NIH Just Reinstated Thousands of Frozen Grants — Was Yours One of Them?

On December 29, 2025 — a date chosen with the precision of an agency trying to bury news during a holiday weekend — the National Institutes of Health issued 528 grant decisions in a single day. Of those, 499 were approvals.

These were not new applications. They were proposals that had been shelved, denied, or left in administrative limbo for months, casualties of the Trump administration's directive to freeze funding related to topics it deemed politically objectionable. A federal court settlement forced NIH's hand, and the result was the largest single-day grant reinstatement in the agency's recent history.

The total scope is far larger than that first batch. Two separate lawsuits — one led by state attorneys general and another by the American Civil Liberties Union — have compelled NIH to re-review more than 5,000 grant applications by July 31, 2026.

How the Freeze Happened

The trouble started in early 2025, when the administration issued directives targeting research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. NIH began pausing, delaying, or outright denying grant applications and renewals that contained certain keywords or addressed topics the administration considered ideologically suspect.

But the freeze extended well beyond DEI research. Applications involving HIV prevention, LGBTQ+ health, sexual violence prevention, Alzheimer's disease, and other areas that had no plausible connection to diversity initiatives were caught in the dragnet. Researchers reported receiving form rejection letters that cited administrative holds without further explanation. Others watched their applications simply stop moving through the review pipeline.

The effect was devastating at the lab level. Principal investigators who had been told their scores were fundable were left without awards. Postdocs whose positions depended on pending renewals scrambled for alternatives. At some institutions, labs furloughed staff or delayed experiments that had been planned for years.

The Legal Reckoning

Two lawsuits converged to force NIH back to the table.

The first, led by the Massachusetts attorney general and joined by additional state attorneys general, challenged the legality of the freeze under administrative law. That case ultimately covers more than 5,000 grants nationwide — the broadest scope of any suit challenging the administration's research funding actions.

The second, filed by the ACLU in April 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, represented reproductive health organizations and individual researchers whose grants were frozen or denied. In June, Judge William Young ordered grant restoration. The administration appealed, and in August, the Supreme Court stayed Young's ruling in a 5-4 decision. But by December, both cases had produced settlement agreements requiring NIH to re-review the affected applications.

Under the terms of the settlements, NIH must issue final decisions on all affected applications by July 31, 2026, with intermediate benchmarks along the way. The agency did not admit wrongdoing in either agreement.

What the Numbers Look Like

The December 29 batch was the first visible result. In the state attorneys general case, 528 decisions were issued that day, with 499 approvals. In the ACLU case, at least 135 of 146 applications were approved.

Those initial numbers are encouraging, but they represent a fraction of the total. More than 5,000 applications remain in the pipeline. NIH has not disclosed how many of those will ultimately be approved, and the approval rate for subsequent batches could differ significantly from the initial release, which likely included the most clearly meritorious proposals.

There is also a critical caveat. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has stated publicly that grants related to DEI research will not be renewed upon expiration: "When they come up for renewal over the course of the year, we won't renew them." In other words, applications that are reinstated now may still face termination when their current funding period ends.

The Chilling Effect Is Real

Even for researchers whose grants were never frozen, the past year has introduced a new variable into the funding calculus. The knowledge that a federal agency can pause or deny a meritorious application for political reasons — even if courts eventually reverse the decision — changes how investigators write proposals, choose research topics, and calculate career risk.

Early-career researchers are particularly exposed. An assistant professor who loses a year of funding due to an administrative freeze cannot get that year back. The tenure clock does not pause for policy disputes.

Some institutions have responded by advising faculty to avoid certain terminology in grant applications — replacing specific words and phrases with more neutral language, even when the underlying research is unchanged. Whether this constitutes prudent grantsmanship or self-censorship depends on whom you ask. The practical reality is that investigators are adapting their proposals to a political environment, not just a scientific one.

What to Do If Your Grant Was Affected

If you had an NIH application frozen, denied, or placed on administrative hold between January 2025 and December 2025, check your eRA Commons account for status updates. NIH is processing decisions on a rolling basis, and new batches should continue appearing through the July 31 deadline.

Contact your institution's sponsored programs office. They may have received notifications about the settlements that have not yet reached individual investigators. Some institutions are tracking affected grants centrally and can tell you whether your application is part of either lawsuit's scope.

If your application was denied and you believe the denial was related to the content freeze rather than scientific merit, document everything. Save the rejection notice, any correspondence with NIH program officers, and your original study section scores. If your application is not reinstated through the settlement process, this documentation may be relevant to future legal or administrative challenges.

For investigators whose grants were reinstated, remember that the funding may arrive on a compressed timeline. Be prepared to activate your project quickly — hire staff, order supplies, submit IRB amendments — because the award period may not be extended to account for the delay.

The Broader Lesson

The NIH grant freeze and its legal unraveling will likely become a case study in the limits of executive authority over scientific funding. Courts in multiple jurisdictions concluded that the agency acted unlawfully. Congress responded by writing new protections into the FY2026 appropriations bill. And more than 5,000 researchers are now getting a second chance at funding they should have received months ago.

But "second chance" understates the cost. Months of lost research time, stalled careers, and institutional uncertainty do not get reimbursed with a reinstated award. The grants may be unfreezing, but the damage to researcher confidence in the stability of federal funding will take longer to thaw — and platforms like Granted can help affected researchers identify alternative funding sources while the federal pipeline continues to stabilize.