No new meeting notices published in US government's Federal Register

27/2/2025 6:17

The Trump administration

has for weeks been blocking the U.S. National Institutes of

Health process for issuing new research grants for everything

from Lyme disease to lung and heart disease, according to

researchers, a departing NIH official and documents.



The government is using a loophole to hold up the money. The

NIH was directed by the administration not to take a key step in

the approval process -- publishing grant meeting notices in the

Federal Register, the documents show.



The ban on publication of such notices impacted the NIH's

two-step grant-making process, which involves preliminary

reviews by outside experts and a final review where the grant is

ultimately approved.



On Monday, the NIH said it was allowing publication of some

of the preliminary meeting notices in the Federal Register,

according to an internal email seen by Reuters, but an NIH

internal website still prohibits publishing by grant review

committees called advisory councils, which remain on hold.



The hold was first reported by the Transmitter and Nature.



President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world's richest

person and close Trump adviser, have sought to dramatically cut

government spending, including the $47 billion annual NIH

budget.



The NIH had said on February 7 that it was planning to slash

grant funding to research organizations like universities and

hospitals, but that was blocked by a U.S. judge's order three

days later, which was extended last week.



The February 10 court order means NIH should be operating

normally, "but we're not, because they're putting up barriers to

make sure that we can't," said Nate Brought, who resigned on

February 17 as Director of NIH's Office of the Executive

Secretariat, in part due to the delay in publication of meeting

notices.



No NIH meeting notices have been published since January 21

- the day after Trump took office - a search of the Federal

Register found. Dozens of meetings were scheduled, the NIH

website shows.



U.S. Senator Patty Murray from Washington, a senior member

of the Senate's health committee, in a February 21 press release

said the hold was illegal. "Trump and Elon are suffocating the

work of cancer researchers with so much red tape that labs and

clinical trials will be forced to shut down," she said.



An NIH spokesperson confirmed that notices for scientific

review group meetings could be published in the Federal Register

incrementally, but that the publication of other types of

notices, including those by advisory councils, remains on hold.



An HHS spokesperson declined to comment.



According to the email, meetings that had already been

published are still taking place.







'SCARY TIMES'



Brian Stevenson, a microbiology professor at the University

of Kentucky, studies Borrelia burgdorferi, the spiral-shaped

bacterium that causes Lyme disease, which is spread by ticks.



He had three grants that were supposed to go into a

preliminary expert review called a study section last week, but

those meetings were abruptly canceled. Grants then go through a

second review panel called an advisory council that recommends

which grants get funded.



Stevenson's work is aimed at understanding what the

bacterium needs to do to infect humans, and how it does that.



His lab has identified proteins involved in that process,

which he had hoped to get funding to test. Understanding that

process could lead to drugs that block or prevent the disease,

which affects more than 475,000 people in the United States each

year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention.



Without grant funding, Stevenson said he will have to close

his lab by the end of this year. His graduate students face an

uncertain future.



"They could graduate soon. But what are you going to do?

What are the jobs going to be? These are scary times," he said.



Suzanne Judd, director of the Lister Hill Center for Health

Policy and a public health professor at University of Alabama at

Birmingham, is a co-investigator for a 4,600-person study

examining why rates of heart and lung disease are higher in some

rural counties and lower in others.



The $35 million study has monitored participants in rural

parts of Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi since 2019

and offers free medical exams, including CT scans and

echocardiograms, to participants about every five years.



Judd said the study's next contract was scheduled for review

in March, but the meeting has not been posted. Without a renewal

of funding, Judd anticipates the study will need to pause

sometime this summer. The study employs about 50 scientists and

research technicians, of which about 20 are full-time, across 16

universities, she said.



Long-term observational studies allow researchers to examine

risk factors for diseases, like cancer, heart disease or stroke,

that take decades to develop. These types of studies inform how

we treat patients, Judd said.



The process for NIH grant approvals typically takes about

three quarters of a year, and the NIH only holds three funding

cycles per year, said Carole LaBonne, a professor of molecular

biosciences at Northwestern University.



If the Federal Register prohibition does not get lifted

soon, it could impact the third cycle of grants, which should

begin in May, she said. Money not spent by the September 30 end

of the fiscal year will be lost.



"They basically found a way to keep most of the NIH

paralyzed," she said.