Researchers describe NIH delays after funding restoration
Harvard computational biologist Sean Eddy said the federal government’s shifting NIH funding decisions over the past year left his lab hollowed out and stalled work he planned to continue with his team. Eddy said he received an NIH letter informing him his project was being terminated and that, despite later funding restoration in early 2026, he and other scientists continued to face uncertainty about when grants would actually move forward.
Eddy described walking through a laboratory where multiple workstations once held researchers analyzing genomic sequencing or troubleshooting questions together. He said the screens and staffing were removed after his funding was terminated, and he cited the change as disruptive to long-running research efforts.
Eddy told NPR that in 2025 he received an NIH letter stating his work “had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated.” He said he has been largely left without answers about the status of the grant since then. Eddy also said he had more than a dozen people working with him when the letter arrived, and that he had to let almost all of them go over the following year.
In addition to staffing losses, Eddy said the termination set his lab back by about a decade. He said that at his career stage, he does not see a path to full recovery, and he described looking for a younger computational biologist to take over the work but said he does not expect that soon, citing a hiring freeze at Harvard.
A separate set of concerns focused on whether restored NIH money is reaching scientists at the pace researchers expect. Jeremy Berg, a former high-ranking NIH official who has criticized NIH’s handling of funding changes, said the environment has damaged what he described as prior reliability in deadlines, forecasts, and expectations for researchers. He told NPR that “Now that level of trust is pretty much gone.”
Berg said NIH’s apparent budget stability in 2026 on paper masked a shift in how grants are being distributed. He said NIH switched to making fewer grants with more money over more years, which he said results in fewer scientists receiving funding. Berg also told NPR that his analysis showed NIH had issued roughly 2,300 new grants earlier in 2026, about half as many as at the same point the previous year.
NPR also reported warnings from former NIH staff and research advocates about transparency problems inside NIH funding processes. Elizabeth Ginexi, who previously worked as a program officer for 22 years and left when the administration began making cuts, said she has tracked NIH “forecasts”—research areas the agency would like to fund—on the NIH website. She told NPR that many of these forecasts were not being posted as they had been in the past and said that of 336 forecasts still listed as open, 205 were already past their promised posting dates without full announcements being published.
Cancer researcher Rachael Sirianni described monitoring the NIH portal for grants that her lab submitted and said, based on what she is seeing, that the likelihood of funding in 2026 is minimal. She told NPR that “The chances of that grant being funded in 2026 are basically zero,” describing how delays made it impossible to keep her project on track on a timeline that depended on the normal NIH review process.
Sirianni said the grant she expected to support work on a pediatric brain cancer setting was tied to evaluating a medication combination she described as offering a “one-two punch.” She said she and a colleague had spent years preparing the proposal, then experienced repeated deadline movement that left the application unreviewable in time for the funding cycle. She said she had to lay off a researcher after the delay, and she described the loss as personal as well as scientific.
In response to the concerns described by Sirianni and others, a Health and Human Services spokesperson, Andrew Nixon, acknowledged a slowdown in funding and attributed delays to the government shutdown and congressional Democrats. In an email to NPR, Nixon wrote that “Timelines have returned to typical funding patterns.” Sirianni and Eddy both said the delays were too late to restart their research trajectories fully, and they said the disruption is continuing as NIH funding decisions play out through grant schedules and administrative postings.
NPR reported that supporters of science celebrated a bipartisan effort earlier this year to restore significant parts of NIH funding through the appropriations process after the previous year’s attempt to cut, freeze or suspend billions of dollars. But even with that restoration, researchers and watchdogs said the practical effects include lost time, reduced grant volume, and less predictable delivery of opportunities—factors they said can undercut both scientific continuity and public confidence.