The Trump administration has blocked a crucial step in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) process for funding medical research, likely in violation of a federal judge’s temporary restraining order on federal funding freezes.
The NIH has stopped submitting study sections – meetings in which scientists peer review NIH grant funding proposals – to the Federal Register after the Trump administration paused health agency communications. By law, study sections must appear on the register 15 days in advance of meetings.
“The idea is that the public has the right to know who’s giving advice to the federal government and when they’re meeting,” said Jeremy Berg, a biochemist who has overseen NIH funding in the past.
These meetings are integral in the funding process for scientists at institutions around the country researching virtually all elements of disease and medicine, including drug development, cancer, heart disease and aging.
An internal NIH email the Guardian obtained confirmed that the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has instructed the NIH to indefinitely hold Federal Register submissions.
Carole LaBonne, a Northwestern University biologist who runs a stem cell lab and has participated in study sections, said by doing this “they effectively shut down the extramural research program”.
This is a clear violation of federal judges’ orders, according to Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan who served as HHS’s general counsel until December 2024.
Judge John McConnnell “initially issued a temporary restraining order saying stop the funding pause,” Bagenstos said, “and then after receiving evidence that the Trump administration was trying to evade that order, he issued a further, broader order, saying that, first of all the, the Trump administration must immediately end any federal funding pause. Secondly, and this is the crucial language, including clearing any administrative, operational or technical hurdles to implementation.”
So, “this idea that we’re gonna spend the money, but we’re only gonna spend the money after we have study sections, and – oops – we can’t have study sections because we’re not allowing notices of study sections to be filed in the Federal Register” unambiguously ignores that language, Bagenstos added.
If the Trump administration continues to evade court orders, Bagenstos says judges have a number of tools at their disposal. They could issue more specific orders directed toward individuals responsible for violations, or even hold them in civil contempt of court, which can include jail time, and which cannot be undone with a presidential pardon.
Study sections bring scientists from institutions around the country together to peer review grant proposals, said Berg. Each section brings 20 or more peer reviewers together to review as many as 100 proposals.
“It’s basically about two weeks of work” for each reviewer, says Berg.
A source familiar with the process estimated that for every three days’ worth of delayed study sections, $1bn of NIH funding is put on hold. Even though study sections are required to appear on the Federal Register 15 days in advance, meetings scheduled to begin on 20 February were postponed the day before.
“This week, without warning, as we were checking in to our flights for DC, my study section was canceled for no reason,” said one scientist who was supposed to have her grant proposal reviewed. The cancellations led the scientist and her colleagues to collectively put together that the problem was related to the Federal Register – a relatively obscure step in the process.
Two scientists scheduled to attend 20 February study sections as reviewers said they had never heard about the requirement until this week. One suspected the maneuver is “another clever way to wage war on medical science” because few people, even those who work at the NIH, completely understand how it works. It’s a “logistical thing that someone like me would never have to interact with, or likely would never have heard of”, he said.
None of the scientists the Guardian spoke to received an explanation as to why study sections were not cancelled until the last minute, even though they were required to appear on the Federal Register 15 days in advance but never did. LaBonne suspects it’s because NIH staff are still hoping the meetings can go forward somehow.
“They’re trying to keep it possible till the very last minute in hopes that someone has mercy and allows study sections to continue, and maybe even waives the 15 day requirement,” LaBonne explained.
Stuart Buck, a Harvard Law graduate and executive director of the Good Science Project, says these moves make it “very hard to read the tea leaves” about what will happen next.
Jay Bhattacharya, who Trump nominated to direct the NIH, has “not even had a confirmation hearing yet”, Buck said. “Why rush out policies that are pretty drastic without the involvement of the people who are supposed to be the experts running the agency?”
Buck continued: “All the public rhetoric is about reducing the deficit or reducing regulation. But the things they’re doing so far are mostly not aimed at the deficit or regulation at all. They’re canceling contracts that are trivial compared to the deficit … firing people and canceling things and creating chaos everywhere.”
A scientist who was supposed to attend a postponed study section as a reviewer also had trouble making sense of these actions. If the meetings are ever rescheduled, reviewers will either have forgotten details of the proposals they reviewed or have to spend extra time reviewing them again, which will take time away from their own medical research.
“This whole thing makes so little sense to me. They’re not even saving any money by doing this. And ultimately, what they’re doing is going to cost more money than anything else, by just delaying everything and kind of screwing up people’s lives,” he said.
Another reviewer said the time waste was “annoying” but “the real disturbing thing here is that there’s a lot of really great science in those grants that really needs to be funded in a time-sensitive way. And if it’s not, labs are going to close.”
The NIH press office did not respond to a request for comment in time to be included in the story.
