Despite spending nearly all of its budget for the 2025 fiscal year, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded 37 percent fewer new neuroscience-related grants in 2025 than in the previous nine-year average, according to The Transmitter’s analysis of data from RePORTER, the NIH’s funding database.
Some researchers say they are already feeling the financial uncertainty and stress as a result of that decrease. “I have a grant proposal that got a 7 percent score, which surely would be funded in previous years,” wrote Joshua Jacobs, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, in an email to The Transmitter. “It’s hard to know if I should close down my existing projects and/or redouble my efforts writing new grant applications.”
This decline in the number of grants is largely due to a new funding policy announced in July, which requires the NIH to fund multiyear grants with a single, upfront lump sum payment rather than distributing funds annually. This shift has lowered the odds of success for new grant proposals and significantly reduced the number of new awards. Since June, the NIH has required that half of the remaining awards for the fiscal year be funded as multiyear grants, Science reports.
“I don’t think [my colleagues and I] have any expected grants that we haven’t received [a notice of awards] on,” wrote Joshua Gordon, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who directed the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2016 until 2024, in an email to The Transmitter. “We still have several well-scoring grants that have been put off until next year, presumably because of the [multiyear funding mandate].”
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he pace of new grants for neuroscience got off to a slow start this year, The Transmitter previously reported: Between 20 January and 25 March 2025, the NIH’s two neuroscience-focused institutes—the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the NIMH—awarded, on average, 77 percent fewer new grants than over the same period in previous years.The entire NIH’s pace of funding picked up in August, when a surge of awards put it on track to spend its entire 2025 budget, according to an analysis by STAT. The 2025 fiscal year began on 1 October 2024 and ends 30 September 2025.
Grants funded by the NIMH and NINDS show the same trend as the NIH overall. Both institutes awarded a similar or greater number of noncompetitive extensions and renewals this year compared with past years. But the NIMH and NINDS funded 427 and 816 new grants, respectively, in fiscal year 2025, down from 820 and 1,013 in 2024, even though their annual budgets hardly changed between those two years.
Several factors are likely contributing to this decrease, according to Joanne Padrón Carney, chief governmental relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit general science organization based in Washington, D.C. In addition to the multiyear funding mandate, “renewals are quicker to process on a tight deadline,” she wrote in an email to The Transmitter.
But that leaves some researchers, particularly early-career researchers, “waiting on the sidelines,” she says. “If NIH continues to use forward-funding as a regular practice, it leaves the institute entrenched and less flexible in its ability to invest in a promising scientific area.”
