Comment: Trump’s medical research freeze leaves NIH in limbo

By Lisa Jarvis / Bloomberg Opinion

The Trump administration has pressed the pause button on the U.S.’s vital biomedical research engine, the National Institutes for Health. Grant reviews, travel and hiring appear to be on indefinite hold.

Without any concrete guidance about the reasoning or length of the freeze, America’s best scientific minds are left to figure out the extent and impact of the disruption.

The upheaval isn’t limited to NIH. Within days of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, issued a communication blackout. That order has affected everything from communicating with state and local health officials about the bird flu outbreak to issuing regulations and guidance to social media posts and updating agency websites.

But the situation with the NIH seems the direst. It unfolded in real time Wednesday as academic researchers took to social media to share experiences of abruptly canceled NIH meetings; some reportedly halted mid-session-and travel disruptions. Job offers were rescinded, and review panels on cancer research were canceled.

When I asked scientists whether there was precedent for such action, the closest anyone could offer was a brief halt to grant reviews amid the 2018 government shutdown. While that was stressful, researchers at least knew there was an end in sight. This situation feels different. One prominent NIH scientist told me, “I haven’t seen something like this before. I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

There has been no communication about the duration of the pause, and it’s unclear whether it’s merely a stopgap until new leadership is installed (the NIH currently lacks a director or interim head amid the administration transition) or signals a broader shift in the agency’s approach to research funding.

That’s left the research community in limbo. And in their world, even minor disruptions can have wide-reaching consequences.

Let’s consider the best-case scenario: This is just a pause and not a reset on how programs will be evaluated. Researchers still need clear timelines for when normally scheduled programming can resume. Anyone not intimately involved in the mechanisms of academic grant funding might think scientists are overreacting. And it’s true that if this is just a week or two, biomedical research will keep chugging along.

But if it extends much beyond that, recapturing long-planned, carefully coordinated meetings to map out and green-light funding will be difficult. Academic researchers are ultimately bosses of small businesses that employ and train the next generation of scientists. Like any small business, budgets are laid out months and years in advance. The size of their groups, the scope of their work, and the pace of their discoveries hinge on grants, many of which come from the NIH.

That can have a particularly brutal impact on scientists just starting in their careers. “Jobs for graduate student and postdoctoral researchers get put on hold, or if it takes too long, eliminated altogether,” Carolyn Bertozzi, a Stanford chemical biologist who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry, told me.

One prominent researcher, who did not have permission from her university to speak, offered an example of how that is unfolding. An early-February meeting for a junior faculty member’s grant proposal, the last step before it was likely funded, has been canceled. “Now I have to figure out how am I going to fund him next year?” she says. And if she can’t scrape together the money to support his work, the worry is he and others in similar situations will leave academia for the private sector.

Many fear a much worse scenario. Some researchers believe the freeze is related to Trump’s executive order “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.” The order includes wording that, if broadly applied across scientific grant-giving, suggests proposals under review will receive new scrutiny to ensure they do not advance “diversity-based” objectives, meaning all agency heads and recipients would have to certify that they do “not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.” Such an approach would have a much more devastating effect, depriving funding to critical research areas.

Putting boundaries on scientific exploration runs counter to the agency’s mission. The NIH is considered a crown jewel of research; not only in the U.S. but around the world. Its more than $47 billion budget supports some 300,000 researchers across 2,500 institutions.

That’s made the organization a source of invaluable innovation. Its resources allow researchers to pursue fundamental questions about who we are and how we work, enabling the development of scientific breakthroughs like mRNA and cancer immunotherapy.

Meanwhile, the investment in science pays dividends to the American economy. The NIH estimates that every dollar of funding delivers $2.46 in economic activity. Patents are generated, and companies are created.

Ensuring a stable future for this vast operation should be a government priority. And yet, there’s reason to worry this is only the beginning of a much larger upheaval. Much of the focus on Trump’s nominees to head the nation’s health agencies has appropriately been on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who next week will try to convince the Senate that he’s qualified for the role of secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Yet Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s choice to lead the NIH, deserves equal scrutiny.

Bhattacharya, who gained prominence through his contrarian — and many would say dangerous — views on addressing the covid pandemic, has said the NIH is too focused on basic biology and “we desperately need reform.” His ideas include term limits for NIH leadership and incorporating more checks on science by requiring studies that replicate its work. According to the Wall Street Journal, he also is interested in weighing a university’s commitment to academic freedom when doling out grant money. Universities should worry about whose yardstick would be used to measure that commitment and what it could mean for the redistribution of federal research funds.

That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement at NIH. There are many good ideas about how to make the agency nimbler and more collaborative and modernize its operations. But creating a climate of fear and anxiety among the nation’s top scientific minds isn’t one of them. The Trump administration needs to assuage researchers’ fears by restoring stability. The future of innovation in the U.S. is at stake.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.