NIH grant reviews stall as political screening delays science funding

Hundreds of National Institutes of Health grant applications that had already cleared scientific review were pushed into administrative limbo after top health officials imposed mandatory screening for 235 disfavoured terms. The review has slowed or blocked awards tied to health equity, structural racism, DEI, LGBTQ issues and gender identity, leaving laboratories waiting for money they had already won on merit.

Internal guidance in December 2025 told NIH staff to use a computational text-analysis tool to scan proposals for language linked to administration priorities. Grants flagged as misaligned were not to receive new funding until the project was assessed and the non-alignment addressed, adding a political filter after expert review was already complete.

The delay has carried direct consequences for researchers, institutions and the people who depend on federally backed science. Uncertain funding can force labs to postpone hiring, lose staff and suspend experiments, while international collaborations and long-running projects become harder to sustain. The disruption has also raised concern for major oceanography work, where unstable federal support can ripple across multi-year field campaigns and shared data projects.

The conflict over NIH grant screening has already moved through federal court. In June 2025, Nature reported that NIH was still screening grants in process even after a judge ruled earlier directives illegal. In December 2025, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office said a settlement would require NIH and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to resume review of delayed critical medical and public health research grants. Massachusetts officials said that agreement covered more than 5,000 grants nationwide, and the attorney general’s office said NIH issued decisions for 528 of them the day the lawsuit was filed.

The settlement grew out of lawsuits led by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell and by the ACLU of Massachusetts and allies. Together, the court fights show how disputes over politically sensitive language are now shaping which NIH applications move forward and which remain stalled. NIH describes itself as the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, and its Grants Policy Statement remains the central document governing awards, making each extra layer of screening a bottleneck for the entire research pipeline.