By Julie Steenhuysen, Ahmed Aboulenein and Robin Respaut
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration has for weeks been blocking the U.S. National Institutes of Health process for issuing new research grants for everything from Lyme disease to lung and heart disease, according to researchers, a departing NIH official and documents.
The government is using a loophole to hold up the money. The NIH was directed by the administration not to take a key step in the approval process — publishing grant meeting notices in the Federal Register, the documents show.
The ban on publication of such notices impacted the NIH’s two-step grant-making process, which involves preliminary reviews by outside experts and a final review where the grant is ultimately approved.
On Monday, the NIH said it was allowing publication of some of the preliminary meeting notices in the Federal Register, according to an internal email seen by Reuters, but an NIH internal website still prohibits publishing by grant review committees called advisory councils, which remain on hold.
The hold was first reported by the Transmitter and Nature.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and close Trump adviser, have sought to dramatically cut government spending, including the $47 billion annual NIH budget.
The NIH had said on February 7 that it was planning to slash grant funding to research organizations like universities and hospitals, but that was blocked by a U.S. judge’s order three days later, which was extended last week.
The February 10 court order means NIH should be operating normally, “but we’re not, because they’re putting up barriers to make sure that we can’t,” said Nate Brought, who resigned on February 17 as Director of NIH’s Office of the Executive Secretariat, in part due to the delay in publication of meeting notices.
No NIH meeting notices have been published since January 21 – the day after Trump took office – a search of the Federal Register found. Dozens of meetings were scheduled, the NIH website shows.
U.S. Senator Patty Murray from Washington, a senior member of the Senate’s health committee, in a February 21 press release said the hold was illegal. “Trump and Elon are suffocating the work of cancer researchers with so much red tape that labs and clinical trials will be forced to shut down,” she said.
An NIH spokesperson said grants were still being funded but did not address the ban on publishing Federal Register notices – which is required by an arcane law – and did not respond to follow-up questions about the February 7 email. An HHS spokesperson declined to comment.
According to the email, meetings that had already been published are still taking place.
‘SCARY TIMES’
Brian Stevenson, a microbiology professor at the University of Kentucky, studies Borrelia burgdorferi, the spiral-shaped bacterium that causes Lyme disease, which is spread by ticks.
He had three grants that were supposed to go into a preliminary expert review called a study section last week, but those meetings were abruptly canceled. Grants then go through a second review panel called an advisory council that recommends which grants get funded.
Stevenson’s work is aimed at understanding what the bacterium needs to do to infect humans, and how it does that.
His lab has identified proteins involved in that process, which he had hoped to get funding to test. Understanding that process could lead to drugs that block or prevent the disease, which affects more than 475,000 people in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Without grant funding, Stevenson said he will have to close his lab by the end of this year. His graduate students face an uncertain future.
“They could graduate soon. But what are you going to do? What are the jobs going to be? These are scary times,” he said.
Suzanne Judd, director of the Lister Hill Center for Health Policy and a public health professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham, is a co-investigator for a 4,600-person study examining why rates of heart and lung disease are higher in some rural counties and lower in others.
The $35 million study has monitored participants in rural parts of Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi since 2019 and offers free medical exams, including CT scans and echocardiograms, to participants about every five years.
Judd said the study’s next contract was scheduled for review in March, but the meeting has not been posted. Without a renewal of funding, Judd anticipates the study will need to pause sometime this summer. The study employs about 50 scientists and research technicians, of which about 20 are full-time, across 16 universities, she said.
Long-term observational studies allow researchers to examine risk factors for diseases, like cancer, heart disease or stroke, that take decades to develop. These types of studies inform how we treat patients, Judd said.
The process for NIH grant approvals typically takes about three quarters of a year, and the NIH only holds three funding cycles per year, said Carole LaBonne, a professor of molecular biosciences at Northwestern University.
If the Federal Register prohibition does not get lifted soon, it could impact the third cycle of grants, which should begin in May, she said. Money not spent by the September 30 end of the fiscal year will be lost.
“They basically found a way to keep most of the NIH paralyzed,” she said.
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago, Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington, and Robin Respaut in San Francisco; Editing by Caroline Humer and Bill Berkrot)
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