The Chaos of NIH Cuts Has Left Early-Career Scientists Scrambling

Nada Fadul’s love for science and medicine began early. As a child, the aspiring physician-scientist had observed her father, a doctor, treat patients at his primary care office. Later, as an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, Fadul had the opportunity to work in a lab developing nanotherapies for ovarian cancer. Through these experiences and a strong cadre of mentors, she “felt really inspired to pursue both research and medicine,” she says.

To gain more lab experience before applying to joint MD-PhD programs, Fadul had decided to apply to the National Institutes of Health’s postbaccalaureate program, which offers full-time research positions to recent college graduates considering careers in medicine or STEM. But in early February, she received an email stating that the program had been completely paused. “There’s always some changes when the administration changes, but I didn’t expect the changes to hit so close to home and to affect my hopes and plans for the upcoming year,” Fadul says.

Changed plans, lost opportunities, worries for the future—these are all things that current and prospective scientists across the country now face on a day-to-day basis. Since January, a rapid-fire slurry of executive orders have driven huge cuts to federal funding, hiring freezes, and thousands of layoffs across the research sector, with thousands more job losses expected. For students and graduates, the knock-on effect is a big reduction in opportunities to gain the experience and placements needed to enter and progress in the field.

During the lifespan of a scientist, there are several critical steps. For many, the first is to gain research experience during college—whether through working in a university laboratory or through summer research programs. From there, some take gap years (with the NIH postbaccalaureate program previously a popular option) to pursue even more research. Then comes an application to graduate school, completing graduate school, and possibly doing a postdoctoral fellowship. After all of that, only some end up as research faculty at institutions—where they embark on a decades-long saga of grant applications, many of which are for federal funding from the NIH or National Science Foundation (NSF).

It’s a process that already forces young scientists to compete for a limited number of spots at each stage of training. Many, like Fadul, seek out extra research opportunities to ready their applications. The process of simply applying to graduate school is “five to ten years in the making,” says a current post-baccalaureate scholar at the NIH, who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution. “I think that for almost all of the applicants, this is their dream, and this feels like their livelihood.” In the space of two months, it is a career pathway that has rapidly narrowed.

After the administration’s initial memos indicating that a federal funding freeze was imminent in late January, graduate programs across the US began reducing the number of admitted students. To track what exactly was happening, faculty and students began compiling a comprehensive list of universities and their associated program reductions—based on word of mouth and reported evidence. Among many others, this included a 20 percent reduction at MIT’s biology graduate program, an estimated 20 percent reduction at Duke’s biomedical graduate programs, and a 30 percent reduction at UC San Diego’s biological sciences program—from 25 places down to 17.

“If we went on business-as-usual and admitted a normal class size, then we’d have students we couldn’t support in the program,” says Kimberly Cooper, a developmental biologist at UCSD and associate director of the biology PhD program. One of her undergraduate mentees wasn’t admitted to any graduate programs this year. That mentee hopes to become an unpaid volunteer to continue working in a lab “because she wants to do this so badly,” Cooper adds. “That’s another concern I have—that we may be moving back to a place where research was really only for people that have independent finances to be able to do it.”

Jeremy Berg, a former director of the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, has tracked the disbursement of NIH T32 grants—training grants that directly support graduate and postdoctoral research. Since February of this year, only two new T32 grants have been awarded. For comparison, 69 grants were made from February to March of last year. While March is not necessarily the month where T32 grant-awarding peaks, the lack of activity has Berg concerned for the future.

The lack of NIH training grants is in line with trends from the NSF, where awards from the Directorate for STEM Education appear to have slowed to a near-complete stop. In comparison to the NIH, the NSF funds research that can be non-biomedical in nature and runs the Graduate Research Fellowship Program—which provides support for thousands of graduate students each year. GRFP awards are usually made in April, and it’s unclear how they will be impacted this year. “It’s a terrible signal to send to students who decided they want a career in science and have been waiting their whole life to go to graduate school,” says Berg.

The instability in training-grant disbursement, coupled with the NIH’s new policy on capping indirect costs—which pay for critical functions like lab maintenance, equipment, and administrative support—have not just affected trainees, but also the faculty whose labs rely on graduate students and postdoctoral scholars’ work. Federal grants provide a significant portion of many laboratories’ funding, says Ran Blekhman, a geneticist at the University of Chicago whose lab is almost entirely funded by the NIH. This uncertainty has forced many scientists, particularly those early in their careers, to pivot their focus from simply doing science to trying to make their science—and their careers—survive.

Blekhman, whose research group studies the human microbiome, has always looked for non-federal sources of funding. But money from, say, private foundations often does not support basic science or has an unsustainably low-indirect-cost ceiling, which ordinarily would have been covered by NIH funding before the new indirect-cost cap. “My feeling is that everybody’s already been looking everywhere,” Blekhman says. “It’s not like there is a new pot of money that no one was aware of.”

To keep the lights on in the lab, contingency plans abound. Cooper, who has four NIH proposals in limbo, recently helped one of her postdoctoral scholars apply for a fellowship in Europe to continue her research. Blekhman is thinking about how many students he can reasonably support in the future, should cuts hit his lab.

Even among the uncertainty, many students remain deeply committed to pursuing careers in science. Robert Schwartz, a college and graduate essay consultant, says that some students he works with are taking a few extra gap years in European laboratories, in the hopes that more US funding will open up in the future. As Fadul figures out which schools to apply to, her list of federally funded MD-PhD programs has gotten shorter, while the list of MD programs (which do not rely as directly on federal funding) has gotten longer. But the uncertainty is “not going to stop me, and I don’t think it’s going to stop my peers, either,” she says.

In the meantime, Cooper, Blekhman, and others are focusing on ways to better support and educate their trainees—not only about how federal funding works, but also how to keep going. “We just want people in the lab to do their great science without having existential dread about how they get paid,” Cooper says.