NIH rolling out streamlined website to help public find information more easily — SkimNews
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- NIH will unveil a redesigned website on Monday built around eight thematic hubs (health, research, data, clinical studies, rare diseases, technology, cancer, and grants) rather than its 27 individual institutes and centers.
- The consolidation will reduce NIH's footprint from more than 700 separate websites—millions of webpages built on non-connecting backend architectures—to a single, fully connected web environment.
- Amanda Fine, NIH deputy director for public affairs, said the goal is "to make trusted NIH information across the agency easier and faster to find."
- The beta version was soft-launched this week with functions including search not yet operational; existing NIH websites will be sunset on a rolling basis as content is verified and redirects are put in place.
- A five-year strategic communications plan begun in 2022 was scrapped after the Trump administration fired hundreds of NIH communications staffers in early 2025, freezing millions of NIH websites for nearly 18 months and leaving a remaining team of roughly a dozen to push consolidation forward.
- Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center called the overhaul "badly needed," saying "trying to find something on the old website required the skills of an Egyptologist."
Why it matters: For the millions of Americans, researchers, and clinicians who rely on NIH as a primary source of vetted health information, the redesign replaces a pandemic-exposed maze of duplicate, disconnected pages with a single search-friendly hub. The 700-to-one cut is being executed by a skeletal communications team of roughly a dozen, a direct downstream effect of early-2025 federal workforce reductions.
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