Tag: NIH

  • Congress Proposes Increasing NIH Budget, Maintaining ED

    Congress Proposes Increasing NIH Budget, Maintaining ED

    The House and Senate appropriations committees have jointly proposed legislation that would generally maintain the Education Department’s funding levels, plus increase the National Institutes of Health’s budget by more than $400 million this fiscal year. It’s the latest in a trend of bipartisan Congressional rebukes of President Trump’s call to slash agencies that support higher ed.  

    For the current fiscal year, Trump had asked Congress to cut the NIH by 40 percent and subtract $12 billion from ED’s budget. The president proposed eliminating multiple ED programs, including TRIO, GEAR UP and the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program, which all help low-income students attend college. He also proposed reducing the ED Office for Civil Rights budget by over a third. 

    But the proposed funding package senators and representatives released this week maintains funding for all of those programs. 

    “We were surprised to see the level of funding for the higher education programs actually be increased, in some regards—and be maintained,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “We knew that level funding would be considered a win in this political environment.” 

    This latest set of appropriations bills is the final batch that Congress must approve to avert another government shutdown at the end of the month. Democrats have said passing actual appropriations bills, as opposed to another continuing resolution, is key to ensuring that federal agencies spend money as Congress wants.

    Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told Inside Higher Ed that the NIH budget increase is essentially “flat funding,” considering inflation. But she said “this appropriations package once again demonstrates Congressional, bipartisan support for research and development and the importance of these investments, as well as rejecting the administration’s very dramatic cuts.”  

    Earlier this month, Congress largely rejected Trump’s massive proposed cuts to the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Energy Department, three significant higher ed research funders. These developments are adding up to a more encouraging 2026 funding picture for research and programs that support postsecondary students. 

    But Congress has just 10 days to pass this new funding package, and Trump must still sign both packages into law. A government shutdown will begin after Jan. 30 for those agencies without approved appropriations legislation. 

    Guillory noted that—despite the Justice Department declaring last month that minority-serving institution programs are unlawful because they “effectively [employ] a racial quota by limiting institutional eligibility to schools with a certain racial composition”—Congress still proposed funding these programs. 

    “Pretty much every single program that is a minority-serving institution program received an increase in funding,” he said. 

    The appropriators also want to send another roughly $790 million to the Institute of Education Sciences, compared to the $261 million Trump requested. Last year, his administration gutted IES, the federal government’s central education data collection and research funding agency. But, like the broader Education Department, laws passed by Congress continue to require it to exist. 

    Beyond the appropriations numbers, the proposed legislation to fund the NIH would also prevent the federal government from capping indirect research cost reimbursement rates for NIH grants at 15 percent, as the Trump administration has unsuccessfully tried to do. Indirect cost rates, which individual institutions have historically negotiated with the federal government, pay for research expenses that are difficult to pin to any single project, such as lab costs and patient safety. 

    The appropriations committees released an explanatory statement alongside the legislation that says “neither NIH, nor any other department or agency, may develop or implement any policy, guidance, or rule” that would change how “negotiated indirect cost rates have been implemented and applied under NIH regulations, as those regulations were in effect during the third quarter of fiscal year 2017.” 

    GOP members of the House Appropriations Committee didn’t say they were bucking the president in their news release on the proposal. Instead, they said the legislation demonstrates “the will of the American people who mandated new priorities and accountability in government, including priorities to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ and ‘Make America Skilled Again.’” 

    “Investments are directed to where they matter most: into lifesaving biomedical research and resilient medical supply chains, classrooms and training that prepare the next generation for success, and rural hospitals and primary care to end the chronic disease epidemic,” the release said. 

    Democrats claimed victory for Congress. 

    “This latest funding package continues Congress’s forceful rejection of extreme cuts to federal programs proposed by the Trump Administration,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, in a release.  

    “Where the White House attempted to eliminate entire programs, we chose to increase their funding,” DeLauro said. “Where the Administration proposed slashing resources, we chose to sustain funding at current levels. Where President Trump and Budget Director Russ Vought sought broad discretion over federal spending, Congress, on a bipartisan, bicameral basis, chose to reassert its power of the purse.”

    Carney says she thinks passage is “highly likely.” 

    “Ostensibly, what they call the ‘four corners’—the chair and ranking members from both chambers and both parties—have come to this agreement on this package,” she said. So, barring “last-minute surprises,” she said, “it should be relatively smooth sailing.”

    Rep. Tom Cole, the Republican chair of the House appropriations committee, urged his fellow lawmakers to pass the legislation.

    “At a time when many believed completing the FY26 process was out of reach, we’ve shown that challenges are opportunities,” Cole said in a statement. “It’s time to get it across the finish line.”

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  • NIH cap on indirect research costs struck down on appeal

    NIH cap on indirect research costs struck down on appeal

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    Dive Brief:

    • A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that the National Institutes of Health cannot cap research overhead funding across the board, upholding an April lower court decision that spelled relief for beleaguered universities.
    • The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously concluded that NIH violated statutory law and the agency’s own regulatory procedures when it issued a policy capping reimbursement rates for indirect research costs at 15% for current and new grants.
    • The ruling is the latest blow to the Trump administration’s attempts to have multiple federal agencies cap indirect cost reimbursement rates at 15%. NIH on Tuesday declined to comment on the ruling or say if it planned to appeal.

    Dive Insight:

    When NIH issued the contested guidance in early February, it said it expected the move to save $4 billion — money that it planned to funnel toward financing direct research costs for institutions. 

    The move — widely panned in the academic community and elsewhere — broke with long-standing procedure of negotiating reimbursement rates with individual research institutions. For many large research universities, those rates top 50% and help pay for things like information technology, utilities, administrative support, and building and running laboratories. 

    These negotiations, built into NIH’s regulations, were also codified by Congress during the first Trump administration. Legislators passed an addition to an appropriations bill that advocates and judges have said specifically bars NIH from drawing up a universal reimbursement rate rather than negotiating individually with grantees. 

    NIH’s new policy drew multiple lawsuits, with high stakes looming while the legal battle played out. As one researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham put it, the cap would “cripple research infrastructure at hundreds of US institutions, and threatens to end our global superiority in scientific research.” 

    In court documents, scores of universities have described in detail how NIH’s 15% indirect cost cap would imperil their medical research operations and workforces, as well as the country’s ability as a whole to advance biomedical science — historically one of the U.S.’s major economic strengths. A February New York Times analysis found the policy could cost some of the top research universities over $100 million a year in funding. 

    As federal appellate Judge Kermit Lipez, a Clinton appointee, noted in this week’s ruling, NIH research has led to major medical breakthroughs and lowered death rates from conditions such as heart attacks and strokes. 

    “In short, the public-health benefits of NIH-funded research are enormous,” Lipez wrote.

    In March, a district court judge ruled the new policy illegal and issued a preliminary injunction against it, followed by a permanent injunction in April. Despite the setbacks, the Trump administration has tried instituting identical caps at other agencies — namely, the U.S. departments of Energy and Defense, and the National Science Foundation. Federal judges so far have blocked those moves as well.

    Several of those opposing NIH’s cap, which included a coalition of state attorneys general, lauded this week’s ruling. 

    “The Trump Administration wanted to eviscerate funding for medical research that helps develop new cures and treatments for diseases like cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement Monday. “We’re starting the new year by building on our previous successes and securing yet another important victory against the Trump Administration.”

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  • NIH Approves 100s of Grant Applications It Shelved or Denied

    NIH Approves 100s of Grant Applications It Shelved or Denied

    The National Institutes of Health is deciding, per court agreements, whether to award or deny droves of grant applications that the agency previously either rejected or shelved. This funding was stalled last year amid the Trump administration’s blunt moves to restrict research into certain disfavored topics, such as diversity, equity and inclusion—though researchers and state attorneys general said officials shot down a greater range of projects, including ones that could save lives.

    The NIH’s agreements, laid out in court filings in two ongoing lawsuits, are already bearing fruit. A spokesperson for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, which is leading one of the cases, said the agreement in that suit promises decisions on more than 5,000 grants nationally. On Dec. 29, the date of the agreement, the NIH issued 528 grant decisions, 499 of which were approvals, the spokesperson said.

    A spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is leading the other case, said the agreement in that case involves about 400 grants. He said the NIH awarded at least 135 out of 146 applications in a batch of decisions on Dec. 29.

    The filings set a series of dates by which the NIH agreed to decide on awarding or denying other types of grants. The last deadline is July 31.

    The agreements are another example of the Trump administration reversing many of its sweeping cuts to research funding in response to litigation. Researchers and organizations filed suit after suit last year after the NIH and other federal funding agencies abruptly terminated previously awarded grants and sat on applications for new ones.

    In a news release, the ACLU said the grants that the NIH will now decide on “address urgent public health issues, including HIV prevention, Alzheimer’s disease, LGBTQ+ health, and sexual violence.” ACLU of Massachusetts legal director Jessie Rossman said in the release that the NIH’s “unprecedented” and “unlawful” actions put “many scientists’ careers in limbo, including hundreds of members of the American Public Health Association and the UAW union.”

    ACLU lawyers are among the attorneys representing those groups, Ibis Reproductive Health and individual researchers in a suit they filed in April against the NIH and the larger Health and Human Services Department for stalling and rejecting grant funding. Democratic state attorneys general filed a similar suit in the same court, the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts.

    The agencies agreed to decide these grant applications in exchange for the plaintiffs dismissing some of their claims. The agencies didn’t admit wrongdoing.

    In a news release, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office said the Trump administration “indefinitely withheld issuing final decisions on applications that had already received approval from the relevant review panels,” leaving the states that sued “awaiting decisions on billions of dollars.”

    The release said that, for example, when the suit was filed in April, the University of Massachusetts “had 353 applications for NIH funding whose review had been delayed, signifying millions in potential grant funding that would aid in lifesaving medical research.” Massachusetts attorney general Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement that “lifesaving studies related to Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and other devastating illnesses were frozen indefinitely—stealing hope from countless families across the country and putting lives at risk.”

    It’s unclear how much money the NIH may dole out in total. An HHS spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that the “NIH cannot comment on the status of individual grant applications or deliberations.”

    “The agency remains committed to supporting rigorous, evidence-based research that advances the health of all Americans,” the spokesperson said. HHS and the NIH didn’t provide interviews or further comment.

    Meanwhile, a legal fight continues over grants that the NIH previously approved but later canceled.

    Lingering Questions

    In June, in these same two cases, U.S. District Judge William Young ordered the NIH to restore grants the agency had awarded but then—after Trump retook the White House—terminated midgrant.

    Young, a Reagan appointee, criticized the federal government for not formally defining DEI, despite using that term to justify terminating grants. He said at a hearing that he’d “never seen racial discrimination by the government like this” during his four decades as a federal judge.

    But, two months later, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 preliminary decision, stayed Young’s ruling ordering restoration of the grants. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority that Young “likely lacked jurisdiction to hear challenges to the grant terminations, which belong in the Court of Federal Claims.” However, STAT reported that the NIH had restored more than 2,000 terminated grants following Young’s ruling, and it didn’t reverse course after the Supreme Court decision.

    That question of whether researchers with canceled grants must ultimately try their luck before the Court of Federal Claims is now before the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals. There’s a hearing Tuesday in that matter.

    Questions linger about when the grant fight will really end. In a video interview with journalist Paul Thacker—released Wednesday and previously reported on by STAT—NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said that, despite the grant restorations, any grants dealing with DEI that come up for renewal this year won’t be funded. Bhattacharya distinguished between cutting a grant and not renewing it.

    He said that, “as best I can understand the legal aspects,” the courts have said his agency can’t cut restored grants. “But, when it comes to renewal, those grants no longer meet NIH priorities … so when they come up for renewal over the course of the year, we won’t renew them,” he said.

    Bhattacharya said the NIH’s DEI-related work “did not actually have any chance of improving the health of minority populations.” He said, “I think that the shift away from DEI is of a piece with the rest of what we’re trying to do at the NIH, which is to do research that actually makes the lives of people better.”

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  • NSF Lowers Grant Review Requirements, NIH Hunts for Phrases

    NSF Lowers Grant Review Requirements, NIH Hunts for Phrases

    The NIH and NSF, which both fund research, gave staff new grant review instructions this month.

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    Two major federal research funding agencies are altering their grant review processes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, according to a Dec. 1 internal memo that Science obtained and published, while STAT reported that the National Institutes of Health distributed guidance Friday ordering staff to use a “text analysis tool” to search for certain phrases.

    The NSF memo says the government shutdown, which ended in November, hampered its progress toward doling out all its funding by the end of the new fiscal year. It said “we lost critical time” and “now face [a] significant backlog of unreviewed proposals and canceled review panels. In parallel, our workforce has been significantly reduced.”

    The memo said the changes “enable Program Officers to expedite award and decline decisions,” including by moving away from the “usual three or more reviews” of proposals. It said that, now, “full proposals requiring external review must be reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers or have a minimum of two reviews. An internal review may substitute for one.”

    NSF spokesperson Mike England didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed the memo. He said in an email that the changes are “part of a comprehensive approach to streamlining processes and reducing administrative burden” and “also help expedite the processing of shutdown-related backlogs while maintaining the rigor of the external merit review process.”

    As for the NIH guidance, while it instructs program officers on how to review and possibly terminate grants, STAT reported that “some outside experts said the guidance is a positive step, making future terminations more of a dialogue that researchers can push back on.”

    But another media outlet, NOTUS, published a more critical article on the guidance, saying the “Trump administration is pausing new funding for National Institutes of Health grants that include terms like ‘health equity’ and ‘structural racism,’ pending review.” NOTUS reported that the guidance says new funding won’t be provided to “misaligned” grants until “all areas of non-alignment have been addressed.”

    Both articles said NIH ordered staff to use a “computational text analysis tool” to scan current and new grants for terms that may mean the submissions are misaligned with NIH priorities. (The NSF memo similarly said “Program Officers are also expected to maximize their use of available automated merit review tools, especially tools that identify proposals that should be returned without review.”)

    Andrew G. Nixon, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department, which includes NIH, didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed a copy of the NIH guidance. In an email, he wrote that “claims that NIH issued a ‘banned words list’ or conducted word searches to remove specific terms from grants are unequivocally false. NIH has never prohibited the use of any particular words in grant applications.”

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  • The NIH Policy Holding Researchers “Hostage”

    The NIH Policy Holding Researchers “Hostage”

    Rachael Sirianni is one of the thousands of research scientists whose work has been decimated by the Trump administration’s massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.

    “My lab is crumbling,” said the pediatric brain cancer researcher, who works at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. “Over the course of the last eight months, I’ve had to shutter more than half of my research program.”

    At the same time, she has a backlog of papers she’s still trying to get published in journals that are the best fit for her research and career, including several that charge thousands in fees to make the paper free to access. And if she wants her work to comply with a new NIH policy to expedite public access to federally funded research—part of the agency’s effort to restore trust in science, it says—she may have to start paying even more.

    The 2024 Public Access Policy, which took effect July 1, requires federally funded researchers to deposit their accepted peer-reviewed article manuscript into an open-access repository, such as the NIH-managed PubMed Central, immediately after a journal accepts it for publication. But researchers are reporting that some journals, including at least several high-impact titles owned by Elsevier, Wiley and Springer—are charging authors anywhere from $2,000 to more than $10,000 in article processing charges (APCs) to make their work immediately accessible.

    While researchers can use their NIH grants to pay for APCs, that’s hard for some to justify in such a precarious funding environment.

    “If I had full access to the institutional dollars that normally support my research program, or if I really believed that that grant that scored well is eventually going to get funded, I could risk my research dollars on these open-access fees,” Sirianni said. “But because of the trauma that the Trump administration is imposing on scientists across the country, we are faced with impossible decisions. Do we dedicate our money to the experiments? Do we maintain our research personnel? Do we comply with open-access fees?”

    Open-access advocates and experts say that predicament is exposing the limits of the government’s ability to rein in the $19 billion scholarly publishing industry, which is fueled by academic incentive structures that reward researchers for publishing frequently in widely cited, prestigious journals. Meanwhile, the publishing industry—which has long opposed immediate open access in part because it threatens subscription-dependent business models—says the rollout of the policy gives them no choice but to charge APCs.

    Zero Embargo

    The 2024 policy replaces the 2008 Public Access Policy, which allowed publishers to embargo new peer-reviewed federally funded research articles for 12 months before making them publicly available. That embargo period allowed publishers to turn a profit from selling academic libraries subscriptions to exclusive content; authors who wanted to make their papers publicly accessible before the embargo was lifted typically paid an APC.

    The government’s goal in lifting the embargo was to promote “equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in Government science, and to advance American scientific leadership,” Alondra Nelson, the former acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a 2022 memo bearing her name. “A federal public access policy consistent with our values of equal opportunity must allow for broad and expeditious sharing of federally funded research—and must allow all Americans to benefit from the returns on our research and development investments without delay.”

    Although the Biden administration finalized the policy, the Trump administration is carrying it forward. It was set to take effect across federal agencies on Dec. 31, but NIH director Jay Bhattacharya announced in April that he was implementing it six months ahead of schedule to promote “maximum transparency.”

    Although Sirianni supports the spirit of NIH’s new open-access policy, she’s worried that high APCs will deter researchers from submitting their work to influential journals that might otherwise be a good fit, to the detriment of the scientific literature.

    “There’s absolutely going to be a lot of work that doesn’t get published or gets published in the wrong journal,” Sirianni said. “This policy is harming scientists. Instead of ensuring that research dollars are invested in providing knowledge to the scientific community and to the public, those dollars will be spent on feeding giant publishing corporations more money.”

    ‘Not Sustainable’?

    However, publishers say the NIH’s zero-embargo policy is forcing them to recoup lost subscription revenue through APCs to sustain operational costs, including article selection, curation, peer and editorial review, publication, archiving, and maintenance.

    “We are unable to support approaches that aim to make subscription articles immediately and freely available, which are not sustainable in the long term given they undermine the subscription model on which they depend,” an Elsevier spokesperson said in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

    “The best method for addressing issues of cost in publication is through a vibrant, competitive, and dynamic publishing marketplace with maximum author choice, including fee-based public access and read-and-publish agreements,” Carl Maxwell, senior vice president of public policy for the Association of American Publishers, who lobbied against the zero-embargo policy, wrote in an email. “We don’t think it’s a good idea to compel researchers to use a one-size-fits-all open access business model that has the potential to require NIH-funded researchers to pay out of pocket to fund the peer review process, in some cases harming their ability to communicate their research results to the scientific community and the general public.”

    Caroline Sutton, CEO for the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, added that researchers’ frustration with the NIH’s new open-access policy “reveals one of the real human impacts of well-intentioned policies that do not fully consider the operational realities of the research ecosystem.”

    It also raises long-standing questions about how to sustain that ecosystem.

    “Should the responsibility for funding this work lie with the funder? With the research or institutional library? Should publishers not be compensated?” she wrote in an email. “And how can the critical system of checks and balances—which must be resourced—endure if it is not sustainably funded?”

    But another sector sustaining the scientific publishing industry is the faculty who produce and peer review research for little to no financial compensation. The most productive are often rewarded instead with tenure, promotion and cachet.

    Holding Articles ‘Hostage’

    While the NIH policy doesn’t require authors to publish in journals that charge APCs—plenty of reputable, fully open-access journals exist—researchers say where they publish matters to their careers. At most universities, frequently publishing research in prestigious, high-impact journals—including many with hefty APCs—carries more weight with tenure and review committees than publishing in more obscure journals.

    But researchers aren’t always clear on a journal’s APC guidelines until they get through the review process and are asked to pay open-access fees to comply with the NIH policy, Rachel Widome, a public health professor at the University of Minnesota, told Inside Higher Ed. She withdrew an article from the Elsevier-owned Sleep Health on how school start times impact adolescents after she realized she’d have to pay a $2,500 fee to upload her accepted manuscript to PubMed Central in compliance with NIH policy.

    “When that happens, they’re holding your article hostage,” she said. “Do you start from scratch and submit it to a new journal? It can take six to nine months to go through another review.”

    She ended up resubmitting the article to Sleep Health after her NIH grant ended, exempting her from the zero-embargo policy. Although “time has been wasted,” she said the APCs stand to hurt early-career scientists the most. “It’s so critical that they establish a publication record,” Widome said. “If the options of which journals they can submit to are really limited [because of APCs], that hurts their chances of getting her research out and launching her career.”

    ‘Valuing Prestige’

    But those academic incentive structures have also emboldened publishers to levy APCs in response to the NIH’s zero-embargo policy, said Dave Hansen, executive director of the Authors Alliance, a California-based nonprofit that supports authors in disseminating their work.

    “So much of the system is wrapped around valuing prestige journals that are published by some of these bigger commercial publishers. That’s really hard for even a big institution like the NIH to nudge researchers away from,” Hansen said, adding that the NIH could de-emphasize prestige factors when evaluating researchers. At the same time, “a lot of publishers recognize that there’s a massive amount of federal funding that they can now demand access to because of this new federal policy.”

    The zero-embargo policy isn’t the NIH’s only attempt to regulate the scientific publishing industry. This summer, Bhattacharya proposed capping APCs to weaken the market power of publishers, dilute the scientific elite and “make science accessible not only to the public but also to the broader scientific community, while ending perverse incentives that don’t benefit taxpayers,” he said. But critics say the plan is neither comprehensive enough to dismantle academic incentive structures, nor likely to substantially lower APCs.

    And the frustration researchers are experiencing in the early days of the NIH’s new zero-embargo access policy—which was crafted with some of the same goals as the NIH’s proposed APC caps—is already offering support for those predictions.

    “The NIH public-access policy applies to a vast amount of research, but it’s also just a percentage of the overall landscape. There are a number of players here, including the funders, researchers, institutions, publishers and libraries,” said Katie Funk, former program manager for PubMed Central, who helped develop the zero-embargo policy.

    “Without addressing the whole system, it just causes confusion,” she added. “Larger conversations need to be had about the costs of publishing. It’s not transparent and it’s pervading the whole system.”

    (This article has been updated to correct the name of the UMass medical school.)

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  • Total NSF, NIH Funding Didn’t Plunge in Fiscal 2025

    Total NSF, NIH Funding Didn’t Plunge in Fiscal 2025

    An analysis found that NSF grant funding remained about level in the recently ended fiscal year.

    The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health doled out about as much total grant funding in the recently ended fiscal year as they did the year before, despite the Trump administration’s “unprecedented” earlier slowdown of federal science funding, Science reported Wednesday.

    According to the journal’s analysis, “NSF committed approximately $8.17 billion to grants, fellowships, and other funding mechanisms in the 2025 fiscal year”—which ended Sept. 30—“about the same as in 2024.” It found that NIH spending also remained level.

    But both federal research funding agencies still reduced the number of new grants they awarded, Science reported. It wrote that NSF funded about 8,800 new research project grants, down from 11,000 in 2024, adding that an anonymous NSF staffer said this “was one of several changes designed to reduce the agency’s future financial obligations, in case Trump’s proposed budget cut is realized.” The analysis also found that the agency reduced from 2,600 to 1,100 “the number of new continuing grants, and ‘forward funded’ a number of existing continuing grants.”

    NSF declined to confirm or deny Science’s figures. NIH spokespeople didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Thursday.

    Congress has yet to decide how much to fund NSF in the current fiscal year; most of the federal government is currently funded by a continuing resolution that expires Jan. 30, and the government could shut down again if lawmakers don’t pass appropriations bills by then. But Republicans from both chambers have indicated they don’t plan to cut $5 billion from NSF, as Trump has requested; in July, Senate appropriators put forth a cut of only $16 million, while the suggestion in the House was to slash the NSF budget by $2 billion.

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  • NIH temporarily restores UC grants under court order

    NIH temporarily restores UC grants under court order

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    Dive Brief:

    • The National Institutes of Health has temporarily restored the University of California system’s research funding it abruptly revoked under President Donald Trump, officials from the U.S. Department of Justice said in court filings this week.
    • A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction last month ordering NIH, along with the U.S. departments of Defense and Transportation, to reinstate the canceled funding for the university system and its researchers while a related lawsuit proceeds. 
    • Trump administration officials said Monday the three agencies were complying but reported some administrative difficulties that would take until mid-October to resolve.

    Dive Insight:

    Researchers and faculty from the University of California’s Berkeley and San Francisco campuses filed a class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration in June, alleging its mass termination of research grants was illegal and jeopardized U.S. advancement. At the University of California, Los Angeles alone, NIH reportedly cut some 500 research grants worth over $500 million. 

    In September, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin temporarily ordered three agencies to reinstate the grants and barred them from making further cuts en masse against the system for the duration of the court case.

    NIH has now restored the bulk of that funding to comply with the order. But the agency is running into issues verifying if the grants it canceled are held by University of California researchers who work at institutions outside of their home system, federal officials told the court on Monday.

    In total, NIH identified 61 grants that likely meet this parameter, all but nine of which have been reinstated.

    Officials are trying to verify that the researchers on the remaining nine grants are still employed by the University of California, a process challenged by potentially out-of-date agency files, court documents said.

    As of Monday, NIH anticipated completing that work by the end of the week, though the shutdown of the federal government has likely altered that timeline.

    The Defense Department also declared a successful return of funds to University of California institutions. But the agency reported administrative difficulties on behalf of its components, such as the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the branches of the military.

    Simply identifying relevant awards issued through those groups has been a challenge, officials said, “because of the number of DoD Components and the variety of grants systems involved.”

    “Reinstatement has been particularly complicated, as a fiscal matter, where funding has already been deobligated,” the court filing said. “In most cases, DoD Components have contacted UC institutions so that they can work together to modify awards and restore funding.”

    Prior to the government shutdown, the Defense Department gave an estimated completion date of Oct. 10.

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  • NIH Fires 4 Directors After Putting Them on Leave

    NIH Fires 4 Directors After Putting Them on Leave

    The directors felt they were fired as part of the administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion and for political reasons.

    Wesley Lapointe/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    Four directors at the National Institutes of Health who were placed on administrative leave earlier this year have now been fired, Science reported.

    The ousted leaders led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the National Institute of Nursing Research. Tara Schwetz, the deputy director for program coordination, planning and strategic initiatives, was also fired. The directors were put on leave in the spring around the same time that the administration laid off thousands at the Department of Health and Human Services.

    Science reported that the directors felt they were targeted as part of the administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion and for political reasons. Jeanne Marrazzo, the former NIAID director, took over for Anthony Fauci, a frequent target for Republicans who took issue with his approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. Marrazzo filed a whistleblower complaint in early September that in part accused NIH leadership of downplaying the value of vaccines, The New York Times reported.

    “It’s not surprising, but it’s still incredibly disappointing,” Marrazzo told Science. “I would have been quite happy to serve under the new administration as long as we were allowed to do our jobs.”

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  • Former NIH Leaders Allege Retaliation for Whistleblowing

    Former NIH Leaders Allege Retaliation for Whistleblowing

    Two former National Institutes of Health leaders are alleging the agency illegally put them on leave in April for speaking up against research grant cancellations and antivaccine efforts.

    Jeanne Marrazzo, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Kathleen Neuzil, former director of the NIH’s Fogarty International Center and former associate director for international research, filed complaints Thursday with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, seeking reinstatement. They allege they faced retaliation for whistleblowing and other protected activity.

    Marrazzo “objected to the Administration’s hostility towards vaccines and its abrupt cancellation of grants and clinical trials for political reasons,” according to her complaint. Neuzil further objected to the administration’s “cancellation of grants based on anti–South Africa hostility and its incorrect belief that certain grants advanced ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’” her complaint stated.

    They both specifically allege that Matthew Memoli—who was NIH’s acting director after Trump returned to power and is now NIH’s principal deputy director—retaliated against them. An NIH spokesperson said in an email Friday that Memoli emphasizes that each vaccine “must be assessed on its own merits.”

    The spokesperson also wrote that “assertions that reprioritization, reallocation, or cancellation of certain grants are ‘anti-science’ misrepresent NIH’s progress and often echo the grievances of former staff.”

    Debra S. Katz, an attorney representing the complainants, said in a news release that the “Trump administration installed politically motivated leaders—most notably Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., who immediately acted to stifle scientific inquiry, halt crucial research and retaliate against those, like Drs. Marrazzo and Neuzil, who refused to disavow the overwhelming body of evidence showing that vaccines are safe and effective.”

    But Katz said the Office of Special Counsel, which is their only route for legal relief, “has been politically compromised to such an extent that it will most certainly refuse to act against Trump appointees.”

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  • NIH Publisher Fee Cap Plan “Not Comprehensive Enough”

    NIH Publisher Fee Cap Plan “Not Comprehensive Enough”

    Members of the public have until Sept. 15 to weigh in on the National Institutes of Health’s plan to curb how much taxpayer money goes to journals to publish some federally funded research.

    The agency, which is the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research, wants to do that by capping—or potentially disallowing—the amount of money it gives to NIH-funded researchers who want to make their work publicly accessible by paying publishers article processing charges. A July 30 request for information memo outlined five potential options, which the NIH says are all aimed at balancing the “feasibility of providing research results with maximizing the use of taxpayer funds to support research.”

    Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, has said the policy could be a mechanism for ending what he sees as the “perverse incentives” driving the $19 billion for-profit academic publishing industry and making it “much harder for a small number of scientific elite to say what’s true and false.”

    But open-information advocates and experts who have reviewed the NIH’s proposed plans for capping the amount it will pay for article processing charges said it likely won’t reform academia’s incentive structure or rein in publishers, including some that charge academic researchers as much as $12,690 per article to make their work freely accessible to the public and more likely to get cited.

    “It is important to keep in mind that any cap is a cap on the amount that can be budgeted to be paid from a grant. It is not a cap on what publishers can charge. What publishers charge may be influenced by a budget cap, but many other factors will also impact on that,” said Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a professor and coordinator for research professional development at the University of Illinois library. “It is more likely that a budget cap causes publishers that charge less to raise their fees—the ceiling will become the floor—than it is that publishers charging more will lower their fees.”

    The proposal, which if adopted would go into effect Jan. 1, 2026, is aimed at addressing one of the many criticisms the Trump administration has made about federally funded academic research and the journals that publish the results.

    In May, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, said he was considering preventing federally funded scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and launching in-house journals instead, claiming without evidence that pharmaceutical companies control the journals.

    Then, in July, the NIH sped up the implementation of a Biden-era rule requiring federally funded researchers to immediately make their research findings publicly accessible. And earlier this month, Bhattacharya criticized academia’s “publish or perish culture” in a statement about the NIH’s strategy for advancing its mission.

    “It favors the promotion of only favorable results, and replication work is little valued or rewarded,” he wrote. “We are exploring various mechanisms to support scientists focused on replication work, to publish negative findings, and to elevate replication research.”

    Given all of that context, the publisher fee cap plan is “more or less a warning shot across the bow that the NIH is serious about scholarly communication reform,” said Chris Marcum, who was assistant director for open science and data policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration. “The administration believes there’s massive market concentration held by just a few scholarly publishers, and they’re no longer going to subsidize the surplus revenues of those journals.”

    While the Trump administration is far from alone in its criticism of big academic publishers—just six companies own 53 percent of academic journals—which rely on often-unpaid researchers and peer reviewers, Marcum said that even if the NIH adopted all five of the options it outlined to cap publisher fees, “it’s not comprehensive enough” to meet their stated goals.

    “They could eliminate APCs and fix pricing, but the extremely useful tool that they have is influence over the universities,” he added.

    For example, one of the options in the NIH’s proposal would increase limits on APCs if the journal paid peer reviewers, but Marcum said he’s concerned that could result in some peer reviewers trying to game the system to enrich themselves. Instead, he said, “if the NIH really wants to move the needle on this, they should think about other ways to compensate reviewers.” Some of those ideas could include giving peer reviewers credit toward their grant applications, including peer review as part of grant work or requiring universities that apply for NIH grants to include considerations for their researchers to engage in peer review.

    Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said that though the NIH “can’t single-handedly reform the global system of academic research incentives, they can play a leadership role.”

    But capping APCs isn’t the only—or most effective—option to make that happen.

    “Rather than just limiting the amount of money that the NIH provides researchers to publish in a journal, it could say, ‘If you choose not to publish in a journal and do something else, we’ll provide money to do that,’ and support other mechanisms that allow researchers to break that incentive cycle,” Joseph said. “The NIH could reward them for communicating their findings early and often, making the global conversation of science dynamic in real time so that people can really benefit from it.”

    The publishing industry is also not keen on the NIH’s attempt to control article processing charges.

    A “free and competitive scholarly marketplace, including not-for-profit societies and other publishers, remains the most effective means of sustaining this vital sector, and bolstering our nation’s leadership position in the sciences,” Carl Maxwell, senior vice president for public policy for the Association of American Publishers, which has opposed open access expansion, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

    “Models are now changing in the face of open access mandates, and AAP is analyzing the options put forth by NIH to identify the plan that will provide authors with maximum freedom to choose how to publish and communicate their work, while at the same time supporting the indispensable publication processes that deliver best-in-class, peer-reviewed articles.”

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