Finally something we agree on.

Oh. My. God.

Jay Bhattacharya has truly decimated opportunities for early career scientists; I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize just how bad.

What a catastrophic failure of leadership.

This thread is truly one of the scariest things I’ve seen in a long time. Jay is dismantling US science 😢

For FY25, success rates for Ks, Ts, and Fs were all down compared to FY24. We won't have success rates for FY26 until next year.

**But overall, success rates for nearly all types of grants are at 30 year lows**

NIH Data Book has more stats:

Upshot:

🟢 JB says scientist training is his #1 priority.

🔴 Yet, this fiscal year so far, training-related grants are down over 80% from expected levels.

Guys, you can’t do science without scientists. JB gets an F (but not an F grant... ba-dum-tss)

More funding curves at Grant Witness:

And finally: K grants

These support post-docs and early career researchers. Landing one of these can be your ticket to a tenure track gig. They're career-makers.

# of new grants issued through April 15 in

FY2024 (the last “normal” year): 374
FY2025: 252
FY2026: 140

Next up: T grants

These support grad student and post doc training programs at certain institutions.

# of new grants issued through April 15 in

FY2024 (the last “normal” year): 70
FY2025: 23
FY2026: 2

First up: F grants

These support individual grad students and post-docs (and some college students).

# of new grants issued through April 15 in

FY2024 (the last “normal” year): 652
FY2025: 402
FY2026: 74

In August, Jay Bhattacharya said “Training future biomedical scientists” was the 1st priority for his version of NIH.

But talk is cheap. Let’s see how JB’s doing. 🤔

NIH supports trainees mostly via fellowship (F), training (T), and career development (K) awards.

Here are funding curves for each.🧵

Highlighted in red: "Political interference is inappropriately shaping or interfering in the conduct, management, communication, or use of science for political advantage or such that it undermines impartiality, nonpartisanship, or professional judgement"

"HHS works to promote a culture of scientific integrity by creating an empowering environment for innovation and protecting scientists and the process of science from inappropriate interference. Scientific findings and products must not be suppressed, delayed, or altered for political purposes and must not be subjected to political interference or inappropriate influence. The responsible and ethical conduct of research and other scientific activities requires an environment that is safe and free from harassment and discrimination" Highlighted in red are "suppressed, delayed, or altered for political purposes", "subjected to political interference", and "inappropriate influence."

"HHS works to promote a culture of scientific integrity by creating an empowering environment for innovation and protecting scientists and the process of science from inappropriate interference. Scientific findings and products must not be subjected to interference or inappropriate influence and must not be inappropriately suppressed, delayed, or altered. The responsible and ethical conduct of research and other scientific activities requires an environment that is safe and free from harassment and discrimination." Highlighted in green are "subjected to interference or inappropriate influence" and "inappropriately suppressed, delayed, or altered."

Text, with "political" highlighted in red to indicate removal: I. Protecting Scientific Processes Scientific integrity fosters "honest scientific investigation, open discussion, refined understanding, and a firm commitment to evidence" (OSTP 2010). It also enables consideration and documentation of differing scientific opinions. Practices that support scientific integrity may include peer review and open science. Science, and public trust in science, thrives in an environment that prevents political interference and inappropriate influence from impacting scientific data and analyses and their use in decision making. It is the policy of HHS to: 1. Prohibit political interference or other inappropriate influence in the design, proposal, conduct, review, management, evaluation, communication about, and use of scientific activities and scientific information. Prohibit inappropriate restrictions on resources and capacity that limit and reduce the availability of science and scientific products (e.g., manuscripts for scientific journals, presentations for workshops, conferences, and symposia) outside of normal budgetary or priority-setting processes or without scientific, legal, or security justification. 3. Require that leadership and management ensure that covered individuals engaged in scientific activities can conduct their work objectively, free from political interference or other inappropriate influence, and free from retaliation.

HHS just published an update to its Scientific Integrity Policy. Notably, it has removed the concept of political interference, and no longer calls it out as something specifically to be prevented.
www.hhs.gov/sites/defaul... (deletions in red, insertions in green)

The massive drop would come from two sources:

1. overall RPG budget cut (-10.2%); and

2. more multi-year funding, see, e.g., 146% increase in "competing average cost", which means new grants will cost more bc they'll be funded for multiple years. Effect is to reduce the # of grants NIH can make.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

If Trump's proposed $5B cut to NIH were enacted in FY27, the number of new NIH research grants would drop **47%**

To be clear, this is from a document justifying the request. It's what they *want*. They think this is good.

officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/pdfs/FY27/br...

Aaron Sojourner | Aaron Sojourner | Offprint Economic and social science analysis from Aaron Sojourner

The administration seeks to eliminate the National Science Foundation's main funding social science research. You can take action today to defend it.

Short post with tools, inspired @marthastarr.bsky.social

aaronsojourner.offprint.app/a/3mjkbiw7op623-defend-n...

Roughly half of STEM PhD students in the U.S. are international students.

75% of them stay in the U.S. long term after graduating to contribute their skills to U.S. scientific research and development.

Cutting international student visas hurts U.S. science now and long into the future.

We're over half way through the Fed fiscal year.

AHRQ FY26 appropriation: $345M
Amount obligated to date: $0

New AHRQ funding curves up at Grant Witness:
grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

AHRQ supports work to lower healthcare costs and improve outcomes. This is what Trump is unlawfully gutting.

NSF awards record number of coveted PhD fellowships in surprise move Quantum science and AI research are big winners just a year after the US funding giant slashed its Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards in half.

Last year the GRFP was initially cut in half, to 1,000 awards, amid rumors of a massive cut. This year the agency is facing a similar, 55% cut from the White House and headwinds in awarding grants. Despite that, on Sunday, it offered a record 2,599 GRFP awards.

My story on the surprising news:

A line graph of Outyear funding in millions of dollars for competitive (competing) awards. The curve for fiscal year 2025 lies above the curves for other years.

The results are shown for fiscal years 2020 through 2026 (to date).

The big jumps in fiscal years 2020 and 2021 are large COVID-related grants that were fully funded.

4/6

Now that my standard funding curves are updated weekly automatically on grant-witness.us (grant-witness.us/funding_curv...), I have been working on some other important items to track.

One is the amount of funding committed to multi-year grants.

1/6

Slasher sequel: Trump again proposes major cuts to U.S. science spending Science advocates urge Congress to reject 2027 budget plan

See also reporting by Science's staff:

Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration Budget proposal would also curb federal payments for scientific publishing.

BREAKING: In response to huge cuts in Trump's budget request, NSF is shuttering its SBE directorate. Staff will be transferred to other parts of the agency and "grants that align with Administration priorities" will be maintained.

That & more w/ @maxkozlov.bsky.social & @edwrdchen.bsky.social

Here's a big one from NIH. It remains Trump admin policy to

- Cap indirects at 15% (repeatedly rebuffed by courts and Congress)

- Multi-year fund *all* grants. As a reminder, this has the effect of dramatically decreasing the total number of labs and projects supported by the government.

Not only is the Trump admin continuing to cut science funding in general, they're specifically targeting STEM education.

Case in point: NSF estimates Trump's proposed FY27 budget would support 69% fewer K-12 students than in FY25.

Tell me again how we'll train the next gen workforce in AI?

Overview of changes in NSF funding proposed by the FY 2027 President's Budget Request. Most programs are significantly cut. OMB did not give numbers for STEM and NCSES, so the numbers appear to be increases (they are not).

Giving folks a sense of what the cuts to NSF funding in the 2027 President's Budget Request actually looks like. Note the significant cuts across domains--even to research security! STEM and NCSES aren't captured for prior years, so they appear to be cuts, even though they are not.

As bad as they are, the fact sheets and top line numbers exclude a lot of key detail.

See the Appendix for the real horror show: www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...

It remains, emphatically, the policy of the Trump administration to defund American scientific research and innovation.

Some science cuts in Trump's proposed FY27 budget

❌ NIH: -$5B, including all of NIEHS, NIMHD, FIC & NCCIH.
❌ EPA: -4.6B
❌ NSF: -3.8B
❌ NASA Science: -3.4 Billion
❌ NOAA: -1.8B, including the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research budget ($605M)
❌ AHRQ: All of it. -$296M, 100%

And there's more.

Okay, NSF is for some reason under an appendix, but they do have directorate-level numbers. Cuts pretty much across the board, including zeroing out SBE? which I suppose is what would happen with a 54% cut. Also worth looking at those FY26 estimates...

www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

This team used Grant Witness data for these analyses.

To see every single one of these grants--along with thousands of others that were disrupted in some other way--you can view them all here: grant-witness.us/nih-data.html

Different case, different year, and I'm no longer at Harvard.

But I stand by this statement and feel the same today as Harvard gets sued again.

Whole bunch of lawyers reading up on collateral estoppel right now.

Of note, Judge William Young when ruling against the Trump Administration in one of last year's NIH grant termination cases: