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Her experience showcases just one of the unprecedented ways in which the NIH, the world’s premier funder of biomedical research, is upending American science. In the name of cutting wasteful spending and “unscientific” research, it has terminated more than 1,300 grants and delayed payments for more than a thousand others. It’s sought to cap funds for research overhead and frozen all awards to a handful of elite institutions.
In yet another variation on this theme, the NIH has quietly disappeared a number of new grant applications from researchers around the country. Earlier this spring, I reported that this figure was at least 20. More recent internal data I’ve obtained shows that, as of May, 43 applications — submitted from 35 institutions in 22 states — were stuck in this peer-review purgatory. (The NIH did not return a request for comment.)
Limbo doesn’t sound like an obvious emergency, at least compared with the vacuum opened up by a canceled or interrupted grant. When there’s not enough money to finish experiments or to keep paying participants, students, and staff members, the loss is immediately evident.
But a never-reviewed grant and a terminated one have the same effect: Research on politicized topics doesn’t get done. The stalled applications proposed investigating subjects like vaccine hesitancy, gender identity, and environmental justice. Needham, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, had “structural racism” in the title of her application. It feels “almost stigmatizing to have your work kind of singled out in this way,” she said.
But with plenty of colleagues grieving lost grants, she has questioned whether her situation is as serious. She has also felt alone, as there is no public record of grants not granted. It was a “relief” when I contacted her, she said: “I was like, Oh, somebody knows that this is happening and it’s happening to other people.”
The uncertainty of this peculiar experience characterizes everything about the new NIH, a dozen in-limbo researchers told me. These scientists — some of whom requested to speak anonymously because they worried about their immigration status or feared retribution from the NIH, their employers, or the public — said they’d previously thrown their best ideas at a system that, while fiercely competitive, at least had operated under widely understood, decades-old rules. At least it employed humans who usually responded to their emails and processed their paperwork. Now, they’re navigating constantly changing, legally dubious, sporadically communicated whims, with no clear way forward. “How,” Needham wondered, “do you appeal something that is almost, like, the absence of action?”
Nearing the end of 2024, some scientists were hustling to improve applications that had previously been turned down. Kristin Mmari, a professor in the department of population, family, and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wanted to test a strategy to improve mental and sexual health among adolescents in Jamaica. She flew there in the fall to flesh out the recruitment plan, a sticking point in an earlier round of peer review, and uploaded her revised application the day before the November presidential election. “Don’t change anything — we will be able to work with you after,” she recalled an NIH employee telling her before she submitted. A Columbia University infectious-diseases expert said his team rushed to collect proof-of-concept data for a project about transgender health they were resubmitting. By the time they were done, the election was over.
“I thought a lot of things have to go wrong for that to affect my grant. Trump needs to win, and then he would need to attack NIH,” said Sarah Lipson, an associate professor of health law, policy, and management at Boston University. Even though she was aware of Project 2025’s calls to shrink the NIH, she reminded herself throughout last year that her research — on LGBTQ+ college students’ mental health — had been funded during the first Trump administration. Last summer, instead of kicking back, she threw herself into researching, writing, and workshopping an application for an October deadline. She said she could have sent it in even earlier ahead of the election, but it wouldn’t have been as strong. “I do not do things halfway,” she said.
Applicants told me that after they uploaded proposals in the period between last fall and Inauguration Day, the agency confirmed that the next step, as usual, would be a “study section” — a system that dates back to 1946. The atomic bomb, radar, and penicillin all came out of American labs during World War II, and the federal government, seeing the value of homegrown science, began to invest heavily in university research. That involved establishing formal lines of dialogue with scientists outside the government. In study sections, reviewers help shape their fields by advancing the ideas they deem the most rigorous, important, and innovative. High scorers go to additional panels of nongovernment scientists, called advisory councils, which make final recommendations to NIH leaders. Competition is stiff: Of all grants submitted to the agency, success rates are around 20 percent.
But after Trump took office, he tried to freeze all federal funding, and the science agencies enacted a “communications pause.” Study sections from February onward got canceled and stayed canceled, despite a federal judge’s orders. In late March and April, they slowly started getting scheduled again.
Around this time, Needham got an email notification about a change in her NIH grants portal. But the only difference was that where the dates of her study section — originally, February 27 and 28 — were supposed to be listed, there was now a blank space. “That’s weird,” she thought. Others report seeing “pending review” or a series of dashes and dots.
Several applicants said they didn’t bother asking why. By the spring, as many as 1,500 NIH employees were being laid off, and the administration had publicized its distaste for certain fields. “I can’t imagine anybody will give me a good answer,” said the Columbia infectious-diseases specialist.
Jeffrey A. Wickersham, an associate professor of medicine at Yale University, tried to get one anyway. On March 27, after he was cut from an April study section, he emailed three NIH employees. The only one to reply said he couldn’t help. So over the next two weeks, Wickersham fired off four more messages to ascending higher-ups. Finally, the director of the Center for Scientific Review — the NIH’s grant-reviewing arm — apologized for the silence and looped in a communications staffer.
I’m a big girl. They can say, ‘You’re not using all of the right words in the title. There are EOs that say you’re not supposed to be studying this. We put it in the shredder.’ Somebody just tell me.
“Your application has been moved out of [the study section] while NIH undertakes a review of its research priorities under NIH’s statutory and regulatory authorities,” the staffer wrote to Wickersham on April 14, emails show. “I do not have further information at this time.”
It was Wickersham’s third go at pitching his project: a smartphone app aimed at preventing HIV in trans women in Southeast Asia. “What made me really angry,” he told me, “was the fact they just want to pretend it doesn’t exist.” Another rejection would be fine, had he been given a fair shot. “But for the application to fundamentally be stripped and thrown into the trash, which is what happened, that really made me angry,” he said. “And then to add to it, that nobody would reply for weeks? I mean, ghosted. It was really stunning.”
Wickersham doesn’t blame the NIH employees. “It is some other entity that is enforcing this gag on them,” he said. He doesn’t know who or what that might be. But agency officials have testified that the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative formerly led by the billionaire Elon Musk, directed them to terminate hundreds of projects. DOGE has also been screening grants before funds are released, according to Nature.
With staff unable or unwilling to help, applicants are stranded. Typically when projects don’t advance out of a study section, the reviewers send suggestions. “If all you get is silence after you put in months of work, not even to hear back the feedback on that proposal — to see whether you should resubmit or see whether you should take the science in a different direction — all it does is serve to stall that research agenda,” said a public-health professor in the Northeast who had put forth a study about vaccine hesitancy. “It’s not a rejection, which is something we always need to be prepared for,” said Lipson, the Boston University professor. “I submitted it, and it’s as if it doesn’t exist.”
The NIH has reportedly revoked dozens of previously issued funding opportunities for targeted kinds of research and training. But scientists like Sara Campbell, an associate professor of kinesiology and health at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, applied for types of grants that remain open, like R21s, which support short-term exploratory research. Campbell said she has a good guess as to why her application fell into a black hole: It was about the effects on the gut microbiome of “estrogen gender-affirming hormone therapy.”
Trump has issued an executive order stating that there are two sexes, male and female, and that terms like “man” and “woman” are inextricably tied to biological sex. The administration is requiring some universities to pledge compliance in order to receive funding. The NIH has pulled the plug on more than 700 grants about LGBTQ+ health, according to the crowdsourced database Grant Watch, because, the agency says, “programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.”
“I’m a big girl,” Campbell said. “They can say, ‘You’re not using all of the right words in the title. There are EOs that say you’re not supposed to be studying this. We put it in the shredder.’ Somebody just tell me.”
The NIH has told institutions that they can appeal terminated grants. But there’s no official recourse for Andrew T. Kaczynski, who months ago submitted a proposal for a system to score neighborhoods’ access to parks. “I have heard from folks around the university about grants being terminated, but I’ve never heard about delays in reviews,” said Kaczynski, an associate professor of health promotion, education, and behavior at the University of South Carolina. The more time passes, the more the local and national organizations involved are losing hope the money will come through, he said.
Still, Kaczynski didn’t want to withdraw. “I am still hopeful that the federal government will figure out its priorities,” he said.
That suspense is the maddening part of being in between: In the absence of a “no,” there remains the possibility, however unlikely, of a “yes.” The early-career epidemiologist in Pennsylvania said part of her still hoped that someone at the NIH had seen the value of her study, which would examine the link between racial segregation and cognitive health. “Maybe they’re like, Let’s just hold on to it to see if things change,” she said.
And if nothing does?
“If I don’t bring in grants, I lose my job,” said a public-health researcher at a private university in California. A specialist in preventing sexually transmitted diseases in sexual and gender minorities in South America, she was removed from a March study section and hasn’t heard anything since. Other grants she’s working on have been cut. Her employer hasn’t articulated a contingency plan. “There’s lots of, We’re going to have to restructure and discuss,” she said. “It’s like, OK, when?”
As a member of the promotions and tenure committee at the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school, Michael S. Gold said he’s started seeing CVs with ghost grants that have been approved by the NIH but not actually funded so far this year. Tenure-seekers have long been required to build a robust track record of funding, but that criteria needs to be rethought, said Gold, who added that he was not speaking for the university. The problem is that Trump wants to gut the NIH’s budget by roughly $20 billion, or 40 percent. “If you’re looking at a budget that is basically going to force you to let go 50 percent of your current staff and you’re still promoting people,” Gold said, “you’re potentially promoting a lot of people who are going to be unfundable now.”
Even as researchers scramble to tap alternative capital — philanthropy, industry, university endowments — they know that the NIH’s coffers are impossible to match. “There is no other funding pathway that equals the NIH,” Wickersham said. “Our careers were built on the NIH being there.”
To enforce the law, Super said, scientists could sue.
In June, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the NIH to reinstate hundreds of terminated grants, calling the agency’s explanations “bereft of reasoning” and discriminatory. He issued the ruling on lawsuits — whose plaintiffs included the American Public Health Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a group of 16 states — that argued the cancellations were arbitrary, capricious, and therefore unlawful. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH’s parent agency, told Nature that it “stands by its decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people” and that it is “exploring all legal options, including filing an appeal.”
Ghosted scientists are questioning whether they see a bigger benefit to working with or against Trump’s NIH. Do they go along — or give up?
There is no other funding pathway that equals the NIH. Our careers were built on the NIH being there.
Campbell said she is determined to keep applying, this time with language and topics she thinks will appeal to the NIH. “If you don’t submit,” she said, “then there is no chance whatsoever that it’ll get reviewed, right?” But Kaczynski said that he is losing enthusiasm for writing applications. “I don’t know if there’s even anyone who’s going to review them or do anything with them,” he said. And Lipson said she’d moved on from counting on the NIH. “My research is not fundable for the next three years,” she said.
At first, Needham thought she’d give up, too. The social epidemiologist at the University of Michigan had proposed digging into survey data to study how a teen’s exposure to structural racism — as measured by indicators of racial inequality in criminal justice, labor, and other domains — may affect their heart health in adulthood. There are large racial and ethnic disparities in cardiovascular-related conditions and deaths, and she wanted to understand whether and how societal institutions could explain those differences. “If we can do things like provide greater access to postsecondary education,” she said, “does that help put people on educational trajectories that improve their life chances and their health over the rest of their life?” Her project was not focused on one racial or ethnic group, she said, but on “how structural racism impacts everyone in a society.” The NIH of yesteryear had funded her to do research along these lines.
After Trump’s re-election, Needham said she assumed that her project would never see the light of day, so she figured it wasn’t worth trying to find out what had happened to it. But then she started hearing about efforts to claw back funding through the courts. “Maybe,” she recalled thinking, “it is important for me to try to reach out.”
So in late April, two months after the originally scheduled dates for her study section had come and gone, Needham wrote to an NIH employee managing the peer-review process. She was referred to someone else who said they had no information, according to the emails. Needham thanked them and copied in her university’s research and legal offices. Then the first employee replied again to apologize: All she knew was that the study had been moved out of review because the NIH was evaluating “its research priorities.”
Needham tried again, this time emailing a higher-up NIH administrator known as a program officer. And on May 7 came a reply: “I would be glad to discuss your application and a possible resubmission.”
On their call, the program officer — who sounded to Needham like she “wanted to be helpful” — said that “health disparities” research was still acceptable, Needham recalled. But the message she got from the conversation, though it wasn’t explicitly stated, was that “structural racism” had to go.
Needham said she considered swapping it for “racial inequality,” but wasn’t sure that term would be safe, either. Moreover, it didn’t precisely describe the crux of her work. “I think about racial inequality as an outcome of structural racism — it’s not structural racism itself,” she said. “If what I’m trying to study is structural racism, that is the correct term to use to study it.”
So Needham has decided to wait for the government to say more about the kind of research it wants to fund, acknowledging that hers may not qualify. “If that’s the case, I don’t see myself submitting grants to NIH until that changes,” she told me in May.
But to her surprise, a potential exit from limbo has emerged. In late June, a colleague forwarded to Needham a message from the ACLU. Fresh off their victory in contesting terminated grants in court, the organization wrote, the plaintiffs were now planning a second phase of litigation over applications that were delayed or submitted to funding opportunities that were later canceled. In a statement, Olga Akselrod, a senior counsel in the racial-justice program at the ACLU, said the NIH had implemented “illegal directives through freezing and administratively withdrawing submitted applications in midreview, delaying progress on urgent public-health issues and jeopardizing the careers of researchers who followed NIH’s procedures in good faith.” The ACLU will “continue working to ensure those proposals are reviewed fairly, without political interference,” Akselrod added.
Needham submitted her application for inclusion in the lawsuit. “I feel like now, because many, many individuals took steps to question or to challenge or to oppose these decisions,” she said, “that it has resulted in some movement.”
For the first time in months, she said, her hopelessness has turned to hopefulness.
