Federal rulings pausing NIH grant cuts highlight an unprecedented, adversarial shift in U.S. research funding, leaving academic medicine institutions wary of deeper rifts.
In June, federal judges ruled in two separate cases for the National Institutes of Health to restore funding for hundreds of grants. The judges said the cuts — some of which targeted studies on race, gender and sexual orientation — were discriminatory.
The NIH has since instructed its staff to pause additional grant terminations. The organization also recently reopened notices of funding opportunities, according to Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy and the regulatory counsel at the Association of American Medical Colleges.
“This really is an unusual and disruptive time,” Ms. Pierce told Becker’s in a June 20 interview. “Last week was the first time we have seen new NIH Notice of Funding Opportunities since January. So that’s five months where no applications were going and no one was preparing.”
Ms. Pierce said the AAMC, which represents 172 medical schools and nearly 500 teaching hospitals and health systems, was “thrilled” with the ruling. It is unclear exactly how many — or when, or in what way — the NIH will reinstate some of the approximately 2,500 grants and $3.2 billion in funds it has canceled in 2025.
There are still issues outside of the court’s control, and it will be challenging to untangle them, Ms. Pierce said.
“Because these threats to academic medicine aren’t limited to the research enterprise, these fully integrated parts of the mission of academic medicine — educating the next generation of physicians, researchers, scientists, and delivering healthcare and conducting research — they’re a threat to all parts of the mission,” Ms. Pierce said.
For decades, the federal government and academic medicine institutions have worked collaboratively on advancing science and medicine. That understanding appears to have come to an end.
“This atmosphere feels more fraught and adversarial, [with all] the lawsuits and appeals,” Ms. Pierce said. “All of this is not how academic medicine and the federal funding agencies have ever interacted before, and so that adds an extra layer of complexity and stress for the institution.”
In a coalition with other national organizations, the AAMC is planning to pitch to Congress in the coming weeks a funding model structure for how the federal government covers research projects’ indirect costs. It aims to head off a proposed 15% cap on overhead reimbursements, which the NIH introduced in February.
