Exclusive: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants

In an unprecedented move, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has begun mass terminations of research grants that fund active scientific projects because they no longer meet “agency priorities”.

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NIH staff members have been instructed to identify and potentially cancel grants for projects studying transgender populations, gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the scientific workforce, environmental justice and any other research that might be perceived to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity, according to documents and an audio recording that Nature has obtained. Grants that allot funding to universities in China and those related to climate change are also under scrutiny.

At least 16 termination letters have already been sent out, says Brittany Charlton, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, who has been tracking them. And hundreds more will be coming, say two NIH officials, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

“It’s extremely alarming that grants that have been vetted by the scientific community and deemed important and impactful to understand the world are now being cancelled because of political ideology,” says Lisa Fazio, a cognitive psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who studies misinformation. “For all this talk about free speech, this is direct censorship of scientific research.”

The actions come during the second month of US President Donald Trump’s presidency; on his first day in office, Trump issued executive orders “restoring free speech” to the American people and “defending women from ‘gender ideology extremism’” by banning federal funds that “promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology”.

The NIH, which is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, did not respond to Nature’s queries about the grant terminations, their legality or how many the agency anticipated sending out.

Cut categories

Although many NIH research grants run for longer, scientists generally receive their funding one year at a time and are required to submit a progress report to the agency annually. NIH staff members then review this report and can issue a continuation of funding.

The agency, based in Bethesda, Maryland, has now asked its employees to review new and ongoing projects for any DEI activities and to place them in one of four categories: projects that solely support DEI-related activities (category one), projects that partially support these activities (category two), projects that do not support these activities but include some DEI-related language (category three) and projects that do not support any DEI activities (category four).

The NIH’s 27 institutes and centres should not issue awards for research in category one, according to a guidance document obtained by Nature and sent to some employees this week. Category-two research must be renegotiated with the lead researcher or institution on the grant to remove any DEI activities. If the work cannot be renegotiated, the institute must seek termination of the project, the document says.

Category-three and -four research can continue unimpeded as long as any DEI language is stripped from the application or progress report.

Although the guidance document focuses on DEI activities, it also includes an appendix with examples of other research that the NIH no longer supports. For example, projects funding research in China and that touch on “transgender issues” will be terminated.

This guidance was drafted by the deputy director of the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research (OER), Liza Bundesen, and approved by acting NIH director Matthew Memoli, according to an e-mail that Nature has obtained. Bundesen, who took the helm of OER less than three weeks ago, is leaving the agency on 7 March, according to an NIH official who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

The guidance does not specify how to determine if a project is discriminatory, which has created confusion and anxiety among agency staff, another NIH official says. Many fear losing their jobs, so this might lead to over-interpretation of the guidance, which would hold back more science than “needs to be”, they say. “For example, is a grant providing culturally-appropriate care specifically to Hispanic and Latino populations ‘discrimination?’”

Lost data

Tara McKay, who studies the health of people from sexual and gender minorities (LGBT+) at Vanderbilt University, received an e-mail from the NIH late on 28 February. It said that the agency was pulling funding for her project tracking the health of more than 1,200 LGBT+ adults in the United States.

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McKay’s study aims to understand the sources of stress and resilience for LGBT+ people, conduct cognitive screening and collect blood samples to understand how they are ageing over the span of a decade. “Longitudinal research gets its value from time points,” she says. Cancelling a grant part way through means that follow-up data will be lost, she says, and “it devalues the earlier money spent”.

The e-mail that McKay received said that her grant did not satisfy certain criteria and then pointed to it including “transgender issues”, saying that such research programmes are “often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans”. This language repeats exactly the internal NIH guidance document.

McKay says that her project does not centre on the experience of transgender people, but merely includes people who identify as such. “That is not a population we’re willing to leave behind in our work,” she adds.