The National Institutes of Health is heading toward one of the most constrained grant-award years in recent memory. By mid-June 2026, with roughly three months left in the fiscal year, the agency had awarded only about 5,000 new and competitive renewal grants, compared with 9,000 to 10,000 in a typical pre-2025 year. The projected shortfall is approximately 2,800 grants, a roughly 25% reduction from historical norms.
The causes are multiple and compounding: a 43-day government shutdown that paralyzed operations at the start of the fiscal year, a delayed White House budget release that created months of uncertainty, staffing shortages that have left some institutes scrambling to process grants, and new administrative requirements that have added layers of review. The combined effect has hit the biomedical research enterprise at a moment when it was already reeling from the 2025 funding cycle, which saw success rates drop to 11%.
The numbers
NIH’s FY2026 budget stands at $47.2 billion. By law, any unspent funds must be returned to the U.S. Treasury at the end of the fiscal year on September 30. As of June 20, only about $16 billion of that total had been awarded, leaving a massive spending sprint for the final quarter, but with fewer staff to process it.
The mid-June grant count of roughly 5,000 awards represents about a 25% decrease compared with the 2021-2024 average for the same point in the fiscal year. Success rates, which were 21% in 2024, plummeted to 11% in 2025 and are expected to remain well below 20% in 2026.
Compounding the problem is a White House mandate requiring that multiyear grants be awarded as single upfront lump sums rather than annual installments. This reduces how many new grants and renewals NIH can fund with the remaining money, because each grant consumes more of the one-year budget at once.
The staffing crunch
The 43-day shutdown at the beginning of the fiscal year disrupted grant processing at a critical time. But the staffing problems go deeper. At NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health, the situation became so acute that staff volunteered for grant-processing duties to prevent an estimated $500 million in unspent funds. The agency has been hiring new staff, but the gaps take time to fill.
New administrative requirements, including DEI reviews mandated by the current administration, have added processing steps, though NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has stated that these are not the primary cause of delays. More significant, according to agency staff, is the elimination of the Unified Funding Strategy (commonly known as paylines), which means institute staff must now manually evaluate each grant rather than relying on established funding thresholds. This has substantially increased the workload per grant.
The human cost
For early-career researchers, the funding environment is particularly dire. NIMH is prioritizing training programs and early stage investigators, but this is a triage strategy rather than a solution. With success rates at 11%, the vast majority of grant applicants, including many scientists who would have been funded in previous years, are being turned away.
Andrea Beckel-Mitchener, NIMH Acting Director, described the situation bluntly: “It’s going to be another tough year.”
Heather Pierce of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) said researchers and university administrators are trying “to figure out on a program-by-program and grant-by-grant basis how to maintain the research enterprise.”
The practical consequences extend beyond the labs whose grants are not funded. Each unfunded R01 grant means lost positions for postdocs, graduate students, and research staff. It means cancelled experiments, terminated clinical trials, and delayed projects. For early-career scientists, a year or two without funding can mean the end of an academic career path. The cumulative effect of two consecutive years of success rates near 11%, across the entire NIH enterprise, is a structural reduction in the biomedical research workforce that will take years to reverse.
The broader context
The current crisis sits atop longer-term trends. NIH’s purchasing power has been eroded by inflation even as the cost of biomedical research, equipment, reagents, animal models, personnel, has risen faster than general inflation. The number of grant applications has increased steadily, meaning that even stable budgets produce declining success rates. The 2025-2026 back-to-back funding shocks have accelerated what was already a gradual squeeze.
The September 30 deadline looms. Whether NIH can spend its full $47.2 billion budget while maintaining quality standards with reduced staff and increased administrative burden remains uncertain. What is certain is that thousands of research projects, and the careers that depend on them, hang in the balance.
Source:
[Science AAAS] Kaiser J. “NIH likely to award fewer grants as it races to spend 2026 budget.” June 29, 2026. https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-likely-award-fewer-grants-it-races-spend-2026-budget