GoKawiilThe main campus of the US National Institutes of Health is located in Bethesda, Maryland.Credit: Michael Ventura/Alamy
A striking change in how the world’s largest biomedical funding agency solicits research proposals has sparked debate about how it should fund science.
US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains
For decades, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded a significant chunk of its grants by asking researchers to submit proposals that address specific scientific problems that the agency’s specialists deemed important. But in the past year, the agency — under new leadership since the return of US President Donald Trump to office in January 2025 — has sharply cut the number of these ‘solicited’ calls for funding, and instead directed the agency to increase its spending on ‘unsolicited’ research proposals driven by individual scientists’ interests.
This move, the NIH has said, will save the agency money on managing all of its funding calls — otherwise known as ‘notices of funding opportunities’ — while also offering scientists more flexibility to choose the direction of their investigations, a change that some researchers welcome.
But others worry that this will mean fewer large, special collaborative projects that require agency coordination — for instance, initiatives such as the Human Genome Project or multi-laboratory clinical trials — that have often been financed through specialized funding calls and cannot be initiated by any one investigator or group. And NIH employees told Nature that the change could widen knowledge gaps in understudied areas of science, such as rare and neglected diseases.
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The change in strategy has also contributed to funding delays this year because the Trump administration officials have been scrutinizing all funding calls before they are issued by the NIH, to make sure they align with the administration’s priorities. Agency staff members say that some of these delayed calls are for programmes and research areas, such as diabetes, that the US Congress has directed the NIH to fund.
The reduction in the number of specific funding calls has been “striking”, says Michael Lauer, who for about ten years ran the NIH’s extramural research programme, which financially supports researchers at institutions across the United States. “There are certain projects that are clearly worthwhile that can’t be done with unsolicited proposals,” he says. But he adds that the precise balance of how many applications should be funded through unsolicited calls versus solicited calls is open to debate.
The NIH did not respond to Nature’s queries about the changes to the funding scheme or the delays in posting funding calls. But a website for the NIH says that broad, unsolicited funding calls are “a proven, efficient model”. It adds: “Our intent is to reduce the number [sic] opportunity announcements without reducing an applicant’s opportunity to submit investigator-initiated applications to NIH.”
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