STAT+: NIH awarded all its grant funding, but delayed and opaque decisions stymied researchers — SkimNews
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- NIH spent its full ~$34 billion external grants budget in fiscal 2026 (ended Wednesday) but funded only ~58,000 projects — down from ~61,000 in FY2025 and well below the ~63,700 awarded annually before the second Trump administration.
- The agency continued reducing grant awards involving health disparities, race, and ethnicity, while making little progress on other Trump administration priorities like distributing funds more evenly across the country and expanding support for early-career scientists.
- The White House pushed to fully fund more multiyear grants in advance, which STAT's analysis suggests may explain why fewer new awards were issued this year.
- Researchers, in a STAT survey and interviews, said delays in the grant review process are slowing the pace of their work and undermining the innovative science NIH exists to support.
- NIH, like the prior year, started spending slowly before ultimately using its entire budget, a pattern STAT reports is sowing deep uncertainty among grant recipients.
Why it matters: NIH funded roughly 9% fewer projects than before the second Trump administration despite spending the full ~$34 billion budget, meaning the contraction is happening in the number of labs and studies supported rather than the dollar total. With multiyear grants being pre-funded and health-disparities research disproportionately cut, the pipeline of new awards — and the researchers who depend on them — is shrinking in ways the flat budget headline obscures.
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