Incredible shrinking grant deadlines at the BRAIN Initiative

The scramble began on 31 August. 

That was the day that the National Institutes of Health released a new notice for a funding opportunity from the BRAIN Initiative.

The “Integrated BRAIN Circuits Program” offers around $1 million per year and requires “a high level of coordination and sharing” among teams of three to six investigators. 

The program has been in the works at the NIH for over a year, but prospective applicants have only 38 days to submit their completed application. The deadline is 7 October.

From that, subtract the seven-plus days that university grant administrators typically demand to review outgoing proposals.

“It’s just not enough time,” says Zhe Sage Chen, professor of neuroscience at New York University, who was invited to join two separate teams applying for the BRAIN Initiative’s circuits program earlier this month. One team has since decided to postpone their application for another year. “They don’t even have the right people yet,” Chen says.

The shrinking deadlines for the BRAIN Initiative and other programs at the National Institutes of Health represent one more way in which the Trump Administration appears to be straitjacketing the funding agency, which has seen programs canceled and budgets slashed in recent years.

When NIH launched its Autism Data Science Initiative in May 2025, investigators only had a month to submit a full proposal.

At the time, the NIH said that “the timeline is shortened to allow NIH to commit the funds for this ROA [research opportunity announcement] by the end of the fiscal year.”

But such tight deadlines have become the rule rather than the exception. “A month is crazy,” says one BRAIN Initiative grantee, who asked not to be named so that he could talk openly. “[The Administration’s] goal is, I think, to just screw NIH as badly as they can.”

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Although the initiative received a boost from Congress earlier this year, the Administration has since made it difficult for grantmakers to give out their funds.

For example, in previous years, the NIH posted the BRAIN Initiative’s notice for funding opportunities (NOFOs) anywhere from three to eight months prior to the first submission deadline.

But John Ngai, director of the BRAIN Initiative, says that these funding announcements can now be released only after they have been cleared by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is led by political appointees. 

“It’s no secret that getting these NOFOs published has been taking longer than it has in the past,” he says. “Because of budget fluctuations, we had to put a pause on certain programs, and we kind of got ourselves reoriented.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not directly answer questions from The Transmitter about delays in approval or the rationale behind them.

A statement attributed to the National Institutes of Health noted that “forecasted funding opportunities are now posted well in advance of application windows, giving the research community adequate time to prepare.”

Researchers, however, say that after so many programs were canceled last year, they are reluctant to trust such forecasts, which rarely provide a firm timeline or a guarantee that the program will move forward. 

“Sometimes the prediction is accurate, sometimes it’s not,” Chen says. “If you ask the P.O. [program officer], they don’t know.”

As with the BRAIN Initiative, the latest round of funding for the National Institute of Mental Health’s Conte Centers program was first forecast in August 2025, but the notice of funding was only released this month. That deadline is 15 October.

Under federal law, calls for funding must be open for a minimum of 30 days.

Ngai says he’s hopeful that he will soon have some exciting proposals for the BRAIN circuits program in his inbox. “The not-so-good-news is people need to get themselves together quickly to do it,” he says.