Thank you for raising attention to this important issue.
You may want to chat with @jeremymberg.bsky.social, a former longtime director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the NIH institutes. He posts lots of updates on this on Bluesky, is knowledgeable and well-connected.
For example, this is from the "Let's Look at Peer Review" presentations. Scientific Review Groups are the same thing as study sections. There is also a second level of peer review meeting, the National Advisory Council. Both meetings must be posted in the Federal Register.
The framing of all the above annoys me a bit because it's not accurately portraying the situation.
Three things happened in the first days of the admin:
1) communication freeze at health agencies
2) blocking all federal advisory committees from meeting
3) freezing all current grant funding
Musk/Trump froze a loved one’s cancer treatment research grant…
It’s not just that they steal food from the hungry, medicine from the sick, money from our federal wallet…the anti-DEIA/science/civil rights crusade will harm ppl at home and abroad.
Thank you for highlighting this. Your piece is correct in gist (afaik) but there are two kinds of meetings being cancelled - study sections and council meetings. New grant apps must go through both before funding is disbursed. 1/2
Some $ could still be going out in the out-years of multi-year previously approved grants. These are called non-competing renewals and they may not require these meetings? @jeremymberg.bsky.social woukd know 2/2
Speaking of those NIH indirect or overhead rates that have DOGE so bothered, it would be interesting to know the overhead on Musk’s government contracts - the DoD contractor I worked for had rates over 150%
thanks for reporting. Study Sections are panels of (usually academic) scientists who are tasked to peer review and rank grant proposal application for scientific merit. They don’t consider budget, they don’t “approve” anything, they are purely advisory but they are the 1st step to awarding a grant.
but it’s correct to say, block them and those proposals can’t reach the approval stage at the next layers of review. SS have zero to do with indirects and this is likely just a pretense to block funding any external grants, prob to hurt universities imo.
One would think with Trump’s deteriorating mental state- evidenced by needing to do press interviews with Musk accompanying him— medical research would be important to him
I work as a grants manager at a medical school. We have an award that should be funded but is in the limbo you describe. There's basically no idea of when exactly the roadblock will be lifted from what we've heard from NIH
This idea had to come from Vought. It’s too clever for any of the others in Trump’s circle, and of them all I’d expect Vought to be most willing to defy a court.
Comments
You may want to chat with @jeremymberg.bsky.social, a former longtime director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the NIH institutes. He posts lots of updates on this on Bluesky, is knowledgeable and well-connected.
Three things happened in the first days of the admin:
1) communication freeze at health agencies
2) blocking all federal advisory committees from meeting
3) freezing all current grant funding
1 and 2 are still in effect, but the impact obviously took time to be felt.
It's not a way around the court order, it's just one more terrible, illegal, unconstitutional act that slipped notice.
Stopping new obligations from NIH (even if that stop is technically not prohibited by the text of the TRO), could be seen as a loophole.
It’s not just that they steal food from the hungry, medicine from the sick, money from our federal wallet…the anti-DEIA/science/civil rights crusade will harm ppl at home and abroad.
They are evil. Authoritarians always are…
Must be smelly viewing their world from within their ass holes.
Indeed you are correct.
NIH funding is very bureaucratic by design, which means a lot of chokepoints where funding can be stopped or slowed.
I don't trust this administration one inch to abide by the judicial decrees.
Who is harmed by this …. The American People!!!
Yeah that guy is seriously expressing admiration. The view in there must be shitty.