NIH Has Funded 74% Fewer New Grants This Year. Here Is What Biomedical Researchers Should Do Next.

Halfway through fiscal year 2026, the National Institutes of Health has awarded 74 percent fewer competitive grants than the average for the same period across fiscal years 2021 through 2024. The dollar value of those awards is 62 percent below historical norms. And on March 18, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya will testify before the House Appropriations Committee with those numbers hanging over every word.

This is not a garden-variety slowdown. Three forces — an OMB spending freeze, a disruptive multiyear funding policy, and cascading staff losses from Schedule Policy/Career reclassifications — have converged to produce the worst grant-making bottleneck in the agency's modern history. For the roughly 390,000 researchers and staff whose work depends on NIH funding, the question is no longer whether the crisis will resolve itself. It is how to survive it.

The Numbers Behind the Collapse

A Johns Hopkins analysis published by STAT on March 17 paints a stark picture. As of March 3, NIH had issued dramatically fewer new competitive awards compared to the 2021–2024 baseline — a 74 percent shortfall. The monetary value of those awards trails by 62 percent. Meanwhile, renewal grants for existing multiyear projects have consumed a disproportionate share of the budget, leaving the pipeline for genuinely new research nearly dry.

Success rates tell the same story from the applicant's side. Across all NIH institutes, the probability of winning a competitive grant has fallen to approximately 17 percent — the lowest in nearly three decades, down from 26 percent the prior year. At the National Cancer Institute, which adopted the new multiyear forward-funding policy early, success rates have cratered from one in 10 to one in 25.

For early-stage investigators seeking their first R01-equivalent grants, the picture is even grimmer. Success rates for this group dropped from 29.8 percent in fiscal year 2023 to 18.5 percent in 2025, with 2026 tracking worse still. These are the researchers most likely to abandon biomedical science entirely if they cannot secure their first independent award.

Three Colliding Forces

The OMB Spending Freeze

Congress actually increased NIH's discretionary budget to $48.7 billion for FY2026 — a $415 million boost over the prior year, and roughly $12 billion above the administration's own request. The House spending package that passed in March explicitly rejected the proposed 40 percent cut to NIH and blocked a 15 percent cap on indirect cost reimbursement rates.

But appropriated money and spent money are two different things. The White House Office of Management and Budget has restricted NIH's ability to release FY2026 funds, limiting expenditures to what OMB deems essential — primarily salaries and existing obligations. Grant awards, including those already peer-reviewed and scored, sit in limbo awaiting authorization that has not come.

This creates a cruel paradox: Congress appropriated more money, but less of it is reaching investigators. The NIH has delayed posting notices for new grant competitions, and large academic programs face the prospect of funding gaps that stretch into next fiscal year.

The Multiyear Forward-Funding Policy

A policy change requiring NIH to fund multiyear grants with a single upfront lump sum, rather than the traditional year-by-year disbursement, has compounded the squeeze. The logic seemed reasonable — give researchers financial certainty and reduce administrative overhead. The math, however, is devastating.

When a five-year R01 grant that would have cost $500,000 per year now requires $2.5 million upfront, the same annual budget supports far fewer new awards. NIH's own projections estimate the forward-funding mandate will eliminate approximately 970 competing grants in fiscal year 2026 alone. That is 970 research programs that will not start, 970 labs that will not hire postdocs, 970 lines of inquiry that will go unexplored.

The policy locks resources into existing commitments and starves the pipeline of new science. Early-career researchers bear the heaviest cost because they are competing for the same shrinking pool of new awards while established investigators have renewals to fall back on.

Staff Losses and Schedule Policy/Career

The third force is quieter but potentially more corrosive. The administration's Schedule Policy/Career reclassification — the renamed Schedule F — allows federal grant-making employees to be moved into an at-will employment category, stripping civil service protections. While the Office of Personnel Management claims relatively few line scientists will be affected, the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates the true scope could be four times OPM's figure of 50,000 reclassified workers nationwide.

At NIH specifically, program officers, grant reviewers, and advisory council members may all fall within the reclassification zone. The agency has declined to specify how many positions it plans to convert. What is clear is that a year of layoffs, reassignments, and attrition has already left NIH understaffed for the volume of grant administration it needs to perform. Fewer staff processing fewer awards against a backdrop of frozen budgets creates the kind of administrative paralysis that is almost impossible to fix quickly.

What $94 Billion in Lost Activity Looks Like

The scale of NIH's economic footprint makes this crisis a national concern, not just an academic one. According to United for Medical Research, the $36.58 billion NIH awarded in FY2025 generated $94.15 billion in total economic activity across all 50 states and supported 390,863 jobs. Every billion dollars in NIH grants supports roughly 10,000 jobs — not just at universities, but at biotech suppliers, equipment manufacturers, construction firms, and the small businesses that serve research campuses.

A 74 percent drop in new competitive awards does not eliminate all that activity overnight — renewal funding keeps existing projects alive. But it throttles the pipeline. New labs do not open. Postdoctoral researchers take industry jobs or leave science. Collaborations that would have produced the next generation of therapies never form. The damage is invisible until it is irreversible.

Strategic Responses for Researchers

Waiting for the system to self-correct is not a strategy. Researchers who want to sustain their programs through this bottleneck need to act now on multiple fronts.

Diversify beyond NIH. The Department of Energy's Office of Science just opened its 2026 Early Career Research Program with $145 million in planned funding and pre-applications due March 24. NSF secured $8.75 billion in FY2026, with plans for 10,000 new awards. DOD, DARPA, and ARPA-H each have distinct funding streams with different review cultures. Biomedical researchers whose work touches computation, energy, materials, or defense applications should map their projects onto these agencies' priority areas.

Target foundation funding. Private foundations are not subject to OMB spending freezes or federal hiring disruptions. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Simons Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and dozens of disease-specific foundations all run investigator programs with meaningful budgets. The application burden is real, but the timeline is often faster than federal review cycles.

Restructure proposals for the new math. The multiyear forward-funding policy means reviewers are now evaluating the full cost of a grant, not just the annual slice. Proposals that demonstrate phased milestones, clear go/no-go decision points, and conservative budget trajectories will score better in an environment where study sections know every dollar awarded forecloses another applicant.

Collaborate strategically. Multi-PI grants, center grants, and program project grants spread risk and can be more competitive in a tight funding environment because they demonstrate broader impact per dollar. Institutions with strong collaborative infrastructure should be marketing that advantage to faculty.

Engage your institution's government relations office. The March 18 congressional hearing is a pressure point. Appropriations committee members need specific examples of delayed awards, deferred hiring, and stalled research to push back on OMB's spending restrictions. Researchers who can provide concrete, district-specific data about NIH's economic impact give their representatives ammunition.

What Happens Next

Director Bhattacharya's testimony on March 18 will be the first time NIH leadership faces direct congressional questioning about the 74 percent shortfall. Congress has already signaled its position by boosting NIH's budget and rejecting the indirect cost cap. The bottleneck is not legislative — it is executive. Until OMB releases the appropriated funds, the most generously funded NIH in history will continue operating as one of the stingiest.

For researchers, the lesson of 2026 is that federal funding concentration is a structural vulnerability. The agencies that control America's $48.7 billion biomedical research investment can be throttled by administrative decisions that have nothing to do with scientific merit. Building a portfolio that extends beyond any single funder is not just good strategy — it is survival.

Tools like Granted can help researchers identify alternative funding sources across federal agencies, foundations, and state programs, moving from a single-agency dependency to a diversified portfolio before the next bottleneck hits.