The National Institutes of Health has made headlines for terminating grants and delaying its peer-review process. But there’s another, less visible way the agency is disrupting the work of scientists nationwide: It’s quietly removing some grant applications from review for the indefinite future.
The Chronicle has found that during the last half of March, at least 20 applications were taken out of the first stage of peer review, known as a study section, according to emails, screenshots, and interviews with scientists. They were not rejected outright, but seemingly put on hold by NIH employees who declined to explain why, other than to state in some cases that the agency is conducting “a review of its research priorities.” They also did not say when, or whether, they would ever be evaluated.
These moves are unprecedented, according to scientists whose applications have been yanked and who have watched colleagues’ proposals disappear from their review queues. The scale at which projects are being sent into limbo is unclear. So is the NIH’s rationale for pulling proposals. Some — though not all — have concerned transgender health, an explicit target of the agency’s as it cancels grants by the hundreds.
The stranding of grant applications marks another confusing development in the Trump administration’s attempt to overhaul scientific research, which has thrown the enterprise into turmoil. The changes reviewed by The Chronicle were made before the NIH’s new director, Jay Bhattacharya, took office last week and reportedly started seeking to identify contracts that “could be used to ‘censor Americans.’” On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services began a mass purge of the government health agencies, sending layoff notices to a projected 10,000 employees. NIH spokespeople did not return a request for comment.
Typically, the first round of peer review happens in a study section, where subject-matter experts individually score a slate of proposals for their importance, rigor, and research team’s qualifications. After the study section meets as a group to evaluate the projects, an advisory council makes final funding recommendations. Starting in February, the NIH canceled dozens of these peer-review meetings, and then, in apparent defiance of a court order, froze the mechanism for scheduling new ones. The delays have jeopardized scientists’ ability to pay graduate students and staff and afford critical supplies.
The agency has since begun rescheduling meetings — but isn’t inviting everyone back.
In a submission last fall, Sarah Peitzmeier, an assistant professor of behavioral and community health at the University of Maryland, outlined an intervention to protect transgender and nonbinary young adults from sexual assault. It was her second time applying for an exploratory grant called an R21. “I was really excited about it,” she said, “especially in the current moment, when there is a lot of antagonism toward trans people and we might expect that levels of violence might increase against the community.”
She was assigned to a study section that was originally scheduled to meet in February, then postponed to April. But in March, an automated email informed her of “a change in the assignment of your grant application.” The NIH’s grants portal stated that she was no longer matched to the study section — or any study section, for that matter — although the meeting is still set for April.
I want to find a way to appeal this or at least have the opportunity to have my grant assessed on its merits, regardless of what the ultimate funding decision is.
Peitzmeier emailed an agency administrator to ask for clarity, but received little.
“Thank you for your note,” came the reply on March 21. “Indeed, your application has been moved out of the [study section] meeting while NIH undertakes a review of its research priorities under NIH’s statutory and regulatory authorities. As far as next steps, I wish I had more to give you than to recommend patience.” The NIH employee concluded by saying that Peitzmeier would receive more notifications “when or if the status of your application changes.”
At least one other scientist said that their application, for a project about Black gay and bisexual men, was also removed from an upcoming study section. Their grants portal lists their status as “Scientific Review Group review pending” and advises them to “refer any questions” to the NIH. But the researcher, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were afraid of retribution, said that the agency has not answered their questions about what is happening.
Peitzmeier is frustrated. “Being assigned to a section and then being removed from the section, and then not even being assigned to another section, is not something I’ve ever seen before,” she said, “and it’s not something that any of my mentors or colleagues have seen before, either.” It seems probable, she said, that her application was flagged for being about transgender and nonbinary people. But “I want to find a way to appeal this or at least have the opportunity to have my grant assessed on its merits, regardless of what the ultimate funding decision is,” she said.
A reviewer for another study section — this one about public-health interventions — said that about half of their pile vanished in mid-March. Those submissions were about sexual and gender minorities, but there were others about that population that did remain, according to the reviewer, who requested to speak anonymously because they feared retribution.
In an email to that study section’s reviewers, an NIH administrator wrote simply that “specific applications have been removed.” They “will not be reviewed in the meeting while NIH undertakes a review of its research priorities,” the email continued. “If you were assigned to one of these applications, you will no longer see it on your assignment list.” In a follow-up email, the administrator said they were unable to provide further information about the fate of those projects.
For a study section about infectious diseases, one reviewer’s number of applications shrunk from around 40 in late February to the mid-20s in late March, screenshots show. Based on the submissions’ titles, it was not clear why some were removed and others kept. The reviewer acknowledged that these moves could be due to straightforward scheduling changes. But “I have been on a reasonable number of these and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one grant reshuffled — I’ve certainly never seen half the pile,” they said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the confidential peer-review process.
“I’m committed to making sure that the people who are still in my pile get the highest-quality review possible,” they added. “But there is a certain level of moral injury to participating in this. And I feel sick for the [scientists] who might not even know this is happening to years of their work behind the scenes.”
For researchers like Peitzmeier, who study LGBTQ+ health, there aren’t obvious sources of financial support besides the NIH. “It’s why the U.S. has — or had — the strongest scientific enterprise around health and medicine around the world,” she said.
Her employer, the University of Maryland, is one of the many institutions currently reeling from the blow of NIH grant terminations. (After threatening to freeze hundreds of millions in funding to Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, the Trump administration announced this week that it would next scrutinize Harvard University and Princeton University.) But Peitzmeier said that universities should be aware that potential funding for future research, too, is falling into an abyss.
“This is also a serious issue that we need to be looking into and figuring out what’s going on and how we can push back,” she said, “because this is stopping the next round of grants and research in its tracks before it can even start.”
