President Trump directed federal science agencies to cancel all scheduled meetings, effectively suspending NIH research grants.
Asuka Koda
Staff Reporter
Zoe Berg
On Jan. 22, 2025, the Trump administration directed federal health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, to pause all external communications, cancel scheduled scientific meetings including grant review processes. This halt on grant distribution processes places scientific research at Yale and salaries of researchers in jeopardy.
The directive has effectively suspended NIH research grant evaluations and disrupted various health-related communications. NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world. 53 percent of grants received to fund research at the Yale School of Public Health came from the NIH, and the Yale School of Medicine is ranked fourth in the nation for total NIH funding.
“I’m just worried that this trend continues, that we’ll lose a whole generation of scientists,” said Sandy Chang ’88, the former associate dean of STEM education and professor of laboratory medicine.
The NIH has an annual budget of more than $47 billion to fund over 60,000 grants that directly support more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 institutions.
Scientists form study sections that meet regularly to review and approve grants. According to Chang, this process is widely regarded to be a fair way to determine which grant proposals should receive funding.
Trump has placed an indefinite pause on these study sections, effectively stopping the grant distributional process. Ongoing study sections were suddenly suspended on Wednesday, which will lead to widespread disruption of research funding, Akiko Iwasaki, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at the School of Medicine, said.
It is unclear whether already approved grants will be impacted and if the University would provide temporary funding should labs run out of grant funding. The School of Medicine did not immediately respond to the request for comment.
Study sections have never been suspended due to executive directives and the timeframe of suspensions have always been clearly communicated. The present lack of communication prevents scientists from planning next steps.
Howard Forman, professor of health policy and management, said that he would be concerned if the communication pause is not lifted by Feb. 1.
“It’s kind of a shock to the community right now, because this really has a huge impact if you have a grant that you know was supposed to be reviewed by the NIH this round and that meeting is canceled,” Iwasaki said. “Who knows when the grant will be discussed next time and when the funding decision will be made?”
These grants fund the salaries of scientists, graduate students, postdocs and other employees in the research process.
Chang, for example, said that around 80 percent of his salary comes from NIH grants. Without those programs, his graduate students cannot get paid either. He believes that this would discourage students from pursuing academia and continue the push towards private industry.
“Without NIH grants, we’re dead,” he said.
Chang explained that curiosity-driven research that is unique to academia is an irreplaceable driver for innovation, and NIH is the biggest provider of funding for these investigation pursuits.
Additionally, Chang said many graduate student training grants come from the NIH programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion missions, which have also come under attack from the new administration.
“It seems like, with DEI under attack, this administration is going to politicize this whole review process,” said Chang. “I’m worried that the training grants won’t be funded because they have a DEI component, which the Trump administration wants to get rid of.”
Should the Trump administration plan to change the grant review procedure, it would complicate an already difficult process for researchers.
The University provides stopgap funding to researchers who were approved for grants and are waiting for the funding to be distributed. Usually, just a few researchers receive such funding to maintain their lab operations, but with the NIH grant approval process suspended, many researchers fear that they may have to rely on it, according to Chang.
School of Medicine Dean Nancy Brown wrote a statement to the school community on Thursday outlining the school’s approach to the grant suspension.
“Faced with incomplete information, human beings naturally create stories to fill in the blanks,” Brown wrote. “During COVID-19, we faced health fears and financial uncertainty. We learned that we are resilient, we can together tackle challenges through creativity and value-based decision-making, and we became stronger. We will apply the same principles moving forward.”
The statement did not mention the possibility of stopgap funding.
The National Institutes of Health began giving out grants in 1945.
This post was originally published on here
