For those not familiar, the Carnegie rankings are described here:

• Research 1: Very High Spending and Doctorate Production, now defined by a clear threshold of $50 million in total research spending and 70 research doctorates awarded annually. In 2025, 187 institutions have been given a designation of R1.
• Research 2: High Spending and Doctorate Production, which continues the previous requirement of $5 million in research spending and 20 research doctorates awarded annually. This year, 139 institutions received a designation of R2.
• Research Colleges and Universities (RCU), a new designation that identifies research happening at colleges and universities that historically have not been recognized for their research activity, including institutions that do not offer many or any doctoral degrees. This new designation includes any non-R1 or R2 institution that spends more than $2.5 million on research annually, accounting for 218 institutions.

Obviously the rankings cover far more research at Howard than the work associated with NIH funding but that, of course, is the primary focus of this blog. At present, Howard University has 41 NIH projects on the books ranging from the usual R-mechs (R01, R21, R03), to underfunded institution mechanisms (R15), to cooperative agreements (U-mechs), to training grants (T34, R25), to research enhancement (SC1) and to instrumentation grants (S-mechs). In short, a diversified portfolio of NIH award types.

This is the worst possible month for a HBCU to be in the news for research vigor, given what is going on in the national political scene with respect to the jihad against anything that seeks to diversify the research enterprise or to provide equity and inclusion for researchers and those with non-majoritarian health concerns.

Many of the NIH awards to Howard University would appear to be at threat under the current Administration. I see FOA that include PAR-16-439, RFA-AG-24-012, PAR-23-308, RFA-FD-22-020, RFA-MD-23-001 and PAR-19-372 listed. These all have some sort of health disparities, funding disparities and/or DEI type of focus.

To remind you, one of the main takeaways from Hoppe et al 2019, and certainly the preferred takeaway of NIH, was the disparity of funding to topics that were of disproportionate interest to Black PIs.

It seemed quite reasonable to NIH, no doubt, to put some heavy focus on underfunded research institutions. The NIH has an old tradition of using special funding opportunities to direct money to institutions that are not well funded (the AREA / R15 is one such) and to institutions in entire states that are not well funded (see: COBRE, IDeA). Relatedly, SROs have an obligation to constitute study sections with an eye to geographic and institutional diversity, from which you may conclude they try to include reviewers from AREA / COBRE / etc qualifying institutions.

The RePORTER data only go back to 1985. Looking at this year by year was a demoralizing exercise as Howard University received 0, 1 or 2 new R01 per year for pretty much this entire interval (3 in 2005 and 2022). Oh, I thought, maybe they live on a lot of AREA/R15? Nope, most years 0 awarded, one awarded in each of 8 FY. So let’s look at total awards from 1985 to 2025. There are 38 new R01, 19 new R21 and 23 new R03 in this four decade interval. Importantly, I see no sign that R-mech awards to Howard ramped up during the doubling. As a reminder, Sally Rockey reported long ago that one of the phenomena of the doubling interval was a massive increase in the number of applicant institutions. This went along with a big increase in the number of applicant PIs. We don’t have measures of submission vigor, i.e., applications per University per year, unfortunately. Not that I can recall seeing.

But suffice it to say, Howard University appears from this to have been left behind during the NIH doubling interval. This was a time during which so many other Universities were able to reinforce or build their research capacity, in part due to NIH grants. For whatever reasons, the data show that this did not include Howard.

One key factor of research infrastructure is the operation of training grants. Like it or not, academic trainees from undergraduate to graduate to postdoctoral phases are an essential labor pool for NIH funded science. Howard has been awarded three T34 (two in 2022, one in 2013), three T35 (1994, 1999, 2001 and four T32 (1991, 1994, 1995, 2003) training grants. The latter two mechs were tiny, awarded for $37K-$135K in total cost. The T34 are slightly larger, $152-$179k total cost. [By way of comparison I happen to be familiar with a long running T32 that was up around $550k total costs, the last I paid any attention to it. It’s currently in year 42 to the tune of over $750k total costs.] The size gives a pretty good indication of how many trainees might be supported at any given time and for how long. The smaller ones might not be for full-time training, they look to perhaps just cover the costs of a 10 week summer program for a few undergrads.

With respect to individual training grants, eight F31 have been awarded at Howard University over the years, one F30 (2017) and two F32 (in 19985, 1994). This is not a lot, putting it mildly.

How about Big Mechs? Are these any better? I see nine new P20. These are the R21 of centers, and are in many cases expected to be used to prepare the research group for a major center application down the road. The P20 at Howard are pretty well spread out across the decades so we can assess how usefully they led to larger Centers. I see one P30 (shared resources, core support type center), one P50 and zero P60. These latter two are the “real” centers. A big miss for the P20s, to the extent they are supposed to lead to later big Centers. It isn’t like this effort was pivoted to Program Projects, either. There is ONE P01 (program project) grant was ever awarded, that was in 1985.

It’s hard to capture all of this but trust me, one of the responses to both Hoppe et al 2019 and the political climate which followed the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 from the NIH was a focus on HBCU funding. I like to reference this “White Paper” Paving the Path to Excellence and Innovation
for Historically Black Colleges and Universities [PDF] from January 2021 which notes in the introduction that Howard University produced almost as many (220) Black STEM undergraduates who went on to earn PhDs as did Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Yale combined (221) in 2013. There is still a NIH webpage full of HBCU resources links under the NIH Small Business Program Office. A sample of HBCU focused FOA/NOFO that have appeared includes RFA-EB-25-002, PAR-24-144, PAR-24-145 and the not-renewed RFA-MD-24-001. There have been “partnership” funding opportunities designed to pair up research-heavy institutions and PIs with HBCUs and I think I saw at least one of those in the Howard list of current funding. Sure, any money is good and so is scientific collaboration but this avenue smacks of colonialism and paternalism to me. The only way I like these is when the primary institution is the HBCU.

There have been prior efforts to direct funds to HBCUS, but they’ve had limited impact. I ran across DA-98-005 HBCU RESEARCH SCIENTIST AWARD which did not appear to result in any actual awards. There is a webpage for HBCU Research Scientist Award (UH1) that says “Alert: No NIH awards using this activity code have been made for five or more years.” The RFA-HL-02-012 did result in one award to the Morehouse School of Medicine and one to the University of Hawaii-Manoa

What I mean by this is not that nobody knows how anything works. It is more that the vast majority of us, from Scientific Review and Program Officers at the NIH, to intramural NIH researchers, to extramural researchers and their administrative support staff do not ever see the whole picture. Many of us extramural researchers are particularly likely to have seen only a very narrow corridor of NIH operations, to have been told various things about it from various sources over the years and to have high confidence that we know “how it works” when in fact we do not. Especially across the vast landscape of the 24 Institutes/Centers with spending authority, their evolved priorities and practices, the diversity of study section practices, etc.

Examples where extramural scientists express incomplete understanding include who the grant is awarded to (aka, who “owns” it), allowable expenditures (frequently our grants administration has truths which are local and not actually NIH regulation or federal law), and what indirect costs are for. That is but a small sample. SROs are often comically unaware of how the dynamics of grant review actually works in a study section even though this is the vast majority of their job. POs are often disastrously ignorant of the realities of extramural researchers trying to maintain a grant funded research program for the length of a career and, of course, many details of how study section review actually works in practice.

I most certainly include myself in this. One pertinent example is that I only recently really understood what SNAP provisions are*. Well, we may be in a position where we have to know a little more about this Streamlined Noncompeting Award Process in the very near future.

The basic principle of SNAP is that at the time of the competing award, the Grants Management Officer negotiates the direct costs for the entire competitive segment, thus eliminating the need to engage in annual direct cost negotiations. As part of that negotiation, NIH staff assures that proposed costs are allowable, allocable, reasonable, and necessary for the project. Since the budget is negotiated for all years of the competitive segment at the time of the initial competing award, annual requirements for financial documentation are streamlined in that only a programmatic progress report, the Federal Cash Transactions Report, and the Financial Status Report are required to enable NIH staff to monitor the scientific and financial aspects of the project.

I hope we will not be in legal fights over whether SNAP makes it easier to terminate SNAP-ineligible grants in the middle of the total competing interval, but I fear we might. I hope we will not get to the point where carryforward of unexpended funds* from one year to the next of the funded award is suddenly prohibited, but the chaos merchants of the new Administration are just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

My more general point of the day is to be a little cautious about what you read on Bluesky, twitter or in various journalism outlets about the NIH. Don’t get all mad when something that sounded authoritative turned out to be incorrect in some detail**. Try to soak up information with some associated mental tags of uncertainty. For those of us involved in the NIH system, try to leave a little room for the consideration that what we thought we knew is actually not correct, whether in small detail or essential concept.

*My misunderstanding was that while I’ve always known that 25% or less of the prior year’s budget could be carried forward to spend in the next year by practice, this had to be actually approved by the assigned program officer. Apparently SNAP-eligible grants are basically pre-approved for 25% or less carryforward. This may be important in the current era.

**E.g., when we are shouting about 1) new grants not being funded right now at the same rate as they were in February 2024 and 2) the suspension of Advisory Council meetings and study sections there is a tendency to conflate these two issues. They are separable issues. The grants that are “missing” from being funded right now are the ones that were submitted last summer, approved by Advisory Councils in Sept-Oct 2024 and could be funded anytime after Dec 1, 2024. Grants not being considered by Advisory Council now are not slated to be awarded until April 1, 2025 or later. Grants not being considered by study sections now wouldn’t have started until July 1, 2025 or later.

I have no idea why the judge would need to double and triple up on the restraining order, but presumably that’s the necessary legal process. In terms of the next steps, the Judge’s order reads, in part:

Defendants’ opposition to the Motion is due by Friday, February 14, 2025. Plaintiffs
may file a reply brief, limited to ten pages in length, by Tuesday, February 18, 2025. Counsel
shall appear in-person for a hearing on the Motion at 10:00 AM on Friday, February 21, 2025.
Counsel for the Plaintiffs shall provide a copy of this Order, along with copies of the motion
papers, to the following by 6:00 PM on Tuesday, February 11, 2025:

MASSACHUSETTS…MICHIGAN, STATE OF ILLINOIS, STATE OF ARIZONA, STATE OF CALIFORNIA, STATE OF
CONNECTICUT, STATE OF COLORADO, STATE OF DELAWARE, STATE OF HAWAI’I, STATE OF MAINE, STATE OF MARYLAND, STATE OF MINNESOTA, STATE OF NEW JERSEY, STATE OF NEW YORK, STATE OF NEVADA, STATE OF NEW MEXICO, STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, STATE OF OREGON, STATE OF RHODE ISLAND, STATE OF VERMONT, STATE OF WASHINGTON, and STATE OF WISCONSIN,

This means that as of this writing some of you, Dear Reader, are spending your grant funds with full IDC support as usual, while some others of you are spending grant funds with a massive reduction to 15% IDC recovery.

This is absolutely wild when you consider that it is Universities and Research Institutes in states that voted for Trump that are taking this kick in the yarbles.

Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania…these are some heavily NIH funded States. The University of Alabama, Birmingham is no slouch, and that weirdo tradwife cosplayer Katie Britt was already trying to protect it from her guy Trump’s cuts. In my field, the Medical University of South Carolina has some significant funding, as does Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and the University of Kentucky.

Now…this probably won’t last. There’s already reporting of a bunch of associations of private universities and hospitals and the like filing their own lawsuit which, by report, is supposed to be asking for a nation-wide stay of the cuts. Probably that will be granted by late tomorrow? Who knows.

Still, at the moment we are in this very strange situation in which the Trump Administration is taking it out of the hide of their own states and can’t touch their real target, the blue states.

What a time to be alive.

In our business of academic science, it is considered a little gauche to describe some tasks as beneath the people who are higher on the pay scale. Which is what “working beneath credential” means. It violates our cultural lean towards egalitarianism, as unrealized as that may be.

Last Friday’s attack on Indirect Costs (more properly known as Facilities and Administrative costs) attached to NIH Grants has renewed interest in discussing just what those F&A charges cover. The attack was also associated with the implication that these charges are unneccessary or reflect institutional/administrative “bloat”.

The salary scales for the University of California can be found here. The annual salary of a Full Professor in the Ladder Rank series (Table 2) ranges from $131,000 to $238,300.

I don’t know all of the job titles and responsibilities but here is a listing at UCSD for a Research Administrator 3 with a salary range of $69,500 – $123,500. Part of this job is “uses skills as a seasoned research administrator to independently develop research proposals, awards, and transactions related to contract and grant management; maintains contract and grant records in compliance with institutional research sponsor policies;“

Here’s a Fund Manager position with a salary range of $69,500 – $123,500. The job description includes “managing the financial and administrative activities of complex extramural, contractual, and internal research projects. This role supports faculty, researchers, and department leadership by ensuring compliance with federal, state, and university financial policies and regulations. Maintain internal tracking systems, generate financial reports, review expenditures for compliance, and provide budget analysis“

Emphasis added.

The time of the newest Full Professor is more expensive than the time of the most expensive of these administrative people. I am assuming here that the time of the administrative people can be charged to IDC, all my experience to date in this system suggests that this is exactly what is supposed to be charged to the F&A. One of the things that administrative support personnel did at my prior institution, with btw “sky high IDC rates”, was to prepare expense reports for any academic travel. E.g., travel to scientific meetings to present data generated on NIH grants and to learn from other people’s research generated on NIH grants. I do not enjoy this support at my current “normal IDC rate” public University. I am responsible for preparing such expense reports to obtain reimbursement for travel charges incurred. Now, I happen to have a hybrid compensation where some of it is paid by the taxpayers of my state and some of it is paid from the research grants. But certainly some of my colleagues are compensated mostly from NIH grants and some mostly from state funds. There’s a range.

In the latter case, expecting Professors to prepare their own expense reports is administrative bloat, but it is picked up by the University. I say “bloat” in the sense that a more expensive person is doing a job/task that a less expensive administrator might be expected to cover. One might also call this inefficiency. This also makes the costs of this task a contribution from the taxpayers of my state to the federal request for research activity. A contribution to the Facilities & Administrative costs.

If any of us prepare expense reports while mostly funded on NIH grants, well, then we are pulling from direct costs (which cover our salary line) that which otherwise “should” be an indirect cost associated with administrators’ work. For that matter, if a lab tasks a technician who is paid 100% from NIH grants with certain annoying administrative tasks* this may come at the same overall cost per hour, but again it is clawing what should be IDC charges back out of direct costs.

Sure, this travel reimbursement issue is just one little thing (although you might be surprised how long it takes to fight through the Concur financial system to successfully submit a travel reimbursement). But the more general point is that there are many real tasks associated with the administrative oversight of a NIH research grant. And if IDC rates are squeezed down, this does not magically make those tasks unnecessary. Which means someone else has to do them. Something else has to be charged for it.

When that someone else is working under credential, so to speak, then the entire system is paying MORE for the same job to be done.

This is inefficiency, not efficiency.

*I have always understood that it is not legal to put purely administrative personnel** on a NIH R-mech grant. Also that these cost “may” be allowable on major projects, such as P-mechs. Here’s a summary from UC Berkeley that comports with my understanding of what I’ve been told in the past.

**Are there workarounds? Sure. I’ve seen purely administrative folks be paid under “research assistant” titles with a job justification that includes “literature searches” or some such semi-plausibly non-bench research activity***. If the PI can get away with it at grant review, they are basically self-clawing from directs that which has been insufficiently covered for them under IDC and the institution’s choices about how to spend it.

***having watched just such a person assist mightily with a prodigious publication output rate (particularly review articles) of a big deal PI, well, I’m not going to say this is unrelated or wasteful.

The first notice posted to the NIH guide in two weeks is NOT-OD-25-068 Supplemental Guidance to the 2024 NIH Grants Policy Statement: Indirect Cost Rates.

The purpose reads, in part: “Pursuant to this Supplemental Guidance, there will be a standard indirect rate of 15% across all NIH grants for indirect costs in lieu of a separately negotiated rate for indirect costs in every grant.”

The NIH implementation portion reads, in part: “For any new grant issued, and for all existing grants to IHEs retroactive to the date of issuance of this Supplemental Guidance, award recipients are subject to a 15 percent indirect cost rate. … This policy shall be applied to all current grants for go forward expenses from February 10, 2025 forward as well as for all new grants issued.”

Their justification includes a lot of talk about how private foundations mandate a much lower IDC, including the Gates foundation. Which, I happen to know, permits a lot more to be charged to direct costs than the NIH does.

This also applies in a similar way to the variety within NIH IDC rates negotiated at different recipient institutions. That is, some “low IDC” institutions claw things back out of direct costs (say, an access-to-the-internet fee) that “high IDC” institutions pay for out of IDCs.

The bottom line here is that you can expect your institution to start charging your directs for all kinds of stuff they previously paid for out of IDC.

NIH has no intention of increasing the direct costs to cover this, I would assume.

First they came for the D-SPAN awards, and I did not speak out—because I was not a person of color aspiring to a postdoctoral position of my own choice.

Then they came for the diversity F31s, and I did not speak out—because I was not a graduate student.

Then they came for the ESI and “at risk” R01 applicants, and I did not speak out—because I was not a person who contributed to the diversity of the scientific workforce, whether ESI or “at risk”.

Then they came for my IDCs—and there was no one left to speak for my grants.

With apologies to, and respect for, Martin Niemöller

To be a HHMI investigator is, in some eyes, the pinnacle of scientific accomplishment because it jet fuels, well, scientific accomplishments.

They hit the news recently because they discontinued their Inclusive Excellence program mid-stream. Awardees were notified they would get no more money.

This made me wonder when we would hear they were extending this cowardice to some of their other programs. According to reporting in Science by Wadman, so far they are only doing the language dodge to try to head off attention from the neosegregationists and US apartheidists.

Gilliam Fellows:

on 17 January described itself as offering awards to graduate students and their thesis advisers who are “committed to advancing equity and inclusion in science.” Today, the webpage refers to “advancing inclusion and excellence.”

Freeman Hrabowski Scholars:

HHMI’s website in December 2024 described the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program as “supporting outstanding early career faculty committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in science.” Today, it states that the program supports “outstanding early career faculty committed to advancing inclusion in science.”

Hanna Gray Fellows:

HHMI introduced the Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program for early-career researchers by stating that “HHMI initiatives foster equitable and inclusive scientific environments where everyone can thrive regardless of their background, disability, gender, ethnicity, or race.”  Today, that language is gone.

The HHMI is private. It is not a function of the US Executive branch. It is not a function of our government at all. The HHMI is very rich. Wikipedia claims “As of 2017 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute had assets of $22,588,928,000.” That’s a lot of cheese available to spend on lawyers to protect them from whatever threats they think they may be facing from the current Administration.

And yet they are kow-towing and kuckling under in advance.

It’s shameful.

One of the primary NIH training fellowships is the Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award for graduate students, aka, the F31. It is requested with individual applications from graduate students in training, who must have advanced to the stage of dissertation research at the time of award. These cover a stipend (currently $28,224 per year) and some tuition and fees. They typically run somewhere between $39k and $50k in annual costs.

NIH funded 1,043 new (aka Type 1) F31 awards in Fiscal Year 2024. Of these, 327 were submitted under the PA-23-272 and 391 under PA-21-051, the two relevant “parent” funding opportunities. Thus, 68.8% of the awards were submitted under the generally applicable funding opportunity.

The PA-21-052 and the replacement PA-23-271 (currently scrubbed from the NIH site) are the companion F31 funding opportunities designed to “Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research”. These accounted for 181 and 139 new awards in FY2024, respectively. An additional five were funded by NIA under their PAR-21-218 FOA designed to “Promote Diversity in Translational Research for AD/ADRD”. Together these add up to 31.2% of the total awards.

The PA-21-052 version is still available on the website and from this we can see that it merely encourages the recruitment of potential students from the categories spelled out in the newly disappeared NIH Statement of Interest in Diversity. I have posted a brief summary of the categories now and again (see this) but it includes A) racial and ethnic groups, B) individuals with disabilities, C) individuals from disadvantaged background and D) a special note that women from these three categories face additional barriers. Note that the “diversity” F31 does not prioritize amongst these categories. A straight white man who happened to grow up in a target US rural area with neither parent completing a bachelor’s degree is equal to a Black woman in addressing the NIH’s goals. There is no sense that the backgrounds of interest add in any way, i.e., there is no Oppression Olympics competition here. The application must only include a statement from an institutional official indicating “how the candidate’s participation will further the goals of the fellowship program to promote diversity in health-related research“. There is nothing in the “Review” information that asks for peer review input on the contribution to diversity. The section on the “selection process” states that the following will be used in making funding decisions.

• Scientific and technical merit of the proposed project as determined by scientific peer review.
• Availability of funds.
• Relevance of the proposed project to program priorities.

“Relevance to program priorities”, we must note, is very, very, very common to the NIH grant award process, research project grants and training fellowships alike. Early stage investigators are a priority. Fentanyl is a priority. Training people they think will be the Principal Investigators of tomorrow is a priority. Etc. There is nothing special here, nor any obligation of the Institute or Center to fund or not fund any particular number of awards under these, or any other funding opportunities. and Oh By the Way, the parent PA-23-272 says the exact same thing about funding decisions.

On Bluesky, someone one of my subfield colleagues reported that the diversity F31 have been recently pulled out of a study section which considers only fellowship applications, submitted under the parent FOA as well as any other FOA, in a given scientific domain. With a little judicious searching of the CSR site we can conclude these are very likely in the Behavioral Neuroscience area. This section* reviewed 36 F31 that were funded in FY2024. Of these, there were 8 submitted under PA-21-052 and 3 under PA-23-271, adding up to 30.6% of the total. Almost identical to the total NIH wide ratio, so this study section serves as a good canary in the coal mine.

The F31 submitted under the parent and the diversity FOA are not reviewed any differently. The reviewers are not asked to weigh in on the match to the NIH request to merely recruit underrepresented individuals. The ICs do not say anything about how they will select these awards for funding after the study section has evaluated them. In the current era the ICs know they are being prevented, aggressively, from doing anything with selection that has even a whiff of interest in diversity.

With all of this, the applications have been simply pulled from review. These graduate students worked hard to prepare their applications. They trusted in good faith that they should select the “diversity” funding opportunity to assist the NIH with meeting their own stated goals. They sweated it out to meet the December 8th receipt date.

And now, just like that, they rug is pulled out from under them. Their applications cannot even be reviewed, and certainly not funded.

So why pull these applications from review? After all, if the right wing theme that these individuals are all unworthy is true, they will not get fundable merit scores. If some of them do score within the range of applications deemed fundable**, who cares, right? Since the right wing goal is all about pure merit?

The NIH data book for F31 success rates is messed up right now, because the lines don’t quite line up with the labels. However, it appears to be the case that success rates were 28% in FY23, 27% in FY22 and have been running mid to upper 20s since 2009. The diversity FOA ones accounted for 31.2% of the awards in 2024, or 8.7% of all applications. As a reminder this is not per-racial category. It is not per-ethnic category. It is ALL of the four categories (racial/ethnicity, disability, disadvantaged background and women in the above three categories) combined.

So what does removing the under-represented graduate student applications do for the over-represented individuals? Well, if there is the same money in the F31 pot, and 31.2% of the fundable scores are suddenly dropped out of the competition, this improves the odds.

As a thought exercise, consider this in round numbers. Suppose there are 3,000 F31 applications submitted in a given year***, and they fund 30% of them, i.e., 900 new F31s. Suppose further that under recent normative conditions, about a third (300 apps) were funded under the diversity FOAs. Thus, over-represented individual success would be 600/3,000 or 20%. Now that the diversity ones have been removed from consideration, the over-represented success goes to 900/3,000 or 30%. Not bad. However, we also could consider the eventual denominator, which now has to be reduced by about 1,000. So 900 funded apps out of 2,000 submitted by overrepresented individuals is a whopping 45% success rate.

*For what it is worth, this panel also reviewed three R36 (dissertation awards, e.g. see PAR-25-347) apps that were funded, seven F30 (MD/PHD fellowship) apps that were funded and ten F32 (postdoctoral fellowship) apps that were funded.

**The outcome of review is not public information. Even the study section members have only an imprecise idea of this since the final vote, generally within a score range that is overtly stated at the end of discussion, is secret. But I am highly confident that across all of NIH F31 reviews, and very likely in every fellowship study section, there are applications submitted under one of the diversity opportunities that score better than some of the funded applications submitted under the regular call.

***Note that in the real world this gets complicated because the review block only happened for the current one of the three Cycles of consideration. Presumably, we will see the proposals that were yanked from consideration be re-submitted April 8, but this pushes them into Fiscal Year 2026****. The FY2025 pool of applications includes those already reviewed in the past two Cycles, and indeed there are 94 new F31 funded in FY2025 (36 under the diversity FOA PA-23-271, the rest under the parent PA-23-272).

****argh yes there is some further complication in that Cycle I submissions can, in theory, sometimes be funded in September, in this case for FY2025.

Nobody, I will note, said one word about forcing anyone. This is fear talking.

I don’t know what I am going to do if the worst happens. Meaning if significant numbers of faculty, postdocs, grad students or techs are out of a source of support because the new Administration manages to turn off existing grant funding. I am fairly certain my current funding is not at risk from the DEI axe. It’s not related to any of the key words. So far.

You have no doubt noticed over the years, Dear Reader, that I am not particularly empathetic on a personal level. To the extent I express empathy, it is on the systemic level. I’m the kind of person who invariably votes to tax himself to let the local or federal government help the poor, downtrodden and unhomed, but I am not a routine easy touch for the spare-changers at the stop light.

Nevertheless, I’m mentally preparing myself to help with this NIH disaster, if it appears it would be useful.

I don’t know how to convince anyone else to do the same. Or to contemplate helping. The aforementioned sentiments are totally understandable. Most of us have struggled to gain funding, at least once or twice in recent years. We’ve felt the wolf at the door. And nobody was coming to help us then. And we might suspect that if we extend our resources to help someone else now, those funds will not be replaced later if things turn badly for us. Nobody will feel the compunction to save us at a later time, once all this chaos has settled into a new state.

A lot of our colleagues’ pursuit of training URM scientists was, let us admit, driven by the funding opportunity. Even if not directly on a reserved mechanism of support, URM trainees still count. For all of the checkboxes of our careers and grant submissions. These are value returned to the PI. And they might be helpful to secure labor for our labs at a reduced overall cost in the future, since they were at least eligible for additional funding. Now that those sources of support are drying up, now that URM fellows on a T32 Training Grant won’t count, now that demographics of the undergraduate population will not help a R15 proposal……. well, we’re about to try that virtue.