Change NIH study section members, change review outcomes
January 22, 2026
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.
Update: I pulled one of the figures from Byrnes’ blog. Since NIH content has been regularly memory-holed this past year.
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