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.