Trump Administration Funding Delays Worry NIH Grant Recipients

The National Institutes of Health is months behind on dispersing the bulk of its fiscal 2026 money to grantees, and research advocates worry that without an update on the delay the Trump administration will claw back the funds or create multiyear grants that hamstring the recipients.

Limited money from last month’s government funding law is being dispersed through the NIH and is largely limited to government salaries and continuing emergency activities, according to three people familiar with NIH grantmaking procedures. The grant money that is flowing out has come from carryover funds from a November stopgap funding measure.

Thursday will mark 30 days since President Donald Trump signed the spending law, and is an important deadline for any changes to NIH grant money being dispersed. The carryover funds are not expected to continue to last.

The three people said the delay was unusual and were worried it could affect the speed and stability of medical research projects. With the government so far behind schedule, it could limit how much money is eventually doled out this year, even though NIH funding was increased in the spending law between fiscal 2025 and 2026.

It’s the latest example of scrutiny over the Trump administration’s approach to federal grants. The NIH has faced litigation over its attempts to slash diversity-related grants and cap research indirect cost rates, among other moves.

The current delay is in part because of a new Office of Management and Budget memo that now requires federal agencies to provide more detailed spending plans in order to spend the money appropriated to them by Congress.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, did not respond to a request for comment.

Any delays are because NIH has not yet submitted its required spend plan, according to a senior administration official.

“From a patient perspective it doesn’t matter who is to blame for the delay,” said Russ Paulsen, president and chief operating officer of UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, who is worried about how this will affect progress to find medical cures. “If you slow that to a trickle are we okay with that regardless of whose fault that is?” Paulsen’s group is not an NIH grant recipient.

The scope and trajectory of grantmaking is also far behind the usual process, according to data posted publicly by Denis Wirtz, vice provost for research and Theophilus Halley Smoot professor at the Johns Hopkins University. JHU is one of the top NIH-funded research institutions.

The number of NIH awards granted is 80% less compared with the four-year average for fiscal years 2021-2024 by this time, and the total value of the awards dispersed is 70% less than the four-year average by February of those same years, according to Wirtz’s data.

The fiscal year ends Sept. 30.

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OMB Director Russell Vought is a proponent of the creation of multiyear grants through a process known as forward funding, as well as the indefinite delay or cancellation of funding by the government, called impoundment. Some worry the NIH’s delay is being used as a backdoor way to implement these policies.

“This is more of the same, and this administration is trying to delay and cut off funding for the lifesaving research that the NIH supports—and I am not having it,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee. “Donald Trump and Russell Vought need to get this money out the door before more clinical trials are disrupted or research on the next cancer cure is derailed,” Baldwin said in a statement in regards to the NIH delays.

The administration is required to notify Congress when it impounds appropriated funding and follow a series of procedures to do so legally. The Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, found the administration violated the Impoundment Control Act multiple times last year across agencies, including at the HHS.

One of the final holdups to secure a deal to fund the NIH earlier this year was on whether to allow forward funding, a mechanism that provides the entire lump sum of multi-year grant funding to a grantee at once.

For example, an institution that receives a five-year $5 million grant receive some of that annually for five years. Under forward funding, an organization would receive all $5 million in the first year.

But Democratic lawmakers fought to limit multiyear funding in the February law, over concerns it would reduce the overall number of projects funded and disproportionately affect smaller grantees.

The Trump administration has argued the policy provides more long-term financial stability for grantees.