NIH delays a young grant, reshaping careers

A stalled NIH grant for a young researcher became a window into how U.S. science funding is tightening—through shifting rules, paperwork burdens, and unstable “soft money.” Michael Green’s 2026 salary sat in limbo after an opaque demand to remove “DEI language

On February 26, Michael Green pressed play on his phone to ask a question he didn’t think would land in his lap so early: why his NIH grant—funding first awarded in 2024—was being held up.

The setting was a science podcast episode. Why Should I Trust You?. and the person taking questions was Jay Bhattacharya. the health economist and Trump administration appointee who leads the National Institutes of Health. Green didn’t ask as a strategist. He asked as a 26-year-old Ph.D. student at Duke University, waiting while his project sat in limbo at the country’s biggest biomedical funding gate.

His grant officer had reached out last July, giving him a week to remove “any DEI language” from the project. Green didn’t know what that meant, and his grant officer couldn’t explain. He tried anyway—removing the word “Black” from his proposal and cutting links to studies showing many Black patients felt discriminated against in doctor’s offices.

Four months later, he was still waiting.

Green says he went into it imagining the worst: a termination decision that would wipe out his work before it could even begin in earnest. Then there was the other reality—less theoretical, more immediate. With the grant portion of his salary for 2026 in limbo, he graduated from his Ph.D. program last December and ended up bartending without health insurance or better job prospects.

“I went into this thinking, ‘There’s a chance that [Bhattacharya] hears this and then just decides to terminate the project, and that’ll be a disaster,’” Green says. He also wanted clarity on his future, because uncertainty isn’t just frustrating for researchers—it’s expensive.

Green’s case has become part of a wider unease among scientists working through the second Trump administration. where the old expectations of research funding have been upended. Last year, the NIH unexpectedly terminated nearly 5,900 grants, a move that hit younger researchers and women disproportionately harder. The National Science Foundation. which traditionally funds disciplines outside clinical medicine. has been directed to favor research into artificial intelligence—a White House priority. NSF employees who spoke anonymously because they feared retaliation say the shift has hurt science education, a long-standing agency priority.

Similar shifts have played out across other agencies—at the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, and elsewhere throughout the U.S. government.

Yet many scientists say the cracks in how research is funded predate the present moment. Funding. they argue. has long skewed toward older researchers. leaving younger investigators to compete for positions that don’t come with stability. Researchers increasingly spend time on administration and grant writing rather than science itself.

The NIH illustrates the scale of the problem. The agency—valued at $48 billion in the context of Green’s application—provides nearly half of all federal basic research spending. more than $22.6 billion in 2024. But since the 1980s. less and less of that money has gone to young investigators. even though they traditionally drive much of the basic science that leads to fundamental discoveries.

As far back as 2008. the average age of a first-time recipient of an R01 independent research grant—the NIH’s most common independent investigation grant. or similar grants—was 43. In today’s system. many scientists in their 20s. 30s. and 40s find themselves trapped in precarious. poorly paid. overworked laboratory positions. A 2023 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development report notes that faced with unreliable career prospects. these young scientists often leave research. particularly if they are women or have children.

Older investigators, meanwhile, spend more time submitting grants to keep labs staffed. At the NIH. grant applications rose 12.9 percent last year compared with the number in 2024. even as grant success rates fell 29.6 percent. The paperwork is punishing: grant applications often run more than 100 pages describing data and proposed experiments. and researchers must also file yearly progress reports. In a 2018 survey. researchers said they spent more than 40 percent of their time on administrivia. a figure that has increased over the past decade.

“Scientists should be spending their time not writing grant applications and not attending to a huge amount of administrative work but instead doing great science. ” says Michael Lauer. a former NIH deputy director for extramural research. “People were warning about this 20 years ago,” he says. He retired last year.

Lauer describes these as systems problems, not simply political ones. He points to three historical culprits.

First, he says federal agencies intentionally rely on small grants to individual scientists, keeping scholars in a permanent cycle of fundraising instead of experimentation.

Second, he says scientists increasingly depend on “soft money” funding from grants to pay salaries—rather than “hard” money from universities—which, as the authors of a 2014 paper put it, creates “unsustainable hypercompetition” for jobs, grants, publications, and trainees.

Third, congressional politics introduce yearly funding gyrations that disrupt the steady pursuit of experimental questions. Lauer says those fluctuations tend to target “big science” projects that address technocratic problems—building moon rockets or semiconductor factories—rather than basic research.

Together, he argues, these pressures create “perverse incentives” that can lead to exploitation of young researchers, often from overseas, while frustrating older researchers who struggle to keep labs funded.

The NIH tried to slow the youth drain. In 2009, it required grant success rates to be the same for first-time grant awardees as for more experienced ones. But Lauer says the policy might have reduced the number of grants for mid-career researchers. By 2017. the NIH switched again. reserving 400 new grants a year for early-career researchers and at-risk researchers further along in their careers.

Some scientists look abroad for ideas that retain talent. China’s “Ten Thousand Talents” program. started in 2012. offers upward of one million yuan RMB (about $147. 000) to promising researchers younger than 40 to work in Chinese labs. A related “Young Thousand Talents” program aims to return promising expatriate scientists to China. providing access to larger research teams and better funding than they’d get abroad. Returnees in the program have ended up outperforming their peers.

Paperwork reduction also shows up as a policy proposal. A 2025 National Academy of Sciences report suggests paring back regulations to reduce administrative load. The report finds that of the new paperwork-generating regulations implemented since 1991. 62 percent came out after 2014. in areas like security. export controls. and misconduct. Last November. a congressional commission on biotechnology called for creating a single platform for submitting scientific funding applications across federal agencies. eliminating time-consuming preliminary data requirements and other steps that modernize the scientific enterprise.

In Green’s case. the grant at stake was a transition grant—part of a program intended to help young scientists make the leap to full-fledged investigators. The money gives young researchers direct control over their employment and guarantees them five to six years to do research and build careers. not write proposals.

But Green describes the process of winning the money as grueling. “The sheer amount of paperwork was probably the most daunting task,” he says. He spent nine months putting together his proposal in 2023. Most of his time went into building a network of collaborators and addressing critiques of his proposed methods from his mentors and other experts. Still, filling out forms consumed many hours.

When his effort paid off, it did so in a way that should have felt like relief. In February 2024. Green got word his proposal received a very high score from the scientist review panels at the National Institute on Aging. That placed it above the “payline” funding cutoff point for his type of grant at the NIH.

In practical terms, he says his grant salary put him in the same league as the typical plumber or electrician—a benchmark many peers dream about. For a young researcher, it seemed like a home run.

Then last year, the project was put on ice.

Green’s dilemma illustrates what Lauer calls the “soft money” problem: a system layer that makes individual scientists extremely vulnerable—whether to politics, peer review, or paylines.

Lauer says the system rests on “a layer cake of false premises.” One premise is that scientists can predict the future in grant proposals—how experiments will go one, two, or five years from now. “That isn’t how experiments work,” he says, though clinical trials are an exception.

A second premise is that peer reviewers can predict which projects will succeed. Lauer argues peer reviewers are inherently biased against novelty and innovation, which are main engines of scientific progress.

The “most false” premise. he says. is that science agencies should operate like government agencies that enforce laws. fight wars. or run community programs. Basic science, he says, plays out over decades rather than years—even for clear breakthroughs. He points out that the average Nobel Prize winner now waits 26 to 30 years for recognition. He also notes that Congress limits most R01 grants to four years. with competitive renewals. and subjects science agencies to yearly funding fluctuations.

In 2004, the NIH began making a small number of “high risk, high reward” grants to deal with underfunding of breakthrough ideas. Lauer says he oversaw such programs during his time at the NIH and favors replacing the current system of small, individual grants with longer-term, larger ones.

He points to Bell Labs in New Jersey as a model. Bell Labs produced major fundamental scientific and technological advances in the 20th century. including the birthplace of the transistor. the laser. and information theory. Lauer argues stable funding and long-term thinking can drive discovery—while also cutting down paperwork that currently robs senior researchers of lab time.

He also highlights a different kind of model closer to neuroscience and research culture: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn. Va. The center brings together researchers to broadly study neurobiology, “free from worries about tenure, grants and paperwork,” Lauer says. It is a home for “brilliant misfits. ” in the words of HHMI senior group leader Gerald Rubin and president Erin O’Shea.

For Lauer, the next step is building these kinds of labs with academic, nonprofit, and industry participants as foundations for what he calls successors to Bell Labs in the 21st century.

Even the NIH’s efficiency measures, Lauer says, don’t address the fundamentals. He points to the Trump administration’s implementation of measures such as centralizing NIH peer-review panels into one center. which the agency projected would save $65 million annually. But he says those efforts don’t solve a system built on small grants, soft money, and politics.

“This is not being pejorative, but what they’re not doing is addressing what I see as the fundamental problems,” he says.

Other reform ideas extend beyond money and paperwork. Pierre Azoulay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management says that the institutions the U.S. inherited from the World War II era may not be optimal for the 21st century. With research labs dependent on foreign-born workers, he suggests “stapling a green card” to every Ph.D. awarded to any foreign student who graduates from a U.S. research university.

The biggest open question remains funding itself. A recent Congressional Research Service report says NIH funding. adjusted for inflation. was 8.8 percent less in 2025 than it was in 2003. its peak year during the George W. Bush administration. While some observers argue that means more money for science agencies is overdue. Trump administration budget proposals to slash science spending have been rejected by Congress. and there appears to be little appetite to greatly increase funding for 2027. The current outlook, the report says, is for flat spending.

Stability. not chaos. is the key ingredient for researchers. says addiction medicine expert Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California. San Francisco. Ciccarone has been a past investigator on numerous NIH grants and a central figure in scholarly investigations of overdose-crisis waves over the past two decades. Even so. he says he has sometimes feared losing funding as the field endured ups and downs worsened by the pandemic and. now. Trump administration cuts to addiction and mental health services.

“We need more minority researchers,” Ciccarone says. He ties that need to serving an increasingly diverse, larger population and to generating unexpected ideas. The structural problems and funding uncertainty in research, he says, can drive disadvantaged people away from scientific careers. “This will entail pipeline development starting in middle and high schools, as well as incentives,” he says.

In the middle of all that uncertainty, one part of the story moved forward—slowly, and late enough that it still carried a sting. In March, the NIH sent word that Green’s grant had gone through, even after his podcast brush with Bhattacharya.

He could finally quit bartending and begin his delayed investigation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But he had already used up almost all his savings during the four months when he didn’t get paid.

As Green waits for the research to start, he keeps returning to a familiar tension in science—how people keep going when the system wobbles.

“As a scientist, you have to kind of be optimistic about the future and the importance of your work,” Green says. “I don’t think all my work is going to face these roadblocks forever.”

NIH biomedical research grant funding early-career researchers DEI language soft money paperwork burden Jay Bhattacharya science policy National Science Foundation overdose crisis Michael Green