Funding categories aimed at early-career researchers are disappearing from the US National Institutes of Health website.Credit: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has drastically increased the number of grant applications it has rejected without funding, adding to a long list of setbacks for medical research that have occurred under the administration of US President Donald Trump.
So far this year, at least 2,500 applications for research funding have been withdrawn — a term the agency uses to denote refusal for administrative reasons. This is more than double the number of applications that were withdrawn in the same period in each of the past two years, says an NIH official who analysed an internal NIH database and spoke to Nature anonymously because they aren’t authorized to speak to the press.
The increase in withdrawals seems to be mostly because the NIH quietly closed around 100 funding categories in February and March, according to documents seen by Nature. Many of these categories supported researchers from diverse backgrounds or investigators early in their careers.
“We risk losing an entire generation of young scientists that are really going to be the people driving tomorrow’s discoveries and cures,” says Carole LaBonne, a stem-cell biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Since Trump came to office, more than 800 existing research NIH grants have been terminated. Grant reviews have been held up and research funds frozen. The administration has also proposed cutting the NIH’s budget by about 40%, down to US$27 billion in 2026.
Researchers whose applications have been withdrawn can reapply for funding under the roughly 600 research and development grant opportunities that still exist, but that will mean waiting months or a year to get any money. Some of these researchers say they’re already struggling to keep their laboratories afloat.
The NIH did not respond to Nature’s queries about the increase in grants being withdrawn this year or about the discontinuation of funding categories.
Review process
Before NIH grant applications can be approved, they are reviewed by two panels. The first is a study section: independent scientists who meet to allocate scores to the applications. Next, the agency’s advisory council, made up of researchers and advisers from the NIH and elsewhere, runs a final check. The NIH then communicates funding decisions to the applicants.
Application withdrawals typically happen before these reviews, for administrative reasons such as a submission being incomplete, not suited to the requirements of the funding opportunity or too similar to another application, says the NIH official. Sometimes, researchers choose to withdraw their own applications.
The NIH official says that, of the applications that should have been reviewed by the advisory council in May, more than 2,500 have been withdrawn. By contrast, only around 900 applications were withdrawn by the May deadlines in 2024 and in 2023.
Of the 2,500 applications withdrawn by May, roughly 1,000 were linked to discontinued grant opportunities. Roughly 200 of the 1,000 were withdrawn by applicants themselves, and the rest by the NIH. The agency withdrew another 500 because they were for projects being undertaken outside the United States or with international partners, and they did not include a required document called a foreign justification. In previous years, a missing foreign justification in the initial application would not have been a reason for withdrawal, says the NIH official.
Discontinued funding
Among the discontinued funding categories were those that supported research to increase vaccine uptake, and grants to train PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from diverse backgrounds. “These are the scientists of the future,” says LaBonne. “We are basically cutting off that pipeline and that is going to have huge impacts down the line on the economy.”
Pages for these grant categories have been removed from the NIH website. A second NIH official, who spoke to Nature on the condition of anonymity, says these opportunities are no longer being offered because they don’t meet the government’s priorities. Many further applications for these categories with review dates later in the year have also been withdrawn.
On the internal NIH website, the listings for many withdrawn applications include an attached correspondence dated 6 May that states that the submission “responded to a discontinued program that no longer effectuated NIH priorities”. These include programmes with elements of “amorphous equity objectives” and diversity, equity and inclusion studies, according to the correspondence.
