NIH likely to award fewer grants as it races to spend 2026 budget

For months, the biomedical research community has been wringing its hands over the slow pace of grantmaking at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), raising fears it would be unable to spend the $47.2 billion Congress gave it for this fiscal year, which ends on 30 September. But recent analyses of NIH outlays have somewhat brightened the picture, suggesting NIH may be able to catch up, as it did after a similar lag last year. With a concerted push over the next 3 months, the agency says it should be able to get its money out the door. At the same time, however, the figures suggest NIH will, for the second straight year, award thousands fewer new grants than it did in the 4 years before President Donald Trump took office in 2025. The White House budget office wants NIH to award many multiyear grants as a single lump sum, meaning NIH can fund fewer new grants and renewals of expiring awards. That could leave many academic labs scrambling to stay afloat or force them to close. The spending delay and uncertainty have left researchers and administrators trying “to figure out on a program-by-program and grant-by-grant basis how to maintain the research enterprise,” says Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy and regulatory counsel at the Association of American Medical Colleges. Overall, NIH had made 27,541 awards as of 20 June, including both new grants and annual payments for ongoing grants, totaling $16 billion, according to the watchdog group Grant Witness. That spending slightly exceeds NIH’s outlay at the same date last year and is roughly 17% behind the pre-Trump pace. But the grant number is about 25% lower than NIH had typically awarded by a comparable date in the years 2021–24. Last year, the spending delay was mainly because of a freeze on peer-review meetings imposed soon after Trump took office as well as deep staff cuts. This year, the main problem has been last fall’s 43-day government shutdown, which affected the first months of this fiscal year, as well as a White House delay in releasing NIH’s 2026 budget and ongoing staff shortages. Many workers who oversee grant programs also blame new layers of reviews for grants touching on diversity, equity, and inclusion, although NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a board of advisers in May that “the slowdown has nothing to do with” these reviews. Some also point to Bhattacharya’s decision to stop using so-called “paylines” to automatically fund most awards that fall above a certain peer-review score. Instead, under what NIH calls its Unified Funding Strategy, institute staff must also consider a range of factors, such as an applicant’s existing support and geographic location. The requirement to look at each grant individually adds to workloads, particularly at large institutes that relied on paylines to cope efficiently with their huge numbers of applications, staff tell Science. Staff shortages have hit the $2.5 billion National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) particularly hard. In March NIMH leaders warned it could end up with $500 million in unspent funds and asked some of its scientists to volunteer to help with the financial and administrative parts of the grants process, as Nature reported. Last week, however, NIMH’s acting director, Andrea Beckel-Mitchener, told her advisory council that the institute expects to fully spend its budget. Still, “It’s going to be another tough year,” she said. In part, that’s because the mandate to fund multiyear grants up front means applicant success rates—the odds that a submitted grant will be funded—will again be painfully low. It was “a bit of a stunner” when that rate plummeted from 21% in 2024 to 11% in 2025, she said, and the rate is expected to stay well below 20% this year. In a bid to soften the blow, NIMH is prioritizing grants to training programs and early-stage investigators. Congress has limited the dollar amount that NIH can spend on multiyear funding to its 2025 level. But that cap is quite high—about 39% of NIH’s budget for new grants. Overall, NIH has only funded about 5000 new and competitive renewal grants so far this year, or just over half the number each year from 2021–24 (see graph, above). If last year’s pattern holds, the final number could again fall short by about 2800 grants. To bolster grant numbers, some institutes are varying grant types—reserving multiyear funding for smaller, shorter awards, for example. Leaders at the National Cancer Institute have said they hope such strategies will enable NCI to award more new grants than it did in 2025. In the meantime, Bhattacharya has repeatedly said NIH won’t have to return unspent funds to the Department of the Treasury. But even the recent figures showing NIH drawing even with last year’s spending pace are “not fully comforting,” Pierce says. For NIH to repeat last year’s successful 3-month sprint to the September budget finish line, she notes, its spending rate will have to “substantially increase” even with fewer staff than the agency had a year ago. NIH is now hiring, but it will take time for new staff to fill the gaps.