The National Institutes of Health has stopped considering new grant applications, delaying decisions about how to spend millions of dollars on research into diseases ranging from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer's and allergies.
The freeze occurred because the Trump administration has blocked the NIH from posting any new notices in the Federal Register, which is required before many federal meetings can be held.
While that may seem arcane, the stoppage forced the agency to cancel meetings to review thousands of grant applications, according to two people familiar with the situation, one of whom was not authorized to speak publicly and the other who feared retribution.
Already, the meeting freeze has stalled about 16,000 grant applications vying for around $1.5 billion in NIH funding, one of the people who is familiar with the grant-making process said.
Officials at the NIH hope to get the freeze on Federal Register notices lifted soon to avoid a severe funding disruption. With an annual budget of nearly $48 billion, the NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.
All requests for NIH grants go through an intensive review process. Each year there are about 2,600 meetings involving some 28,000 scientists, doctors, administrators and other expert reviewers. Their decisions keep the NIH funding flowing to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools and other institutions.
But because of the freeze, "applications will come in and basically they go into a black hole and nothing can be done with them," said the person familiar with the NIH grant-making process. "That is where we are now."
Some members of those committees, including key gatherings known as "study sections," expressed frustration.
"Today, I was meant to be serving on one of the many cancelled National Institutes of Health study sections," Annika Barber, assistant professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University, said during a briefing Thursday protesting the disruption of biomedical research funding. "And instead of providing feedback on critical biomedical research for federal funding, I'm here to explain what America is losing when we lose basic science research."
Some outside observers defended the situation.
"A temporary pause in publicizing or funding new grants in order to review them is typical for a new administration," Judge Glock, director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote in an email to NPR.
Soon after Trump was inaugurated, the federal government froze all grants, including NIH grants. But that freeze was temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
Some researchers suspect the NIH's Federal Register freeze is an attempt to circumvent that ruling.
Other observers dispute that interpretation.
"I do not think this pause is an end run around the court order blocking the earlier, more general funding freeze, because that freeze dealt with many different programs, including some that the executive did not have the power to delay," Glock said. "If the Trump administration continued such a pause on Federal Register notices indefinitely, then there would be a good argument that that was an impoundment that could also be stopped by a court, but a temporary pause on Federal Register notices seems like a more typical chance for review."
Even some of the NIH's biggest supporters believe the agency could benefit from changes, such as making the grant-making process more transparent. But some observers say the Trump administration's approach so far has been indiscriminate and counterproductive.
"I think they are systematically dismantling the whole process with which we have been funding scientific research for 80 years, and it's very, very sad," said one of the people familiar with the NIH funding process who spoke to NPR. "There's no question the system is not perfect and can be improved upon. But the system can work well enough that we shouldn't address the problem by blowing everything up, which is what they're doing."
Neither NIH nor the Department of Health and Human Services, of which it is a part, immediately responded to NPR's request for comment.
It was unclear if the freeze on Federal Register notices was being imposed on other agencies. But the move has intensified fears of funding and program cuts at NIH and among thousands of scientists who depend on the agency for funding.
The NIH has been hit with cuts to its workforce, losing about 1,200 people so far. At the same time, the Trump administration is trying to cap the rate at which the NIH pays for the indirect costs of doing medical research at 15%, which is far lower than the rate that has been paid at many institutions. Scientists say it could cripple medical research. A federal judge in Boston is deciding whether the cap can go forward.
Many scientists fear the moves are just the beginning of what could eventually lead to a restructuring of the NIH. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now leads HHS, which oversees the NIH, has said it needs major reforms.
In addition, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford University researcher President Trump has nominated to be director of the NIH, has also criticized the agency. Some Republican members of Congress and conservative think tanks have proposed major changes to the NIH, including sending most of the agency's $48 billion directly to states through block grants.
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