In the first three months of 2026, the American biomedical research community has gained much needed clarity regarding the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) funding landscape going forward. In this opinion piece, I describe the general contours of this landscape and some of its key implications—slowdowns and delays in awards, lower success rates for funding, declines in funding opportunities—for NIH–funded researchers.
Congressional Support for Biomedical Research Remains Strong
On February 3, 2026, President Trump signed into law the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026.” In this bill, Congress rejected the administration’s proposed cuts to NIH and sustained its top-line budget at $47.2 billion. This remarkable decision, coupled with statutory language maintaining federal facilities and administration rates for research agencies at currently negotiated levels, is important to celebrate. It reflects the hard work of Senate and House appropriators and the stalwart bipartisan support in Congress for biomedical research in America.
Preserving the top-line budget available to NIH allows the agency to continue supporting new and ongoing research projects from researchers across the country that drive the American biomedical research engine. A significant reduction to NIH’s budget would have been catastrophic: requiring either a near-complete pause in new research awards or the reduction of much of the NIH’s ongoing research. It is not hyperbole to say that Congress saved the NIH and American biomedical research as we know it.
The research community has encountered many obstacles over the last year. The issuance of multiple research-related executive orders early in the Trump administration led to a number of challenges for NIH-funded researchers: rapidly evolving NIH policies regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion and other topics; terminations of many existing awards; administrative pauses in foreign collaborations; and a general slowdown in the administrative operations of the agency. Thankfully, most of these challenges have been resolved or greatly improved. This is due to the hard work and advocacy of many stakeholders—researchers, research institutions, professional associations, and elected officials, not to mention the NIH’s staff—in interpreting, navigating, and at times challenging the administration’s policy actions.
Unfortunately, there remain two policy changes at the NIH that are causing significant slowdowns and declines in new awards. The first is the transition to the NIH’s new Unified Funding Strategy for new awards, and the second is the transition to multi-year funding for new awards.
Changes to NIH’s Policy for New Awards are Causing Slowdowns and Declines
The NIH’s Unified Funding Strategy was announced last November. Its core tenets include prioritizing scientific merit, sustaining early career investigators, and promoting “broad distribution and geographic balance of funding, considering the total amount and type of NIH funding already available to each investigator.” The most immediate effect of this strategy is the operational changes in grantmaking it requires from the NIH’s institutes and centers. For example, the policy ended the use of paylines, or funding cutoffs, which many of the institutes and centers relied on for decision-making. Adjusting to a non-payline based funding strategy (not to mention one that now explicitly integrates geographic location and overall funding portfolios for investigators and institutions) is requiring institutes and centers to develop new workflows, which has introduced delays in the award process.
While the transition to NIH’s new Unified Funding Strategy is disruptive, the related slowdowns and declines in new awards are likely short-lived. More long-lasting in impact is the second policy change—the transition to multi-year funding for most new NIH awards.
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget wants to transition the NIH to a predominantly multi-year funding model, requiring the NIH to obligate the entire cost of most multi-year awards in the year they are awarded. Historically, the NIH has budgeted research dollars for most of its multi-year awards year by year. This meant that future year allocations were obligated with NIH funding appropriated in the relevant future fiscal year. With multi-year funding of awards, the NIH must obligate the full cost of the award (i.e., all years) in the fiscal year the multi-year award is awarded. For example, for a four-year, $250,000 per year R01 award, multi-year funding means that the NIH now needs to obligate $1 million of its current fiscal year dollars to fund this award, as opposed to just $250,000 under the traditional accounting system. This means fewer new awards will be made until the future year obligations from existing, year-by-year funded multi-year awards wash out.
We have already seen the impact of these policy changes, in particular multi-year funding, on the number of new awards NIH has issued. Data from the NIH on their awarded investigator-initiated research grants (i.e., R01-equivalent awards) shows a 24 percent reduction in the number of awards issued from fiscal year 2024 to 2025 (7,720 vs. 5,885), causing the average success rate to drop from 24 percent to 17 percent. There is little opportunity for a legislative remedy this Congress (e.g., Senate appropriations language further limiting the transition to multi-year funding failed to survive the final FY26 negotiation process) and the current statutory language allows NIH to continue the transition to multi-year funding at the same rate as fiscal year 2025, so we should expect similar numbers and success rates for fiscal year 2027.
Investigators and Institutions Need to Adapt
The NIH-funded research community needs to recognize the likely scenario of significantly reduced funding of new awards for a period of two to three years. There is no replacing the NIH as the central funder of American biomedical research; private foundations, industry, and philanthropy will not fill this gap. This decline in new NIH awards will undoubtedly result in lost discoveries and innovations, lost jobs, and an accelerated ceding of America’s scientific leadership to other countries that are investing heavily in cutting-edge research. Acute drops in research awards will force innovative researchers to move away from research institutions into private industry or to leave the country for better offers abroad.
To survive, individual faculty and institutions will need to proactively identify ways to sustain the scientific workforce and the research programs they support until NIH funding of new awards recovers. Helping investigators to identify and apply for awards from other federal agencies (e.g., Department of Defense, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, National Science Foundation), private foundations, and industry is a good first step; many NIH-funded scientists do not know much about these alternative sources of funding. Investigators also need to take a careful look at their research programs and plan their projects and budgets with a tighter funding environment in mind. Finally, institutions will need to identify ways to bridge their researchers through this period of reduced funding financially and professionally. This is, by many measures, the proverbial rainy day and institutional leaders should act accordingly.
There are many good things happening at the NIH today, and there are many good people at the NIH working tirelessly to support the biomedical research community. Congressional support remains strong, and the NIH is well-funded to continue its mission of advancing fundamental knowledge and enhancing health. However, policy decisions made by this administration—in particular the transition to multi-year funding—have created a period of significantly reduced funding for new awards. We need proactive, investigator and institutional level engagement to sustain science until funding levels improve.
