Trump Administration Stalls Scientific Research Despite Court Ruling

The Trump administration has blocked key parts of the federal government’s apparatus for funding biomedical research, effectively halting progress on much of the country’s future work on illnesses like cancer and addiction despite a federal judge’s order to release grant money.The blockage, outlined in internal government memos, stems from an order forbidding health officials from giving public notice of upcoming grant review meetings. Those notices are an obscure but necessary cog in the grant-making machinery that delivers some $47 billion annually to research on Alzheimer’s, heart disease and other ailments.The procedural holdup, which emails from N.I.H. officials described as indefinite, has had far-reaching consequences. Scores of grant review panels were canceled this week, creating a gap in funding from the National Institutes of Health. Together with other lapses and proposed changes in N.I.H. funding early in the Trump administration, the delays have deepened what scientists are calling a crisis in American biomedical research.Columbia University’s medical school has paused hiring and spending in response to funding shortfalls. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology froze the hiring of nonfaculty employees. Vanderbilt University is reassessing graduate student admissions. And lab leaders said in interviews that they were contemplating and, in some cases, making job cuts as grant applications languished.For the N.I.H., the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, the ban on announcing grant review meetings has effectively paused the vetting and approval of future research projects. Government advisers and scientists said that amounted to an effort to circumvent a federal judge’s temporary order that the White House stop blocking the release of billions of dollars in federal grants and loans across the Trump administration.“The new administration has, both in broad strokes and in rather backroom bureaucratic ways, stopped the processes by which the N.I.H. funds biomedical research in the nation,” said Vaughn Cooper, a microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh.He had been planning to study urinary tract infections in people with long-term catheters, a project that expert reviewers gave a favorable score in initial vetting four months ago. But a higher-level review meeting to advance his research and other proposals has now been canceled, putting his work on hold.An N.I.H. official wrote in an email in Feb. 7 reviewed by The New York Times that the ban on announcing grant review meetings was in effect “indefinitely” and “came from the H.H.S. level,” a reference to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is now being led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.The breakdown in the grant review process seemed to reflect a broader Trump administration strategy of exploiting loopholes to effectively keep much of the president’s blanket spending freezes in place, despite judicial orders to keep taxpayer dollars flowing.Officials at the N.I.H. and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.The lapse in grant-making may augur additional upheaval at the N.I.H., which helps drive the pharmaceutical and biotech industries with its spending and generates tens of billions of dollars in additional annual economic activity each year.In an internal email late Friday morning, Dr. Matthew Memoli, the agency’s acting director, warned employees of “further changes ahead” and said it would have “many opportunities to demonstrate our value to Secretary Kennedy in the coming weeks and months.”For American research labs, which in many cases pay their employees with N.I.H. grants, lapses in funding can quickly push scientists to dismantle the infrastructure and work force that support lines of experimentation.Katie Witkiewitz, who studies treatments for substance use disorders at the University of New Mexico, said that expected gaps in funding already meant that she would have to let go of one employee in the coming months.“The N.I.H. just seems to be frozen,” she said. “The people on the ground doing the work of the science are going to be the first to go, and that devastation may happen with just a delay of funding.”The stoppages have touched nearly every area of science. This week alone, the N.I.H. had scheduled some 47 meetings for handpicked experts in various fields to weigh grant applications, the first stage of a lengthy review process. But 42 of those meetings were canceled, stalling proposals to study pancreatic cancer, addiction, brain injuries and child health.Higher-level review panels charged with deciding whether to recommend projects have also been canceled in recent weeks. Under a 1972 law, neither type of review meeting is allowed to occur without being announced on The Federal Register, a government publication. Such notices, which typically need to be published at least 15 days in advance, have not been posted on the register since Jan. 21, the day after President Trump’s inauguration.In messages to scientists who serve on review panels, which were reviewed by The Times, N.I.H. officials said that federal register notices had stopped being updated. Any meetings not announced on the register, they said, were being canceled. (Some meetings appear to have gone ahead because they had been announced on The Federal Register before the Trump administration took office.)“What is happening is that they’re basically blocking the process, just by an administrative, legal means, rather than by ordering staff not to make grants,” said Jeremy Berg, who directed the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the N.I.H. for eight years and now works as a data scientist and administrator at the University of Pittsburgh.On Jan. 21, amid broader efforts by the Trump administration to clamp down on communications from federal health agencies, Dr. Dorothy Fink, then the acting secretary of H.H.S., directed employees not to send any announcement to The Federal Register “until it has been reviewed and approved by a Presidential appointee,” according to a memo reviewed by The Times.Portions of the communications pause eventually appeared to be lifted. But meeting notices for The Federal Register remained frozen.In internal guidance to N.I.H. staff posted on Feb. 10, which was reviewed by The Times, the agency’s leadership said that federal register meeting announcements “continue to be on hold.” For that reason, the guidance said, “those meetings will be canceled on a day-to-day basis until further guidance is received.”Adding to the confusion, portions of review panel meetings that were once open to the public in the interest of transparency have now been closed, the guidance said. As a result, review panels were being canceled en masse because of a failure to announce them to members of the public who were barred from attending them anyway.“It’s a Kafkaesque thing going on,” Dr. Berg said.The review panel shutdown is only one element of a seemingly broader pullback in biomedical research funding. Researchers have also reported delays in the delivery of the money and reductions in new grant awards.The Trump administration sought to slash tax dollars allotted to overhead research costs like lab maintenance, a plan that remains on hold under a federal judge’s temporary order.Compounding difficulties at the N.I.H., an estimated 1,200 employees were dismissed as part of Mr. Trump’s plan to shrink the federal work force. Those layoffs especially hurt parts of the agency, like the grants management staff, that turn over more frequently and therefore rely on probationary employees, former agency officials said.The N.I.H. is on the clock to spend its congressionally allocated funding: Any money not released by the end of the federal government’s fiscal year in September could be lost, scientists said.And grant review panels generally meet only a few times per year, exacerbating the effect of recent delays. If proposals remain frozen for long enough, researchers said, they could miss the next stage of vetting and remain on hold for half a year.“This crisis — and I’m not exaggerating by calling it a crisis — has already consumed one funding cycle,” Carole LaBonne, a stem cell biologist at Northwestern University, said. “But if this block to publishing in the register continues on much longer, it’s going to swallow two funding cycles, and that will put many labs out of business.”Jeremy Singer-Vine contributed reporting.