The Trump Administration’s abrupt cancellation of National Institutes of Health meetings and grant reviews has sparked concerns that medical breakthroughs will be stalled and DEI initiatives shut down.
By Amy Feldman, Forbes Staff
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n Wednesday around 1:30 p.m. Pacific time, Esther Choo, a professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, got an email that the National Institutes of Health study section she was slated to sit on the next day was cancelled. Within hours, as word of NIH meeting cancellations pinged across the social media platform Bluesky, she realized that this wasn’t only about the opioid research she would be reviewing, but a broader NIH research shutdown.
“For the first hour, it felt like a rumor,” Choo told Forbes, noting that there was no announcement on the NIH website. As it became clear that the cancellation involved all stages of scientific proposals in the grants review process, the reality sunk in and she began to gauge best case and worst case possibilities. “It could have some ripple effects where people that [research] cycle continue to not hear and that affects their ability to stay at their research institution or take on mentees,” she said, adding, “We are preparing for the worst. It’s very stressful, especially when your entire career or training path hinges on it.”
The NIH is the crown jewel of American scientific research, investing most of its $47 billion budget on medical research. Without the NIH meetings known as study sections, the agency can’t review grants and thus can’t make research awards. Those funds are critically important in helping researchers study cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and opioid addiction, among numerous other health issues – and have helped fund major breakthroughs, including Moderna’s development of its mRNA vaccine against Covid-19. Vaccinations against Covid-19 saved at least 14 million people from dying in the first year.
Pretty much every major university or medical institution relies on federal grants to fund their research, with big recipients of NIH funding including Johns Hopkins University, University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts General Hospital. A small proportion of funds, including those from federal healthcare research institution ARPA-H, go to healthcare and biomedical startups with promising early-stage research. (ARPA-H had a meeting in San Francisco that was to draw more than 100 people on Thursday abruptly cancelled).
In the short-term, the cancellation of these meetings means that some researchers who expect to receive funds in January will see those funds delayed, while others who had expected grant proposals slated to be reviewed would be subject to the challenges of rescheduling once the pause is lifted — each review requires some two dozen researchers to meet at the same time to assess the scientific merit of proposals in their field once the pause is lifted. It’s not clear if NIH grant review meetings will resume after February 1, when the pause on federal health communications is slated to end.
Longer term, researchers fear the Trump Administration will use federal research funding as a cudgel to force universities and other institutions that receive it in its purge of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that NIH grants would be a “key lever” in forcing schools such as Harvard and University of California, San Francisco, which receive tens of millions in NIH research funding each year, to rework or drop their DEI initiatives.
Programs that emphasize race, gender and sexual orientation “are at the least going to be disfavored by the Administration and that’s just a straightforward reading of these orders,” Mark Barnes, a partner focused on healthcare at global law firm Ropes & Gray, said of the Trump Administration’s order on DEI. That order, issued on Tuesday and called “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” designates federal anti-discrimination laws as “material” for those who receive government funding, allowing them to be sued under the False Claims Act. That essentially makes the NIH’s billions in funding a stick for enforcing the Trump Administration’s DEI agenda.
The NIH did not respond to detailed questions seeking comment by press time.
As word traveled among scientists about the cancellations of both NIH study sections and councils, which is the next step in a grant approval process, fear and uncertainty spread. There are at least 200 study sections each cycle, with three cycles a year, and each one can have dozens or, in certain cases, 100 different projects to review, said Rebecca Burdine, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, who has a grant pending to look at congenital heart defects in zebrafish (a precursor to being able to do such studies in humans). “A lot of people are in limbo,” she said. “That’s where you’re seeing the panic because we just don’t know,” she said, adding that there’s been a lot of fear in the scientific community about the administration’s lack of respect for scientific truths.
Even short delays can be a problem in scientific research, Burdine said. With zebrafish, for example, if there isn’t money to keep the fish facility running, it would take a lot of time, effort and cash to restart it. “People are thinking, ‘If I don’t get this grant, I might have to shut this research down, and it might not ever be feasible to start it back up again,’” she said. The fact that the shutdown comes at a time when the NIH saw its budget pared slightly for fiscal 2024, making it more competitive to get funding on worthwhile projects, has only increased researchers’ anxiety.
The potential for diversity fellowships to be shut down is an additional concern, she said. The NIH currently offers numerous awards to diverse researchers at all stages of their careers, including predoctoral fellowships known as F31 and postdoctoral fellowships known as F32. “Students who have fellowships through some of these DEI initiatives are afraid they will get retroactively taken away and their careers will come to a halt because that’s their tuition and stipend and money they live on while doing their Ph.D. work,” she said.
Michael D.L. Johnson, an associate professor of immunology at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine Tucson, said that it wasn’t yet clear to researchers if the NIH meeting cancellations and DEI initiatives were directly related, but that there was concern. “It’s hard to see why this is being used as leverage,” he said. “Maybe because it can be, and it’s as simple as that. What I can say is that the effect is that the ocean is going to be uneven. Some ships are going to be sailing higher than other ships.”
Johnson, who is also director of the National Summer Undergraduate Research Program, a virtual summer research program for underrepresented students that’s funded through the NSF, which has paired more than 400 students with more than 160 labs, said that he was concerned about what might happen to programs like that under the new administration. As a Black tenured professor who was helped by such programs early in his career, Johnson worried about the impact this would have on the next generation of scientists. “That to me is terrifying because I know how important it was to me,” he said.
For early-career scientists, NIH funding is crucial for getting a leg up in a difficult career path. Sema Quadir, a postdoctoral research scholar studying alcohol use disorder at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told Forbes by email that her proposal for a K99 award (for promising postdocs to complete mentored research development) was slated for March 5 – but was currently on hold with no additional details. The NIH’s webpage that used to have the study section review roster for each date had been scrubbed of details.
Quadir said she hoped to get the grant, which would start in July, in order to apply for faculty jobs in the fall 2025 cycle. Alternatively, she said, she might have to postpone the length of her postdoc, which could be viewed unfavorably in a faculty job search, or forgo the potential of the K99 grant, which could mean applying for less prestigious jobs.
“This pause in grant reviews jeopardizes not just my career, but the progress of our field,” she wrote. “What happens to the researchers whose work is delayed indefinitely? And what happens to the 46 million people in the U.S. living with a substance use disorder, waiting for breakthroughs that depend on federally funded research?”
