What the Hell Is Going on at NIH?

Chrystal Starbird, a cancer researcher at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, had been preparing to serve on her first National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant review panel at the end of January. On Wednesday, to her surprise, that meeting was abruptly canceled.

These NIH panels, or “study sections,” typically involve a group of about 20 to 30 scientists who meet to assess research grant proposals within their areas of expertise. Most of the grants, Starbird says, range from about $2 million to $10 million. Once the group reviews and scores the projects, a separate NIH “advisory council” decides which ones to fund.

The email Starbird received was vague. It came from her study section contact at NIH, within the Trump administration, and it said the multiday meeting, set for January 30 and 31, would not take place as planned. The message instructed her to save her files about the projects for the time being and thanked her for her service to the NIH. “I’ve never seen a complete pause like this as part of a transition,” she told me.

The “pause” goes beyond grant reviews. It appears to be part of a larger blackout on research at NIH and across the federal government. On Tuesday, as the Washington Post first reported, the Trump administration paused all external communications—”health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts” at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Morale is very low,” an NIH researcher told me, and it’s possible the agency will soon start losing “good people.”

HHS also reportedly instructed staff to pause any travel plans, including to conferences and workshops. (The department hasn’t publicly commented on the freeze, and didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.) Employees also received a memo instructing them to report any colleagues who’ve used “coded or imprecise language” to “disguise” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts—or face “adverse consequences.”

“It sounds like Big Brother,” one NIH researcher told me.

The disruptions to the grant process, some researchers say, is already affecting science. The NIH is the country’s largest public biomedical research funder, providing some $40 billion to outside scientists every year to pursue the type of basic research that over the decades has contributed to countless important discoveries, and the development of lifesaving drugs and treatments. To ensure the agency supports the most rigorous, promising studies, it relies on panelists like Starbird to review them. But now those meetings, which typically take months to schedule, can’t happen.

On top of that, according to reporting by Science and email memos reviewed by Mother Jones, upcoming advisory council meetings where studies are officially greenlit were suspended too. That puts new funding for all sorts of research, from cancer to the opioid crisis, on hold until further notice. “It just feels like everything is in limbo,” says Amanda Gillespie, a professor and speech-language pathologist at the Emory School of Medicine whose 5-year, approximately $2.5 million funding proposal was up for approval at an abruptly canceled council meeting that had been set for this week. She’d scored high marks from her reviewers, so was optimistic about getting selected. “It was, to put it mildly, quite a letdown.” Without knowing when the meetings will start up again, she says, “it’s really frustrating because it’s very hard to plan.”

If the pause is lifted, returning to the normal process will likely take months, experts say. “It’s quite an endeavor to organize this thing,” says Esther Choo, a professor of emergency medicine who studies policy and substance abuse at Oregon Health and Science University. Her study section on addressing the opioid crisis, was also scheduled for this week and then canceled. These meetings, she explains, typically last one to two full days and can require 40 to 60 hours of preparation. They often involve top researchers in a given field.

“If you go to somebody who’s a Nobel Laureate and say, ‘Okay, I need to schedule a meeting again next month,’ chances are it’s not going to happen,” Starbird points out.

The delays could have a direct impact on patients, experts say. As Choo explains, it’s a little bit like the Olympics: When a country can’t participate, or there’s a major disruption, “there are always those athletes that missed a window.” In the case of the NIH funding, people’s lives are on the line.

Starbird’s mother-in-law, for example, has late-stage lung cancer. She recently added to her chemo regimen a new drug that was discovered by one of Starbird’s former collaborators and approved just months ago. “Imagine if that drug pipeline had been delayed for a few months. You wouldn’t be giving her that drug today, right?”

The full consequences of the pause—and when (or whether) it will end—remain unclear. Theoretically, says Greg Ducker, a cancer and diet researcher at the University of Utah, whose study section next week was also canceled, it may be possible to catch up if the delay is short. But if it drags on, and grants and clinical trials go unfunded, that could present real problems. “Without communication from the head of HHS,” he says, it’s difficult to say what might happen.

Beyond any logistical disruptions, as I’ve previously reported, researchers fear their studies related to climate science, equity, and diversity initiatives may be vulnerable to funding cuts under the Trump administration, which has threatened to root out DEI programs. Outside scientists worry they’ll lose access to federal data—for example, the vital metrics provided by the Energy Information Agency—and that scientists may be forced out of frowned-upon specialties or never pursue them at all. “As Trump wages a war of intimidation and fear against scientists,” predicted Jennifer Jones, the director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit science advocacy group, “you’re going to have a lot fewer people raising their hand to serve the public good through science into the future.”

The chill is already setting in. “Morale is very low,” the NIH researcher told me, and it’s possible the agency will soon start losing “good people.”

“It really concerns all of us that science is going to be rewritten. We’re all just very demoralized and concerned,” they added, and then hedged, in typical scientist fashion: “I hope I’m not being alarmist. But we just don’t know yet.”

Source: View source