The halfway point of the federal fiscal year looms at month’s end, yet the National Institutes of Health has only obligated around 15 percent of the estimated $38 billion it has to distribute in grants and contracts to universities and other research institutions, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
The AAMC on Tuesday released an analysis of data from NIH’s RePORTER site, showing it had only obligated $5.8 billion as of Friday, compared to nearly $9 billion by that date in the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration. When the NIH “obligates” funding, it has sent an institution a notice saying the dollars are available to its researchers to spend.
After the historically long government shutdown last fall, the NIH didn’t start doling out funds until December. That month it obligated $1.2 billion, followed by $2 billion in January and February. That’s a marked decline in the amount of funding obligated in the first half of the previous five fiscal years, the AAMC report said.
The report says that current funding rates “raise concerns” that the NIH could be in a similar situation to last year, when it was forced to accelerate its spending to obligate the full amount of its budget by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
According to the AAMC, last year the NIH obligated over half of the necessary research funds to institutions in the final three months of the fiscal year, July to September. Many of the grants were obligated through controversial multiyear funding of individual grants that reduced the number of new grants it distributed over all.
The agency’s own data also suggest that the careers of early-career researchers were particularly harmed by fewer grant awards last year.
The AAMC report underlines the risk that slower NIH funding and fewer overall grants poses to university budgets, higher ed research and the individual researchers who perform it. “Predictable, sustainable funding of biomedical research—including support for exploration of new ideas—is critical for driving scientific progress and maximizing the investment of the American taxpayer,” the AAMC wrote.
The Association of American Universities, a group of top research institutions, also found a significant slowdown in funding in its own analysis of NIH data through the end of last month. Lizbet Boroughs, that group’s senior associate vice president for government relations and public policy, said NIH is “considerably far behind.”
“Consequently, many of our universities have lowered the number of Ph.D. students in life sciences that they have admitted this year or admitted them with the caveat that they may not be supported,” Boroughs told Inside Higher Ed. She also said, “Every university that I know of either has RIFed [laid off] employees or has hiring freezes.”
Besides the decrease in cumulative funding so far this year, the rate of individual grant awards has also slowed. Since October, the NIH has awarded 1,187 new grants, 63 percent fewer than the average awarded by this point over the past five fiscal years, the AAMC wrote.
The AAMC downloads grant-funding data from the NIH but cautioned that because the NIH RePORTER website data is updated in real time, “there may be slight inaccuracies due to the completeness of the data at the time of download.” The AAMC has launched an NIH funding tracker.
Shutdown Delays and Short Staff
NIH director Jay Bhattacharya—who’s also acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has repeatedly played down funding concerns. NIH didn’t respond to multiple requests from Inside Higher Ed for data backing up his arguments that there’s little cause for worry.
At a House appropriations subcommittee oversight hearing last week, Connecticut representative Rosa DeLauro, the head Democrat on the full committee, told Bhattacharya, “NIH grant funding for fiscal year 2026 has dwindled to a trickle.” But the White House Office of Management and Budget had approved the NIH apportionments the night before, she said, providing hope for funding to speed up. (OMB and NIH never responded to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about whether OMB was holding up approval, or why.)
“Researchers need confidence that funding is going to be there,” DeLauro said, asking Bhattacharya, “Can you commit to this committee that NIH is going to accelerate its grant making?”
She also asked how long it would take for NIH funding to return to normal. Bhattacharya never answered that question, but suggested it wouldn’t take much time.
“We did this last year,” Bhattacharya said, adding that his NIH colleagues “accomplished really a remarkable task of getting—even despite all the disruptions—getting grants out the door and spending the entire allocation of the fiscal year 2025 money.”
“We will expend the allocation on excellent science this year and—scientists that are listening—don’t pay attention to the hype,” he said, adding that “grants are already going out the door.”
Asked to respond Tuesday to the AAMC report, NIH acknowledged a slowdown in grant making but didn’t quantify it or blame OMB.
“The Democrat-led shutdown delayed NIH’s ability to issue grants,” a spokesperson said in an email. “Given that this was one of the longest shutdowns in history, this limited delay is a testament to NIH’s steadfast commitment to supporting rigorous, evidence-based, gold-standard science.”
Heather Pierce, the AAMC’s senior director of science policy, said the association’s analysis “didn’t seek to explain which processes or sources of delay best explain the numbers.” But the report did acknowledge the impact of the historically long government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, saying it “prevented the NIH from obligating any funding for the first seven weeks of FY 2026.”
Boroughs, of the Association of American Universities, also pointed the finger at layoffs at NIH.
“NIH physically needs more scientists on their staff that can help review awards, and then when awards go out make sure that they’re managed properly,” Boroughs said. She said, “Career staff at NIH really want to get the funds out the door,” and noted Bhattacharya promised this, too.
Early-Career Researchers Hit Hardest
Speaking to a crowd of more than 100 attendees gathered at an event in January hosted by the MAHA Institute, an organization focused on advancing Make America Healthy Again policies, Bhattacharya said his agency had changed its grant application review process to help early-career researchers.
He said he wanted to “make science be willing to take big intellectual risks again.” Referencing his own research, he said that, as of the 2010s, NIH-funded scientists were typically publishing ideas that were seven or eight years old—a lag he wanted to fix.
“We have made tremendous reform in how we choose our scientific projects to move away from that [time frame],” Bhattacharya said, adding that “part of that is making sure early-career researchers get the funding and the support they need.”
“Science needs to be refreshed with new ideas, continuously,” he said.
But relying on multiyear grants in a rush to get funding out the door last year seemingly hampered Bhattacharya’s ambitions. NIH data shows that last fiscal year, the agency gave significantly fewer R01-equivalent grants than in 2024. R01s are NIH grants that can make an early-stage investigator’s career. The NIH defines ESIs as scientists who aren’t a decade past earning their terminal degree or completing their clinical training and haven’t yet “been awarded a substantial NIH grant.” Their median age in 2025 was 40.
In 2024, 5,446 ESIs applied for R01-equivalent grants, and roughly a quarter, 1,423, were awarded. In 2025, more ESIs applied for the grants, 6,065, but even fewer were awarded, 1,114.
In a blog post, the NIH said the requirement to use 50 percent of its funding on multiyear grants starting in June last year likely contributed to the career challenges ESIs face. “[The requirement] was expected to lead to fewer awards and support for fewer researchers over all,” it said.
Funding delays can derail scientific careers well before someone earns a Ph.D. Deborah Altenburg, vice president for research policy and advocacy at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said funding instability makes it hard for faculty to predict how many graduate students they should accept into labs.
“If the new funding is not approved in a timely manner, it’s difficult for some institutions to continue to float those research labs while they’re waiting,” Altenburg said. While she said she thinks people were encouraged by Bhattacharya’s comments to Congress last week that things may improve, “the proof will be in the actions of the NIH in the coming weeks.”