ever see data on success rates but the NIH had been hovering around 20% in the past several FY..this is about to go to 10% or worse.

That is just based on these award numbers and assumes that the number of proposals does not go up. Which of course is unlikely. We’re going to see a desperate barrage of proposals submitted for at least the next four years. Sure, there will be many labs closing and therefore PIs getting out of the grant-proposal pool. But it isn’t going to be quick or clean. I predict we’re going to see a period of time where PIs have submitted as many proposals as they are allowed (6, the number is 6 as a PI or Multi-PI) in each year.

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*For some reason, intentional or loop-hole, the five year R01s are balanced by R21 and R03 and other shorter mechanisms. If an institute such as NIGMS does not like to use the smaller mechanisms, they are more or less forced to fund mostly four-year R01s. To my understanding.

NIA surges out of the blocks

LOL. Of course not.

The National Institute on Aging has, however, started off Fiscal Year 2026 with the funding of new R01 grants, unlike most of the other ICs. There are 22 Type 1 R01* on RePORTER so far, two of which are from NINDS and twenty from NIA. For reference, there were 531 new R01 funded to start by 1/7/2025 for FY2025, of which 50 came from NIA.

These FY2026 awards are all presumably Cycle I grants, which went through Advisory Council Review in ~September, after review in the summer rounds for proposals submitted in Winter (~Feb-Mar) 2025.

As always, our null hypothesis has to be that if one IC** can do something, all of the ICs** can do it. In the past FYs, many other ICs (possible all but NIDA and NIAAA***) issue some awards by the first week of January. NIA is doing normal, workaday stuff here, albeit at a somewhat reduced pace (20/50).

Now, for all we know, the ICs are trying to get grants funded at a high rate and they are being bogged down by extra-special review. But I very much doubt this. What I suspect is that the ICs have learned essentially nothing from FY2025.

We’re under a Continuing Resolution. The ICs have, for the minute, permission to spend up to FY2025 levels. Which were FY2024 levels because of the perma-CR. They have puh-lenty of proposals that made it through the Advisory Council stage of peer review. If we have learned anything from FY2025 it is that it would be better to get as many awards as possible funded while they can and let the regime try to pull them back, than it would be to cower and comply.

We’re not talking about spending out the entire FY2025 amount. Sure, the Congress may slash the eventual appropriation for NIH. But zero it out? That seems unlikely.

This is the first of three major Cycles for the FY. Attrition of grants that ended 11/30 or 12/31 frees up cash. The impact of multi-year funding, and therefore the reduction of new R01, in FY2025 frees up cash. I’m not even arguing the ICs should be funding 33% of what they funded in FY2025 or in FY2024. But they should all be funding some new awards. Say, 20% of expectation? Even 15%? SOMETHING!

Not-yet-funded grants have very little impact on the overall struggle. It’s a harder case to be made with the lay public to complain about how our 9%ile application wasn’t funded than it is to complain about specific projects being halted after they were awarded. I assume the argument in various court cases is likewise asymmetrical. There’s theoretical or potential harm up against demonstrable harm. Members of Congress are likewise less likely to be concerned about the former and more likely to be concerned about the latter. Particularly when said awards are in their districts****.

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*none of these are multi-year funded, all have either 12/31 or 11/30 Budget End Dates in 2026. Totally normal for Cycle I awards.

**(with funding authority)

***Don’t get me started

****Look, NIH ICs. It sucks for many of us but if you just so happen to choose to preferentially award new projects in districts represented by Republicans, particularly those who fear a tough re-election fight this year, well you won’t see me complain too much about that.