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.
