As President Trump takes the reins of the federal government, one of the agencies in turmoil is the National Institutes of Health — the world’s leading public funder of biomedical research.
The new administration imposed a blackout on the NIH and other health agencies on most communications with the outside world and banned travel, forcing the cancellation of meetings needed for decisions about what research to fund next in the fights against cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other diseases.
Those moves, among others, have generated widespread confusion, anxiety and fear among scientists and doctors on the sprawling NIH campus outside Washington, D.C., and at institutions dependent on the agency’s funding.
“It’s a huge deal,” says Haley Chatelaine, a postdoctoral fellow studying basic cellular functions at the NIH who helps bargain for the union representing 5,000 NIH fellows. She was one of just a few NIH employees willing to speak on the record with NPR.
“Science moves at breakneck speeds and requires that all of us in the scientific community work together,” Chatelaine said. “Any gap that we experience sets us back in terms of being able to conduct the cutting-edge biomedical research that Americans need to stay healthy.”
Communications clampdown, but signs of a thaw
The NIH released a statement Monday night saying that the communications blackout has started to lift and that some meetings and travel are resuming. The NIH has restarted closed sessions of committees subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which includes advisory councils and boards and scientific review groups.
In addition, the NIH has lifted a block on submissions to the Federal Register, official correspondence to public officials and travel “in support of NIH internal business for oversight and/or conduct of science,” according to the statement.
But a hiring freeze at the NIH remains in place, along with a prohibition on starting any new research projects on NIH’s campus and a pause on recruiting new patients for any clinical studies at the agency.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” says Marjorie Levinstein, another postdoctoral fellow at the NIH with the union. She studies addiction among other things and says she had to put aside a big step in her research. “It’s really harming our ability to make huge medical breakthroughs.”
The NIH spends most of the agency’s nearly $48 billion annual budget on funding tens of thousands of researchers outside the agency at universities, hospitals, medical schools and other institutions.
So far, NIH funding appears to still be flowing, but the status of new grants and renewals of existing grants remains unclear. So officials at many institutions are worried about what might happen next.
“I have … heard that some extramural institutions are making anticipatory holds on spending in case there is another spending freeze or something like it,” says Kevin Wilson, a vice president at the American Society for Cell Biology.
Uncertainty and a sense of foreboding
“It has been the period of most uncertainty in my adult and professional life as a scientist in terms of the continuity of projects,” says Daniel Colón-Ramos, a professor of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine. “Right now in the scientific community, the general feeling is one of uncertainty and concern.”
Even the NIH’s biggest fans say the agency is far from perfect. Some changes have been under consideration for a while, such as making the grant-review process more transparent. But many scientists inside and outside the NIH are describing a sense of foreboding for the NIH.
“There’s been a general theme to Mr. Trump’s ascension to the presidency that this new administration is going to be somehow waging war on the health agencies,” says Dr. Harold Varmus, a scientist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who ran the NIH for six years in the 1990s. “And it’s going to have a tremendously detrimental effect on the health sciences. All these are terrible signs that we need to be confronting vigorously.”
Trump tried to cut the NIH budget last time he was president and wants Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime NIH critic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University researcher who was critical of the NIH during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, is Trump’s pick to take over as the next NIH director. His confirmation hearing hasn’t been scheduled yet.
“I have grave concerns,” says Keith Yamamoto, special adviser to the chancellor for science policy and strategy at the University of California, San Francisco, who chairs the Coalition for the Life Sciences, which advocates for U.S. health agencies. “People are dismayed about the chaos and confusion being sown and don’t really know what to do.”
“Most scientists are very worried,” agrees Bruce Alberts, a professor emeritus of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, who served as the president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1993 to 2005. Kennedy and Bhattacharya “both have a record of ignoring the best science and making statements and opinions that are not based on the best science and more are based on emotion and the misreading of science.”
But many people also say that if the prohibitions are temporary, the long-term impact could be modest.
“If this all lasts a few more days or a couple of weeks and then gets lifted with some potential reforms, then we can evaluate those reforms on their merit and that’s fine,” says Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “But, boy, at the moment it’s really disruptive and harmful.”
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