NIH Published 780 Funding Calls a Year. In 2026, It Has Published 14.

Between 2016 and 2024, the National Institutes of Health issued an average of 780 Notices of Funding Opportunities per year — roughly 400 Requests for Applications and another 380 Program Announcements with special receipt dates. These calls shaped the direction of American biomedical research, steering billions toward specific diseases, populations, and methodologies that career scientists at NIH's 27 institutes deemed important.

In the year after the current administration took office, NIH issued 73. In 2026, through mid-March, it has issued 14.

The numbers come from NIH's own Reporter database and were independently verified by Elizabeth Ginexi, who spent 22 years writing funding announcements at NIH before departing last year. Her analysis shows that the decline is not just a slowdown — it represents a fundamental restructuring of how the world's largest biomedical funder decides which science gets done.

The Bottleneck Is Political, Not Scientific

The collapse in funding calls is not because NIH scientists stopped proposing them. Ginexi's data tells a different story: in 2025, individual institutes drafted 391 funding announcements that passed internal scientific review and were allocated budget. Of those, only 120 were actually posted. The remaining 271 — fully developed, scientifically vetted, budget-approved NOFOs — sit in a review queue that did not exist before 2025.

In 2026, the pipeline looks worse: 75 announcements have been forecasted, 14 posted, and 61 are blocked. That is an 81 percent blockage rate.

The bottleneck is Executive Order 14332, signed August 7, 2025, which requires every discretionary funding announcement to be reviewed by a senior political appointee for "consistency with agency priorities and the national interest." Previously, institute directors and their scientific advisory councils approved NOFOs internally. Now, each announcement must pass through the NIH director's political staff, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Office of Management and Budget. Nature reported that this process takes a minimum of six months, and many announcements are never approved at all.

The result is that the National Cancer Institute — historically the largest publisher of targeted funding calls — has gone nearly silent. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which led the COVID-19 response with dozens of emergency solicitations, has published almost nothing. Mental health, aging, drug abuse, environmental health, and rare disease research have all seen their targeted funding pipelines functionally shut down.

The Official Rationale — and What It Means in Practice

NIH leadership has framed the shift as a return to investigator-initiated science. The argument is that eliminating targeted funding calls reduces administrative overhead and gives researchers more freedom to pursue the questions they find most promising, rather than chasing topics Washington has pre-selected.

There is a genuine intellectual case for this position. The R01 mechanism — NIH's workhorse grant — has always been investigator-initiated. Researchers propose their own ideas, peer reviewers score them, and the best-scored applications get funded. Many landmark discoveries, from CRISPR gene editing to mRNA vaccines, originated in investigator-initiated research rather than targeted calls.

But the argument breaks down in three critical areas.

First, some of the most consequential science of the past two decades was agency-directed by design. The Human Genome Project, the Cancer Moonshot, the BRAIN Initiative, the All of Us precision medicine cohort, and multi-site clinical trials for Alzheimer's therapeutics all required NIH to define the problem, coordinate multiple institutions, and issue targeted solicitations. No single investigator can propose a $500 million multi-center trial through an R01 application.

Second, targeted calls have historically driven research into areas the market neglects: rare diseases, health disparities, environmental exposures, pediatric conditions, and global health threats. An unsolicited system tends to fund what established researchers at well-resourced institutions already want to study. Without targeted calls for understudied populations and neglected conditions, the portfolio naturally tilts toward diseases that affect wealthy countries and attract industry co-investment.

Third, the freeze is not ideologically neutral. Nature reported that Trump administration officials are screening every funding call for alignment with administration priorities. NIH employees told Nature that calls related to certain topics — including health equity, diversity-focused training programs, and climate-related health research — face particular scrutiny. The shift from agency-directed to unsolicited science is happening simultaneously with a political filter on which science the agency is permitted to solicit.

The Advisory Council Crisis

The funding call collapse arrives alongside a parallel crisis in NIH's peer review infrastructure. Nature reported in January 2026 that 13 of the agency's 25 advisory councils — the panels that by federal law must review grant applications before funding is awarded — are on track to have zero voting members by year's end.

Since January 2025, only one new member has been appointed to any NIH advisory council. As current members' terms expire, the councils shrink. The majority now operate with less than half their full complement.

This matters because federal statute requires advisory council review for all competing grants above a certain threshold. If a council has no members, it cannot convene. If it cannot convene, it cannot approve new grants. The practical consequence is that some institutes may become legally unable to issue new awards — not because Congress cut their budgets, but because the review machinery required to spend those budgets has been allowed to atrophy.

What the STAT Survey Reveals

A March 2026 STAT survey of nearly 1,000 NIH-funded researchers puts human faces on the structural collapse. More than 25 percent have laid off lab members. Over 40 percent canceled planned research projects. Two-thirds advised students to pursue non-academic careers. Among junior tenure-track researchers, 81 percent said funding disruptions could jeopardize their tenure prospects.

Steve Shoptaw, director of UCLA's Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine, characterized the moment: "This is like the Titanic hitting the iceberg. People are still eating at the table, music's still playing, and yet the ship is sinking."

The survey also found that only 35 percent of researchers whose grants were cut or delayed in 2025 had full restoration by year's end — despite court orders and Congressional action rejecting the administration's proposed 40 percent budget cuts. Congress kept NIH's budget roughly flat at $47.2 billion. The money exists. The mechanism for distributing it is what has broken.

What Researchers Should Do Now

The strategic implications are concrete. If NIH is no longer issuing targeted calls for your research area, you have three options — and the smart move is to pursue all three simultaneously.

Strengthen your R01 pipeline. With targeted calls disappearing, the R01 mechanism becomes even more dominant. That means study section scores matter more than ever, and the competition for unsolicited funding intensifies. Researchers whose work previously aligned with a specific RFA now compete in a general pool. Reframe your specific aims to speak to broad scientific questions rather than program-specific priorities.

Diversify across agencies. The Department of Energy's Office of Science just opened its 2026 Early Career Research Program with $145 million in planned funding. NSF secured $8.75 billion for FY2026. ARPA-H is issuing contracts, not grants, with milestone-based payments that bypass traditional study sections entirely. The SBIR/STTR reauthorization creates new $30 million Strategic Breakthrough Awards for companies ready to scale. If your research has translational potential, the defense and energy agencies may fund what NIH will not.

Pursue private philanthropy aggressively. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Simons Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and dozens of disease-specific foundations all run investigator programs. MacArthur raised its annual payout to 6 percent of its $8.7 billion endowment — an additional $150 million in grants. The Spencer Foundation and three partner funders launched rapid-response bridge funding for disrupted researchers. These are not replacements for NIH-scale funding, but they are lifelines for labs facing imminent closure.

The Long-Term Stakes

The collapse of NIH's targeted funding apparatus is not a temporary disruption. It reflects a deliberate architectural change in how the federal government directs biomedical research priorities. Whether you view that change as a correction — returning power to individual investigators — or as an abdication of the government's role in directing research toward public health needs depends on your assessment of which problems the market and individual researchers will address on their own, and which require coordinated federal action.

What is not in dispute is the arithmetic: 780 funding calls annually enabled the NIH to maintain a diversified research portfolio spanning rare diseases, health equity, pandemic preparedness, environmental health, and population science. Fourteen calls in 2026 cannot sustain that portfolio. The science that falls into the resulting gaps — the diseases too rare to attract private investment, the populations too underserved to generate commercial returns, the threats too slow-moving to command political attention — will go unstudied until someone decides to fund it again.

For researchers navigating this landscape, tools like Granted can help you identify which alternative funding sources align with your work and get proposals drafted before the increasingly narrow windows close.