DrugMonkey

I’m just noting this because it just seems so absurd we have reached this point.

Grants Management Specialists are the administrative professionals that handle the nitty gritty paperwork details of getting grants awarded to your institution once an I or C has decided to fund it. Under ideal circumstances you, the PI, would have no reason to know which GMS is assigned to your grant. Because in ideal circumstances everything goes smoothly, there is nothing for the GMS to request of you or your institutional grants office, etc.

This is true for new awards and even truer for non-competing continuations, assuming that your ducks are probably lined up most assuredly for the latter.

Well, NIH has been indicating that the normal operations of the GMS pool have been under stress. Yes, due to various slowdowns in NIH ICs deciding when to fund grants, or the political review interfering, which delays the normal pace of grants being ready for the assigned GMS to issue/award. But also because a lot of people got pushed out of service during the DOGE process and ongoing forced reductions.

You can check out the up to date status of the pace of grants issued in 2026 with the graph over at Grant Witness. Spoiler: Non-competing awards are still off the pace of 2025 (down 2804 awards, or 14% lower) which itself was off the pace of prior (normal) fiscal years (down 3,457 awards, or 16% lower) at this time last year. Reminder, NIH has had the same $ budget to spend in each of FY 2024, 2025 and 2026.

New reporting in Nature from Max Kozlov contains this little window on how bad this has become.

At least one of [It is NIMH] the NIH’s 27 institutes and centres has lost so many GMSs that it has asked early-career researchers, including postdocs and graduate students, who work in the NIH’s own labs to consider working temporarily as a GMS on a volunteer basis, according to internal documents, meeting notes and e-mails that Nature has obtained.

Wow. These are trainees in intramural labs. Not on the Program side, at all. Being asked to “volunteer”. So clearly they cannot be paid as outside contractors or similar.

Look, yes, the job of a GMS is about navigating the red tape involved with making an award that NIH wants to make and the institution wants to receive. It sounds simple. But these are contractual government matters that involve large sums of money. I am certain to my bones that the normal GMS staffer requires a lot of training. There was a stray tweet that flew by asserting the GMS are made personally culpable for screwups, potentially to the tune of millions of dollars. I hope this is all more threat than ever a reality but still.

This is unambiguously serious business.

Putting volunteers on the job is not ideal.

The piece goes on to detail knock-on consequences of this staff shortage including a prioritization of non-competing awards over new competing awards, the corresponding pressure to use multi-year funding (more money expended for the same GMS time, I assume), a deputy director of an IC being re-tasked with helping make awards, the suggestion at least one IC was down to 3 out of 11 GMS seats filled at one point, etc, etc.

There was a distressed post that flew by on Blüski this week.

How are we to survive this?

How will academic scientists get through this chaos and assault on our profession?

You either will, or you will not. Some will exit the profession. Some will hunker down and survive. It’s okay to do either.

I used to say my one detectable talent for this business was my ability to take a punch.

I’ve had a lot of reason to doubt this over the past several years.

We take the punches until we cannot.

That’s it.

That’s the gig.

A small literature on citation homophily in science describes a bias in which white men cite papers authored by white men more than is warranted, and cite papers authored by women or authors of color less than is warranted. Obviously it is tricky to figure out how often any given paper should be cited, but for now let’s stick with some results from a partially overlapping set of authors regarding citations in a subset of “top*” neuroscience journals.

Bertolero and colleagues presented Racial and ethnic imbalance in neuroscience reference lists and intersections with gender in a preprint in 2020. So far as I can find, this was never published in a journal, for those who find this important. The critical categorization in the paper looked at the four first/last author dyads involving Authors of Color (AoC) or white authors. The darker tone distributions in the figure represent actual citations and the lighter tones depict predicted citations based on random draw models using a bootstrapping procedure, with the former normalized to the latter (hence the 0% central tendency).

These data show that White/White author dyad papers are cited more than expected and AoC/AoC dyads cited less. This is true regardless of whether the citing authors are white or of color, but the effect size is much much larger for white author publications. The outcome of this analysis was not improved by attempts to use the characteristics of each paper to match to a population of similar paper. The conclusion remains. Papers authored by white authors are cited more often than they should be, and papers authored by authors of color are cited less. This effect is primarily driven by the citation practices of white authors. In neuroscience.

Entirely unsurprisingly, this also holds for papers with man/man and woman/woman author dyads. Dworkin and colleagues published The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists in Nature Neuroscience in 2020 (doi: 10.1038/s41593-020-0658-y). This panel from Figure 4 of the paper depicts temporal trends which give you a feel for how increasing proportions of publications that include women authors would be expected to increase the citations to women. This shows that if the citing papers have Man/Man author dyads, they tend to cite other Man/Man papers more than warranted. Correspondingly they cite papers with women authors less. As with the above analysis, the pattern of overciting M/M dyad papers is present, but much less in magnitude when citing papers have women authors. Interestingly the M/W and W/W citations rates are right at expected value when the citing papers include women in the first/last authorship dyad.

This brings me to a study of the review of research grants at the Veterans Health Administration. Boyer and colleagues published Analysis by Gender and Race and Ethnicity of Reviewers and Awardees for Intramural Research Funding in the Veterans Health Administration in 2023 in JAMA Network. These data drew from five review cycles for VHA grants from 2018-2020 and involved thirty six study sections, 664 reviewers (381 were women; 81 were racial or ethnic minority individuals) and 146 (77 to women; 81 to ethnic/racial minority PIs) funded proposals. Yes, it is frustrating that any outside analysis only has access to funded projects. So the study could only report on frequency of investigators by sex or representation status within the funded grant pool. There is no indication of success rates.

The authors were able to group the study sections into quartiles based on percentage of women reviewers, out of a range from 20% to 80%, or a median split based on underrepresented minority percentages (range 0 to 39%, median 7.3%). The frequency of women investigators in the subset of funded grants was five times higher if reviewed study sections with the top quartile of woman participation compared with the lowest quartile. Which, you can see from the Figure 1 from the paper, included quite a few study sections with 40-50% women. The analysis for underrepresented individuals found a three-fold increase in the proportion of funded grants in the subset of funded awards reviewed in study sections with minority participation in the upper half (8-39% URM) compared the lower half (0-6% URM).

Interpretation of the meaning of these studies, obviously, depends on a fair number of assumptions. About whether expected citations to papers can be modeled if your sample size is large enough. About whether the statistical models used consider the necessary factors when determining funding proportions. And whether we can tell anything without the success rate data.

But the whole Ginther / Hoppe / Lauer saga from NIH grant review sets up a pretty strong null hypothesis. I.e., that this reflects a genuine funding disparity for Veterans Health Administration awards that is driven by homophily bias whereby white reviewers favor proposals from white applicants and male reviewers favor proposals from male applicants.

We have not seen this sort of study section by study section analysis of the disparity of funding at the NIH, likely this will never be done from the inside so we can get Ginther style success rate numbers. One might have thought it would be a nice dovetail with the “topic based” analysis that arose with Hoppe and the excuse based on funding ICs championed by Lauer. It would have been interesting to know how the percent of Black PIs on study sections affected funding success. The aggregate percent of Black reviewers was 2.4% in the Hoppe report. My recollection is that I’ve only ever been on NIH study sections that were 3% Black as a low bound and mostly higher, ranging up to about 9% or so. Were these sections that exhibited less bias? Is there something systematic here in which there just tend to be more Black PIs doing reviews in study sections on selected topics, in this casue substance misuse disorder research? Perhaps so, given NIDA is the one IC out of the three or four that we have any data for that appeared not to have a Ginther gap problem (in one brief snapshot).

The VA study is also useful for making reasonable inferences about what it takes to change a bias. The lower quartile participation for women was at 50%. This is, in my experience, the high water mark for NIH panels. The median split for URM reviewers (all URM, not just Black reviewers) broke between 6% and 8%. I’d love to see the CSR wide histograms for reviewer participation and to see some analysis of how that does, or does not, predict application success rates based on the characteristics of the PI.

*Nature Neuroscience, J. Neurocience, Neuron, Brain, Neuroimage

A new paper in the Lancet by Fielding-Miller and colleagues reports on the principal investigators of grants that were terminated from January to May in 2025. This includes terminations based on the specific content of the grants, the answered funding opportunity or identity of the PI as well as University wide terminations at Harvard University, Columbia University and Northwestern University. Their approach was to identify affected grants via the GrantWitness database, find institutional email addresses for the PIs and invite them to an online survey.

There were 1918 investigators with terminated grants who were approached of which 941 (49.1%) responded. Of the termination types, 56.2% of those with targeted terminations responded and 38.3% of the institutional termination PIs responded.

There is a lot in here so I will just hit a few highlights. The investigation compared the percentage of PIs meeting various demographic criteria against the percentage of all PIs funded in 2024 for the relevant grant categories. The first observation is:

Compared to the all NIH-funded investigators in 2024, investigators who received targeted terminations were more likely to self-identify as women (n = 406, 56.0% vs 42.4%), Hispanic/Latino (n = 122, 17.7% vs 7.0%), Black/African American (n = 86, 11.9% vs 4.0%), American Indian/Alaska Native (n = 19, 2.6% vs 0.3%), and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (n = 5, 0.7% vs 0.1%) and less likely to identify as white (n = 484, 66.8% vs 70.2%)

We can express that as a grant being 1.32% more likely than the base rate of funded investigators to be terminated if the PI was a woman. The risk for grants with Black PIs was 2.98% more likely to be terminated. I remind you this is for funded grants. And we know from Ginther et al 2011 and Hoppe et al 2019 that the R01* proposals of Black PIs are only about 60% as likely to gain funding in the first place.

The paper also addressed the disadvantaged socio-economic background criteria that used to be under section c. in the NIH’s long standing statement on their Interest in Diversity (now rescinded, see this blog post for reference to the criteria and the wayback machine link). Respondents were asked if they qualify. It turns out that grants with investigators who had disadvantaged backgrounds were 2.54 times more likely to be terminated compared with the grants with non-disadvantaged PIs.

The overall picture did not change when “restricting the analysis to exclude investigators whose only terminated grant was a diversity supplement,“, i.e. this was not only about the funding opportunities that were explicitly about increasing workforce diversity.

Also, because of the demographics of NIH funded investigators at Harvard, Northwestern and Columbia, about 20% of investigators who had grant terminations justified in an Executive Order on the grounds of combating antisemitism at the institutional level were themselves Jewish.

There’s more in the paper, and you should read it, but the takeaway verifies that which we already suspected:

Investigators in our sample who received targeted terminations were significantly more likely to be women, Black, Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander than the publicly available demographics of 2024 NIH-funded investigators.

And that’s great for us that the authors have provided a data based account of what happened in 2025. We have something citable and specific. Even if we suspected that the topics and funding opportunities targeted for termination would just so happen to be correlated with relevant PI demographic groups. Suspect because this is related to what was shown for bias against the funding of R01 proposals on topics of disproportionate interest to Black PIs in Lauer et al 2021 and indeed the fact that Black PI proposals were less likely to be selected for funding across the quintiles of topic-associated funding rate as described by Hoppe et al, 2019.

I do want to end with a caution. It is tempting for people to promulgate a sort of top-level, executive summary from this. Such as the following from the end of the Results section:

Among our sample of investigators with terminated grants, BIPOC women and trans/non-binary people had nearly three times higher odds of having an equity-related termination compared to White cisgender men (aOR 2.69, 95% CI: 1.71–4.25)

I saw a popular science blogger/tweeter type post something along these lines today, with a tweak that misrepresents the findings.

But it has been suspending NIH grants to women and minorities at three times the rate of neutrality.

In fact the rate was 0.32 times for women and 3 times for Black PIs, presumably the overall BIOPOC stat was likewise about 3 times. This is a 10-fold higher hit for PIs of color than it is for women in general.

*The statistics in this paper appear to include every mechanism of grant award including research grants, fellowships and supplements.

Jeremy Berg posted a word cloud analysis for terms that appeared in the title of NIH grants last year but have been removed in the latest non-competing interval. N.b., this excludes any grants which have not (yet?) been renewed.

I have no idea how unusual this is for the NIH as this is a new consideration for me. I don’t believe anyone had any reason to even suspect this occurred with much frequency in the past. In my experience grant titles are never changed within the non-competing interval. Nor are Abstracts, even if the Progress Report indicates that there has been a change in the Aims, something which is perhaps not common but is far from rare.

Changes in the title from one competing interval to another, should one be fortunate enough to obtain a competing continuation, do occur but mostly just reflect a change in the scientific focus as a natural progression of the work previously accomplished.

As noted in Berg’s Alt text,

“The most commonly removed words are “equity”, “diverse”, “disparate”, “racial”, “gender, and similar terms.”

This analysis does not prove cause, although every bit of chatter suggests that Program, broadly construed, has been requesting these changes be made prior to issuing notices of grant award.

The Administration claims, via Director Bhattacharya and others, that there is no list of banned words that, if included in a proposal, would lead to it being prevented from funding.

Maybe technically true in some way, or maybe not. But this analysis sure suggests there is a list somewhere of words which are likely to prevent, or significantly delay, the issuance of a notice of award. Program Officers are communicating that to PIs and requesting/demanding that the titles be altered.

The chatter on bluski included a position that this is all no big deal. That altering the title words for form’s sake has no real impact on the science that will be conducted and that this is all just routine as long as the funds are awarded. One individual called it “transactional”.

I think this is naive.

I don’t know exactly what was meant by this but my longer term readers will be thinking about a constant mantra around these parts.

A grant is not a contract.

This is intended to remind people, for various circumstances, that one is not bound by chains to conduct every experiment mentioned in a R-mechanism NIH proposal. One is expected to make progress under the proposed Aims, yes, and that may include doing what you said in some circumstances. In other circumstances, changes in the advance of science in the PI’s lab or in the field at large may dictate doing something not mentioned in the proposal itself.

There is some grey area here, for sure. Program is touchy about PIs veering too far outside the scope of what has been peer-review approved but “too far” is a very, very VERY slippery concept. Statements in the Progress Report may be viewed with different levels of seriousness by PO and PI if it ever came to a debate.

PI: “Hey, I mentioned we might do this cool new experiment in one sentence in the progress report and you didn’t say anything and grants management issued the Notice of Award so that means we got Program approval right?“

PO: “Wait, you didn’t say you were going to totally throw every resource this year into what I see as a totally novel direction!”

There is some poorly understood black and white as well, such as that you cannot spend grant funds on research using a vertebrate animal species not mentioned in the original proposal unless you do a bunch of paper work with OLAW and your PO requesting a change.

This is under normal times.

We are not under normal times. Grants are pulled individually and University-wide for various offenses against the policies of the regime. Long court battles ensue and even if the University wins, much time is lost.

I think it naive for anyone to think that a PI who was asked to remove the above listed target words from their proposal is just being asked to change words. They are being told they are not supposed to be working on their research from a specific set of angles and perspectives.

I think it is very likely that most PIs in this boat are in considerable discomfort and indeed fear about how they should proceed. Fear that the usual flexibility afforded to PIs about what they work on under a NIH grant may be suddenly violated in specific cases. Fear that anyone who only “transactionally” alters their title or Aims and continues to work on, oh I don’t know, gender affirming hormonal therapy or racial equity of health care of refugees, may be sued by the government to replace the allegedly misspent dollars.

It is spectacularly tone deaf to ignore these as legitimate concerns.

UPDATE: Sigh. I was kindly reminded of NOT-OD-26-007 issued last November which serves as a:

Reminder to NIH awardees that changes in scope represent new terms and conditions, with which recipients must comply.

It goes on to define a change of scope as:

a change in the direction, aims, objectives, purposes, or type of research training, identified in the approved project. NIH GPS, 1.2. This can include changes to Aims, Objectives, Titles, and Abstracts.

So yeah, a change of Title is a change of scope which become(s) new terms and conditions of award, and the recipient must comply with those changes. And in case you are really thick, “This includes changes in scope that were renegotiated to align with the agency’s priorities.“

Yes, I realize I’ve spent the past 19 years yelling into the void about various ways that the NIH should, in my views, alter the way it does business. On Feb 8, 2007, I observed:

It is dismaying to realize that by the time he received his first R01 (the major NIH research grant) Mozart would have been dead for 7 years (tipohat to Tom Lehrer). The official noises coming from the National Institutes of Health, and even some individual institutes such as the National Institute on Drug Abuse (scroll for comments on the young investigator) are positive, sure. We’ve heard such sentiments before, however, and most objective measures show long, uninterrupted dismal trends for the young and developing scientist.

…and things went downhill from there.

Today, however, I’m focused on comments on the bluski from one of the “Abundance” authors and podcast participants I mentioned yesterday. I was having trouble with their assertion that there were only two poles of opinion on the NIH- DOGE destruction or those that did not permit any criticism of the NIH and pretended it was perfect in every way. For the obvious reasons this didn’t sit well with YHN, given my credentials as a complainer about the NIH. It also didn’t sit well with many NIH-interested folks on the bluski.

On prodding, one Derek Thompson first insisted that he didn’t mean us. Of course not. “i never said “SCIENTISTS don’t want to reform the NIH.” that would be fucking stupid. scientists love complaining about grants and bureaucracy, and Bsky complains about … everything! the problem is that the NIH itself is resistant to large-scale reform.“

Glad he clarified. It certainly did not come across in the transcript of the podcast.

The discussion finally arrived at this:

which, in the event bluski craters, reads: Well, I wrote a book chapter after talking to dozens of scientists and the NIH itself about how the NIH should reform—to experiment with new grant approval methods, to award more funding to younger scientists and newer ideas, and to reduce grant-application burdens—but thanks for your feedback.

Finally something actionable. Criticism topics beyond mere “paperwork”. And it is just as absurd as you imagined.

The community of extramural scientists has discussed these topics ad nauseum of course. From the fate of younger scientists, to frustrations about getting “newer ideas” funded (ask me about my hot off the presses summary statement) to potential strategies for reducing grant application churn, we’ve gone over it all.

However, despite my grouchiness, one has to admit that the NIH itself has frequently discussed these problems and done things to try to change. The fate of newer/less tried/unfunded investigators has a long and storied history, NIH even has a summary page. New ideas have been serviced with Director’s New Innovator grant this and Stephen I. Katz award thats. To stabilize funding we’ve seen MERIT and MIRA and PECASE, oh my. Policies to limit the number of award dollars to any given PI have been announced. and practiced, at least in some ICs. I’m not sure what “new grant approval methods” means. If it means strict payline versus Program pickup behavior, well, this is already represented. Grant lotteries? Well, I don’t know for sure but this probably has been considered within the halls of NIH- of course this one runs into Congressional language and is not simple to change. (Lottery schemes are stupid and nobody really means a true lottery anyway.) Could happen, probably been discussed once or twice. Grant-application burdens…well, one might see the A1/A2 policy machinations as attempting (badly) to address this.

I AM going to give this guy a partial pass about interviewing NIH folks, particularly on the record. I have frequently mentioned my frustrations about NIH folks expressing what seems like the company line, believing in their own…smoke….a little too much…zombie mantras about revising grants…pretense about non-paylines from those Program Priority institutes….saying “we can’t” in response to many “we don’t wanna” issues. and my outrage about various grant review issues where NIH folks who should know better express beliefs that are in flagrant opposition to the experience of nearly everyone after their first one or two study section experiences.

But still. It is just plain ridiculous to stick to this straw man that every supporter of the NIH within the NIH refuses to entertain even the slightest critique of how they do business. Or to refuse any measures of reform to try to do their business better. We can add SABV policy into the mix here, in addition to the above-mentioned issues. And Collins’ creation of the National Center for Advancing Translational Science. And Congress backed initiatives (hint, they do not invent this up themselves without NIH input) on the BRAINI or, some time ago, HIV/AIDS research.

It happens all the damn time. With much of this in public, on the public record, easily viewable and understandable in the history of how NIH has operated.

Podcast doods operate on the perspective of the moment. They have no need to understand historical context. They have no requirement to justify their critique of the hour or, more importantly, to address which interests will pay the price for prioritizing their own schemes.

Take the fate of young investigators…it SOUNDS great to complain about how terrible it is that some can’t get funded or that the age of first major award hasn’t changed in decades from over 40. And to bleat about how ‘new ideas’ are somehow unique to the younger folks. But do we ever get serious input on how many new PIs we actually need? or what happens five years down the road when we fund all the ESIs who apply? or analyze how many truly new ideas gain traction via funding an ESI versus funding an existing vibrant lab on their new ideas that can’t get funded?

Or take childhood cancer- OMG it’s just terrible and we haven’t solved that yet, give more moneeeee! Of course, NCI already gets the lion’s share. If we devote more of the zero sum pool to this particular health condition, we take it away from elsewhere. Like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Or substance misuse in parents or during pregnancy…which affects other children adversely. Or, um, childhood vaccination against infectious disease. ahem.

Everything is a tradeoff. More money for heart disease? Less money for multiple sclerosis. More money for AI eleventy to do…whatever? Less money advancing promising drug leads to the point where a company might choose to pick up the ball and advance it to an approved medication.

Etc.

Everything has a tradeoff.

And recognition of competing interests and ideas about what is the most important thing has a tendency to look to the podcaster critique of the moment like intransigence. As if the NIH should not be criticized.

But that’s not it. The frustration is with Johnny-come-lately types that cannot understand that their certainty about priorities is discordant with good functioning of an agency that is supposed to be addressing the concerns of all Americans.

It isn’t that NIH can’t be criticized.

It’s that your criticism is poorly informed and displays a lack of consideration of inevitable tradeoffs.

Interviewing “dozens” of the PIs who submitted the 62,592 research project grant proposals for FY2025 does not even remotely bring one up to speed on the diversity of viewpoints and priorities that are in competition for limited funding. Only 8,161 (13%) of these were funded, awarded to 10,090 PIs (a third of which were first-time awardees). This represented about 20% of the 49,609 unique PIs who applied for funding in FY2025. How do we evaluate the opinions of the 39,519 unsuccessful applicants against the opinions of the successful? How do we decide that one-third of awardees being first-timers is too low?

How many of the disappointed experienced applicants are at the end of their first interval of support, and only a mere 5 years ago were the new and untried investigators podcasters now purport to be so concerned about? Do they really think that the way to advance science is to continually fund untried, new investigators for five years and then boot them off the rolls so we can get in the next new penny?

I dunno, guys. Maybe I’m the problem because I think the NIH does some really good things, has a demonstrated history of activities that lead to almost miraculous advances in human health and necessarily operates in a tenuous tradeoff of priorities and investments. Maybe my reading of science history that says it is an inferior approach to try to engineer efficiency in advance by picking winners from too narrow of a perspective makes me a knee jerk defender of the status quo.

Someone on the socials tagged me in on a few comments about a NYT transcript of an Ezra Klein podcast. Apparently he wrote a book about “Abundance” and somehow this relates to thoughts about re-configuring the NIH. I had a quick scan through, didn’t see anything before I got tired on my phone, and couldn’t immediately work out what Abundance means or how this related.

Later I had time to get to it on a computer and search out NIH (nothing. N.I.H. did work.).

The blog host and, I guess, his co-author of course set up a criticism of convenience in support of their blather about how they have the one true solution.

It starts with the premise that NIH needs some shaking up and gee isn’t it a shame that NIH is uncriticizable in polite company.

Consider three approaches to the N.I.H.: a pro-establishment liberal approach, an anti-establishment MAGA approach — which we’ll call just current policy in 2026 — and an anti-establishment, abundance liberal approach.

No worries, they know all about the current regime.

The current anti-establishment, MAGA approach essentially says — for a variety of reasons that are too complicated for me to go into right now: We hate universities, we don’t trust scientists, and we really don’t like mRNA vaccines. So we’re going to attack the universities. We’re going to destroy a lot of their scientific programs. We’re going to cut the N.I.H. grants by billions of dollars and also basically defund mRNA research because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump don’t like it very much. That’s catastrophic.

Fair enough. They view themselves as good guys, despite expressing admiration for Elon Musk earlier. They purport to believe in the aspiration of what NIH is doing, or supposed to be doing. But they want to be significant critics and reformers so….

The establishment approach would be to say: The N.I.H. spends $40 billion a year and is the jewel of global biomedical research. It is one of the most important, successful institutions in America. You cannot criticize it; you cannot touch it. It exists on a kind of spectral plane that we simply cannot broker any criticism of.

mmhmm. I’m getting a distinct whiff of straw here. In what sphere does anyone operate where the NIH can’t be criticized? Are they unfamiliar at the very least with the Golden Fleece award from Senator Proxmire? And the succession of generally right wing Congress Critters who took aim at the NIH now and again as their target for reducing government expenditure? They definitely do not interact with many scientists if they believe this is true.

Here’s their genius criticism, which nobody would allow in polite company so thank goodness for their podcast. and publisher, apparently.

But then you come to category No. 3, and the abundance liberal approach….it says: You know what? Current policy is horrific. What’s also quite embarrassing is the fact that, according to their own testimony, American scientists who are funded by the N.I.H. spend up to 40 percent of their time filling out paperwork. These are the smartest people in the world, whom we entrusted with coming up with the most important breakthroughs about the cosmos and the human body and curing diseases. And what do we do for almost half of their time? Force them to check boxes. That’s a failure, and it’s a failure that we inscribed with decades of cover-your-ass rules that force scientists to essentially become bureaucrats.

Current NIH policy is horrific. In many ways. Past NIH policy, before 2025 was horrific, in many ways. And if these folks would talk to actual scientists who work under the NIH extramural granting system, well, they would get an earful.

However. “Paperwork”? “box checking”??? We waste 40 percent of our time on this? I don’t know who they have been talking to but I suspect they have mistakenly conflated a real complaint with something they can understand. I suspect that the scientists who complain about 40 percent of their time taken up with non-science tasks are referring to the grant chase. The amount of time devoted to writing and submitting grant after grant after grant for very low success rates, just to be able to do their work.

Perhaps I am projecting but trivializing NIH funded scientist’s major complaints about the system as complaining about “paperwork” seems wrong to me.

They then go on to insist their goal here would be to ask:

What do we want to accomplish with the N.I.H.? Don’t we want an abundance of scientific breakthroughs? Isn’t a good way to do that — to unleash the productivity of scientists and unburden them from some of the paperwork requirements that we’ve added in the last few decades? Let’s find a way to allow scientists to be scientists by reducing that burden. That’s an approach that I would like to see a “good DOGE” lean into in 2029.

I dunno, unique genius guys, even if the complaint is about “paperwork”, believe you me that nobody would hesitate to sound off on the NIH system about this. Is “paperwork” the annual progress reports? Are we to be freed from that from some future “good DOGE”? GREAT! Are they suggesting that IDC rates be increased even further so that PIs can get proper administrative support to fill out travel reimbursement reports? GREAT!

But it cannot be about this. It just CANNOT be “paperwork”.

The strangling of scientific productivity is because of the grant chase.

The need to submit many, many proposals just to land one research grant and the need for preliminary data for those endless submissions. The relative uncertainty of continuing research programs, the hoarding of precious funds, the reluctance to take on employees/trainees, hesitancy to publish until a grant has been awarded… etc.

Fix that with your “Abundance”, guys.

Acting Director Bruce Reed posted a blog post on the consolidation of all NIH grant review within the Center for Scientific Review (CSR). There are some tidbits of interest including:

In 2024, CSR reviewed 66,697 applications….With consolidation, CSR became responsible for managing the review of about 30,000 additional applications per year.

How did they accomplish this? Well, by leaning on the people previously doing the job within the IC study sections.

CSR expects to create 52 new chartered study sections to manage the review of R01 applications previously handled by funding ICs. These study sections are essentially being created out of existing study sections, which are now oversubscribed. Overflowing study sections will be divided to cover different, scientifically coherent sets of topics.

CSR is recruiting reviewers who had previously served on panels convened by funding ICs to retain valuable expertise…Most of the review staff who were at IC branches are now staffing CSR meetings.

Pretty reasonable stuff. This apparently says they are drawing in experienced SROs and the same super set of potential grant reviewers to cover the same old topics.

So far, so good.

There’s some blah-de-blah about making review more consistent via minimizing “significant local variation in review practices” without specifying what that may mean. Standard guidelines….training…yeah yeah, sure.

Here’s the howler slash head scratcher. One of those things that makes you wonder if possibly the longest running, most experienced and most senior person left at the CSR has any idea how grant review and award actually works.

Having review meetings with applications grouped according to science, rather than the IC that administers them, promotes appropriate competition. Better competition should ultimately result in better review outcomes.

Huh?

Let’s see how this works with some closely-related ICs and study sections pulled totally at random.

We already know that the supposedly already-in-progress ENQUIRE process reviewed NMB, NAL and BRLE this past cycle, and decided to keep BRLE as-is, but to revamp NMB and NAL. From my point of view of having a lot of proposals reviewed in BRLE, some in NMB and a handful in NAL, as well as being empaneled for a term of service on BRLE way back when, I cannot help drawing the direct connection.

NAL stands for Neurotoxicology and Alcohol but it has always, to my limited view, had a big domination of alcohol-related proposals that would be funded by NIAAA. In fact I once learned the hard way that this panel did not in fact actually have interest in non-alcohol neurotoxicology. NMB (Neurobiology of Motivated Behavior) has typically been dominated by proposals that would be funded by NIDA. BRLE, at least in times past, has a bit more of a diverse mission. When I was on it we seemingly got NIDA and NIAAA directed proposals, as well as a fair number from other ICs such as NIMH, NICHD, NINDS, what have you.

NIAAA also has maintained AA4 (NEUROSCIENCE AND BEHAVIOR) as an in-house study section. I never was very clear on why they did so and why some proposals would be reviewed there instead of, say, BRLE, NMB or NAL.

I don’t think NIDA had any lasting generalist panels like AA4, but they sure did have SEPs convened for targeted FOA/NOFO. It probably worked out about the same.

There is a certain species of my colleagues, and I love and sympathize with y’all, that expresses very strong opinions about how those guys over there get sweetheart insider club review and funding privilege. While they themselves, of course, are subject to true and competitive merit-forward review.

In general, the in-house reviews (standing IC study section or IC SEP) are more likely to be accused of inferiority, lack of true competition and a smooth path for the insider club.

Within the CSR panels, well, there is some of this kind of grumbling based on the degree of IC capture that is represented with an added dose of complaining about “gatekeeping”.

I have colleagues on both sides of the divide. They are not shy when complaining about their latest grant disappointments.

The funny part is that it is all true. And it is all not true. In approximately equal measure.

Review is highly subjective. Bruce Reed of all people should understand this by now. The major driver is the attitude of the assigned reviewers and the panel at large regarding the importance / significance of the work. And people have a pronounced tendency to think the work they do is the most important. Talk to a NIAAA insider about how important it is to cure alcoholism and alcohol abuse. Or to a NIDA person who is, er, cocaine forward, about basic mechanisms of substance misuse and the way to make “real” progress. Or to a NIMH funded person about research funding for their favorite mental condition that doesn’t happen to involve substance abuse.

They may even quote you some epidemiological and funding stats that “prove” their position.

So how does Reed’s “appropriate competition” work in these more generalist* panels? As per always, our default hypothesis has to be one of percentages. A panel that is 80% “NIAAA folks” will give higher scores to alcohol proposals. A panel that is 80% “NIDA researchers” will score alcohol proposals lower.

How does this help respective Program officers? NIDA isn’t looking to fund any alcohol-focused work and NIAAA isn’t looking to fund a cocaine-only proposal. It is not necessarily “better competition” OR a more useful review outcome to pit these against each other all of the time. Who cares if the 1-5%ile is all NIDA proposals and the NIAAA ones score from 6-10%ile?

This is likely to occur, broad strokes. Statistically speaking. Particularly when one IC is smaller than the other, thereby generating fewer applications, thereby requiring, on the face of it, fewer peer reviewers on one of these newly generalist panels.

Don’t get too smug, NIDA-folk, NIMH is larger than us and the same dynamic could quickly put us on the back foot. And let’s not forget about Big Daddy NCI’s tobacco addiction portfolio.

The issues that are actually important to, e.g., NIAAA Program Staff for making funding decisions may not even be rigorously addressed, if the panel is basically responding “meh, it’s alcohol, pass“. Right? Sure, they can pull up anything they want from the ND-Competitive pool but these will not have the benefit of discussion or panel vote.

Look. I favor generalist study section panels that tend to get a diversity of IC assigned panels. I thought my formative years on BRLE were frikkin awesome in terms of the kind of cross-pollination of reviewers and proposals that occurred. The focus then was on behavior, regardless of the broad spectrum of disorders to which is was applied. But I always had the suspicion this only worked because there were more specialized / IC-captive CSR study sections as well as the in-house study sections.

Regardless, it is not trivially obvious that this more general competition will result in better review outcomes, in so far as the primary outcome is SUPPOSED TO BE assistance to the Program staff in deciding what to fund.

*Neuropathophysiology of Addictive Substances seemingly replaces NAL; Neural Basis of Motivated Behavior seemingly replaces NMB. Keep your eyes on them for rosters and, ultimately, funded grants to see how this re-organization plays out in practice.

The response of many Boomers, particularly those who went through higher education in California, to talk of ballooning student loan debt and the unaffordability of University education is often a lack of sympathy. Mostly due to this.

“I paid my way through college working minimum wage jobs so these damn kids these days are just spoiled. Get to work!”

They, as is very typical for Boomers, conveniently forget the investment the prior generations made in them and how their selfish Reaganism (taxes bad, government bad) sympathies withheld similar support for subsequent generations. It worked a bit like this, yes, even in allegedly left of center, education favoring, high tax California.

For today, we are going to ignore the major investments that built the fabulous University of California, California State University and the Community College systems.

We can start with this constant dollar chart of the Tuition and Fees charged to undergraduates at the UCs and CSUs over time. It is very obvious that costs were a lot lower from 1965-1980 than they were in 2010. You will recognize this interval of time as prime Boomers going to University years. In fact it is almost comical to see the costs start to rise literally after Reagan was elected President and then to bump up again when the Clinton Presidency (and interestingly the economic boom of the tech revolution) turned the Democratic party fully to their “triangulation worked so this must be ground truth” adoption of the central premises of Reaganism, i.e., that taxes and government spending were bad things.

We’ll get to that part in a moment.

Meanwhile, the same selfishness of the Reagan era and the Reagan/HWBush recession put the hurt on compensation for minimum wage jobs. Here we can see both the Federal and California Minimum Wage standards across time. This is represented in constant 2011 dollars to match up with the static data on Tuition and Fees, above. First, California and Federal were pretty much aligned from 1954 to 1998, and it is only after that when California started treating its lower compensated workers better. (N.b. the grey lines represent local municipalities adopting minimum wage standards even higher than the California statewide standard.) It is pretty clear that from 1965-1980, when University costs were low and relatively stable, minimum wage workers enjoyed the highest level of compensation. For example the adjusted CA minimum wage rate of $9.47 per hour in 1979 was not regained until it hit $9.40 in 2018.

For comparison’s sake, adjusted CA minimum wage was $8.00 in 2011, when the graph of Tuition and Fees, above, ends. Minimum wage was 85% of what it had been in 1979, whereas the costs at a CSU had ballooned to over 6 times what they had been. 600%.

This is the first fact-smack you need to apply to your local Boomer or other person who should know better. Minimum wage was down 15% in 2011. It was $6.70 in 1987 and in $6.43 in 1995. That’s 71% and 68% of 1979 compensation for minimum wage jobs. You will recognize this interval of time as prime GenX going to University years.

The conversation likely then drifts into blaming the victim territory by bemoaning why University Tuition and Fees are seemingly ever increasing. Take a pause for the part where you have to explain inflation to your Boomer. And try not to get sidetracked discussing how a given student is not responsible for the general competitive trend where Universities think they have to provide more and more luxury and services.

This brings us back to the fact that generations prior to the Boomers chose to support higher education with their tax dollars riiiiight up until, you guessed it, Reaganism.

The Public Policy Institute of California reports on higher education support in California and leads with this graph on the amount of money California has spent on UCs and the CSUs out of the General Fund. I.e., out of taxes. I am not positive but this appears to be in constant dollars and not inflation-adjusted constant dollars. Which, to belabor the obvious, means the decline is actually worse than depicted here. According to the national CPI inflation calculator that ~$10,000 per CSU student in 1986 equals $20,930 in 2012.

CSU spending per student was relatively constant from 1980 to 2002. Constant here represents a decline in spending power and sure enough if you look at the first graph, CSU tuition and fees were increasing in constant dollars across this interval.

Spending on the UC system was increased in the late 1980s (cushioning the impact of the Reagan recession) and continued until about 1991 or so. You can again look to the Tuition and Fees chart above and see how the constant dollar costs to students started to rise when the State investment declined. Another rise in California State investment in the UC budget that peaked around 2000-2001and fell thereafter was matched by another stabilization and then steep increase in student costs. State support continued to decline from 2001ish to 2012 in nominal dollars and costs to UC students in constant dollars continued to rise. According to the national CPI inflation calculator that ~$25,000 per UC student in 1986 is equal to the spending power of $52,325 in 2012.

We don’t know what UC and CSU got from the CA taxpayers in the 1970s. But in the early to mid 1980s, as the last of the Boomers were attending University, UC was getting 2.5 times as much per pupil from the taxpayers as in 2010. This is in nominal dollars. So you have to increase this to account for inflation.

The difference was made up by charging the students more. A LOT more. Five times as much in tuition and fees, in constant dollars.

While they were able to only earn 85% as much in a minimum wage job.

Any conversation about how we return to a decent society can look to the past in part, a la making America great again. And it was indeed great when higher education was affordable, and students could work their way through college with entry level jobs. But that was only possible because taxpayers agreed to support institutions of higher education. And felt that educating the youngsters was a high priority. And were grateful for the taxpayer supported benefits that they themselves enjoyed and are enjoying.

I can’t locate it right now but a recent blueski conversation about geographical distribution of NIH funds that touched on the Ginther gap, resulted in (to my poor memory) a throwaway about how Black women surely have it even worse.

Of course I don’t know the breadth of the context intended. But I often get this assumption/question when I introduce the Ginther Gap to academic audience. In short, Ginther and colleagues showed in 2011 that the NIH grant proposals with white PIs had a ~1.7 fold advantage in funding and Hoppe and colleagues followed this in 2019 to show that a subsequent sample of grant applications showed the exact same disparity.

I can’t seem to find any mention of the answer in a quick search of my blog archives. However, Ginther and colleagues examined the fate of grant applications in their sample by race, gender and PhD vs MD of the PI in a followup paper published in 2016. So this is a good opportunity to mention their findings.

The answer to “Is There Evidence of a Double Bind for Women of Color?” raised in the article’s title was pretty emphatic.

No.

Figure 1 tells the tale. The upper panels show that per-application rate that is the subject of the major outcome in Ginther and Hoppe. The lower panels show a per-applicant rate that differs slightly from the dodge promulgated by Lauer and co. In this case the per-applicant rate is calculated as the probabability of a PI who applied in the 2000-2006 interval (the sample for the Ginther et al 2011 analysis) having received at least one R01 award from 1980-2006. No matter how the data are sliced, Black women are not at a substantial disadvantage relative to Black men. The biggest gap is apparently MD-holder application award probability.

The paper gives more breakdowns in Table 1. The male/female difference in award probability for Black PIs is negligible for both new and experienced investigators. Of new investigators under the age of 50, Black PhD women had a single-submission R01 award probability of 51% versus 37% for men, a significant difference.

Note that the male/female differences for other racial / ethnic categories were also minimal.

The point of this is not to dismiss the feeling women get about being disadvantaged in the NIH grant getting game. Especially women of a certain age who got their start, or hit mid career, before much of the data that we have readily available to us.

The point is use other successful examples to design remedies for persisting problems with grant award. In this case, there was previously a funding disparity for women and it was fixed. OK, the gap was closed. There are still some disparities for renewals and big mech funding that have come up in more recent times. But as I pointed out in at least one prior blog post,

something changed in 2003. All of a sudden a sustained advantage for men disappeared.

I don’t know what changed. The abruptness of the effect and the persisting success rate of women juuuuuuust below the rate for men year after year for fourteen years* does make me suspicious about some sort of corrective process rather than a fix to the systematic bias. I.e., NIH ICs making sure to balance success rates across PI gender when they make their overall funding decisions. Otherwise wouldn’t we expect the small difference to be more randomly distributed across the 14 years?

Even these data on the left side do not reflect what I assume was a much larger prior disparity for women. There was a time in the past where a group of women sued the NIH over this. It resulted some sort of agreement by the NIH to change. To enroll more women on study sections, for example. A LOT more women. Women comprised** 27% of standing reviewers and 24.5% of non-standing reviewers in FY2000. This rose to 32.9% of standing, and remained at 24.5% of non-standing in 2004.

I don’t know that I’ve seen comprehensive stats since then but I think somewhere I saw more recent data showing this pushing up close to 40%ish. For some reason the RePORT page for peer reviewer stats is rudimentary.

A quarter to a third to forty percentish is enough to Do Something. To Move the Needle. To oppose a systematic bias associated with male preference for the scientific work of other men.

In contrast, seeking a target of Black study section members that matches the percentage of Black PI applications for R01 funding (1.4% in the Ginther sample, 2.3% of only white+Black in the Hoppe sample) is not sufficient to budge any bias needles on study section. Not even if we assume*** Black peer reviewers on study section will express a bias in favor of Black PI applications that is equivalent to the bias of white peer reviewers that is connected to the 1.7 fold advantage for white PI applications.

Women were PIs on 37% of R01-equiv awards in the past two Fiscal Year. Women were also about 37% of the PIs on RPGs for FY2025. If we assume women are about 54% of the population, their underrepresentation as funded PIs is about 31.5%. Since Black individuals comprise about 14% of the population, representation as about 2% of funded PIs is 85.7% underrepresentation. As discussed above, a similar under-representation holds for study section membership.

Low numbers are pernicious. With aggregate study section participation of at least 25% women, and maybe up to 37%ish in recent years, on study sections this almost guarantees quite a few women on each and every panel. In contrast, 2% overall means that many panels do not have any Black reviewers. And this may interact in strange ways with grant topics, and study section domains. I cannot recall being on NIH review panels of normative size (20+ reviewers) where I was the only Black person. If some scientific domain review panels are regularly including 6-10% or more Black reviewers, well, some other panels must be horribly deficient.

*This difference was mostly driven by Type 2. It may be the case that Type 2 renewals were driven into obscurity by the crashing success rates of the post-doubling and this eliminated the source of the gender disparity. Winning?

**Per CSR Data Book, FY2004 dated 5/23/2005.

***this is unlikely to happen, just given the selection of these reviewers from the ranks of reasonably successful Black PIs, implicit biases, the tendency for those on the short end of bias sticks to favor scrupulous “fair” decision making, etc.

I appear to have never written a blog post noting that CSR of the NIH is closing some study sections this year. I posted somethings on bluski about it but never followed through here.

Eventually I realized that periodic review of study sections, closure of some, continuation of others and creation of new sections is done by the NIH under something called ENQUIRE. The splash page says:

Science changes rapidly. Making sure that study sections change with the science is an ongoing challenge. CSR ENQUIRE integrates data and input from multiple stakeholders to determine whether changes in study section focus or scope are needed to facilitate the identification of high impact science, with special consideration of emerging science.

Which makes it weird that this process goes through study sections so slowly. Maybe only some science “changes rapidly”? You can get an idea for how many are evaluated each year on this page. Obviously I’ve never been alerted to this process before, most likely because the study sections of closest interest to my work have been in place for at least 25 years with only relatively slow SRO turnover. I have no idea how often they have been ENQUIREd and let off the hook, but they’ve not been closed.

Here’s an example of one of the CSR review “branches” which collects a few study sections with relevance to substance misuse disorders. Three study sections are closing (NMB, PMDA and NAL), and three new ones will seemingly replace them. Two have the obvious SRO assignment transfers and one has a new SRO. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?

Thinking about this brings me back to something odd that I noticed last summer. The thing that was odd was a peculiar change in the number of new R01s that were funded after being reviewed by one study section. Peculiar because the pattern differed from two other study sections that I think handle reasonably related types of research proposals. Study sections that have fairly similar people reviewing for them. Sometimes these are the exact same people reviewing for two or three of the panels over time. There is a shared culture, in many ways. Clearly not in all ways. Anyway, now that we have FY2025 data, the update:

You can readily detect what first drew my attention. Study Section 1 stopped issuing as many fundable scores in FY2020-FY2022. That’s nine, count em, NINE review rounds in which something has, from the applicant perspective, gone very wrong. The recovery in FY2023-2024 was only partial, if we compare with the other two representative sample study sections.

As far as the update goes, FY2025, as expected, has decreased funded grants from at least two of these sections. Matching the overall NIH trends, likely due to the impact of the Multi-Year funding thing.

Look, I can dream up several excuses for this that have nothing to do with reviewer behavior. It could be that applicants with high probability of funding wrote proposals in such a way, or successfully begged for assignment, to avoid the section. All at once. For some reason. Yeaaaah, not likely.

It could be that the number of proposals assigned to the section all of a sudden decreased, relative to their historical average. By half? or two thirds? Seems like a stretch.

It could be that Program staff at the ICs which usually have grants assigned to this study section changed in their usual preferences for the types of science to fund.

Or.

Or, it could be that something was (is?) very wrong with the review culture of that study section that is resulting in fewer funded grants than there should be. As I noted before, it seems unlikely to be a sort of scoring recalibration for better spread scores and therefore worse average priority scores. The reason is that the percentiling process is a moving three-round calculation. A sudden recalibration of scoring would be bad in the first round, but would get resolved in three rounds. This bad spell lasted at least nine rounds of review.

It could be that the section is too nicey-nice in their scoring, thereby hurting the applicants due to weird percentile calculation practices at CSR.

It could, I suppose, be the impact of one or more newly recruited standing members who savage all grant proposals and are persuasive enough to decrease the number of fundable scores. This is a popular belief in some corners, I know.

But as per usual my biggest source of endless screaming is (was?) my absolute conviction that everyone at CSR is asleep at the switch when it comes to the funding of grants and how the things they do are so critical to funding and not-funding. Asleep about the holding pattern of A2s way back when. Asleep about the Ginther gap. Asleep about how the NI checkbox did not help newbies, but only established investigators who didn’t happen to have NIH grant funding in their long illustrious careers. ahem.

So they have this thing called ENQUIRE to evaluate study section performance. All three of these study sections happen to have been evaluated in 2025. You might think that a sudden decrease in fundable grant scores is exactly the sort of thing that should trigger a question as to “whether changes in study section focus or scope are needed to facilitate the identification of high impact science, with special consideration of emerging science.“

Guess which one(s) is/are being closed and which one(s) is/are being continued, as is?