The funding freeze implemented by the Trump administration in January has forced the National Institute of Health to stop considering new grant applications related to billions in medical research, NPR reported on Saturday.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley extended the temporary restraining order blocking the administration’s cuts, yet the administration in turn blocked the NIH from posting any new notices in the Federal Register, a procedural step that is required before federal meetings can be scheduled. Aaron Hoskins, an RNA biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the administration was exploiting a “loop-hole” in the process and has forced him to pause his own hiring of graduate students due to the frozen grant application process. “It’s really quite nefarious,” he said.
The freeze has resulted in a backlog of approximately 16,000 grant applications hoping to get a piece of the $1.5 billion in NIH funding, according to a source familiar with the agency's grant process. Due to the freeze, “applications will come in and basically they go into a black hole, and nothing can be done with them," the source said. "That is where we are now."
Every request for an NIH grant must go through a lengthy review process, resulting in thousands of meetings involving tens of thousands of doctors, scientists, and administrations to keep the funding moving to universities and other institutions. Annika Barber, assistant professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University who is on one of the committees was not pleased with the administration’s tactics. "Today, I was meant to be serving on one of the many cancelled National Institutes of Health study sections," she said. “And instead of providing feedback on critical biomedical research for federal funding, I'm here to explain what America is losing when we lose basic science research.”
Still others say a pause in funding is typical when a new administration comes in. Judge Glock, director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute told the outlet, “A temporary pause in publicizing or funding new grants in order to review them is typical for a new administration.”
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