NIH ends 2026 with a boost for early-career researchers, but new awards are down overall

From ScienceMag:

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) ended the 2026 fiscal year with mixed news for the biomedical research community it supports. The agency came back from a lag early in the year to spend its entire extramural budget of $35.3 billion by 30 September. It also funded a record number of early-stage investigators—defined as those less than 10 years out from finishing their graduate degree or clinical training—who were seeking their first grant, Trump administration officials announced today. But a White House mandate to fund many multiyear grants as a single lump sum means fewer awards overall, potentially putting established labs that were counting on fresh funding at risk of downsizing or even closing.

The agency funded 17,543 new grants and renewals of existing research and training projects—a number that’s about 500 more than last year, but 11% below the 2021–24 average. A total of 1648 early-stage investigators won NIH’s bread-and-butter research grants, known as R01 equivalents, compared with just 1144 last year and a previous peak of 1608 in 2022. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya announced the record number of early-career grantees this morning at a science summit where President Donald Trump is expected to speak later today.

“It’s definitely good news,” Michael Lauer, NIH’s longtime extramural research chief who retired in early 2025, says of the funding for new investigators. “I’m glad to hear that the agency has reaffirmed its commitment to help early-career scientists as much as possible.”

Bhattacharya has said his plan to fund more early-career researchers centers on prioritizing edge science, which he says is more likely to be proposed by young scientists. However, the process seems to be unchanged from before his arrival. A recent NIH blog post explains that NIH’s 27 institutes and centers set annual funding targets for awards to early-stage investigators. Lauer says that’s the strategy NIH has used for years. “We set a specific goal” for each institute, he says. “About halfway through the fiscal year, we would send every 2 weeks detailed spreadsheets” to institute leaders “letting them know where we stood.”

“I don’t like the word quota,” he adds, because it suggests subpar grants might be funded. In all cases, the grants had “an outstanding review.”

The 2026 funding picture for established investigators may be less rosy. The overall number of research and training awards—including new projects, renewals of expiring grants that competed for new funding, and annual payments for continuing awards—fell below the 2024 total for the second year, to 61,151. That’s a 13% drop compared with an average of 70,061 in the 4 years before the White House budget office told NIH to make more multiyear-funded awards, according to the nonprofit watchdog group Grant Witness. But the actual number of active grants likely did not fall as much, the agency and observers note, because multiyear-funded awards made in 2025 or some previous years would have been ongoing in 2026, even though they received no additional payment this year.

Bhattacharya also described a plan to recruit 100 early-career principal investigators for NIH’s massive $5 billion in-house research program. Its 1200-strong roster of principal investigators has shrunk since early 2025 when Trump-imposed staff cuts, hiring freezes, and limits on travel and purchasing drove many researchers to leave the agency.

A push to hire new intramural investigators “might be the first real improvement over where we were 2 years ago,” says Ian Morgan, an NIH postdoctoral fellow who has spoken out against Trump policy changes. “It would bring new blood and new ideas.” He cautions, however, that the agency will need to address problems such as restrictions on purchasing large equipment. Those limits “could make setting up a new lab really difficult right now.”

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