The last time Jay Bhattacharya testified before Congress, in early February, the biomedical research community watched optimistically as the National Institutes of Health director downplayed the impact of last fall’s government shutdown on the pace of grant funding. Coming on the heels of lawmakers passing an appropriations bill that pushed back on the most drastic changes to the agency proposed by the Trump administration, scientists were hopeful that 2026 would treat them better than 2025.
But as the director returns to Capitol Hill Tuesday to appear before the House Committee on Appropriations, that outlook has darkened. Nearly halfway into the fiscal year, the NIH is far behind on grant spending. As of March 3, the agency had doled out 74% fewer competitive, or new, awards than the average for the same period in the 2021-2024 fiscal years, according to an analysis of NIH RePORTER data by researchers at Johns Hopkins. The monetary value of those awards so far this year is 62% below the average for those previous years.
The grants NIH has funded this fiscal year have largely been the renewals of existing multiyear projects, rather than funding entirely new proposals.
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