Even by current standards, it's amazing how quickly this has been normalized.

I just can’t believe a FIFA Peace Prize winner would do this.

2026 can't be worse than 2025, right? ......right?

“The quiet power of program officers lies not in control, but in care. Care for the science, for the people who conduct it, and for the public it is meant to serve.”

The Senate version of the NIH appropriations bill has language that limits the use of multiyear/upfront funding. Please call your Senators and Representatives to make sure it is in the final bill. We must stop the brain drain in our research workforce before it's too late.

You didn't think FY26 was going to be better, did you?

The NSF is being brutally murdered.

So now that paylines are not a thing across the NIH, how exactly are we making funding decisions? Serious question.

Ridiculous. I'm reviewing a paper in a fancy journal that looks just like this. It's literally unreadable and impossible to review. I honestly don't know what these journals are thinking.

We can't work with foreign collaborators, but they can send money to a foreign PI to conduct an ethically questionable study in a vulnerable population in another foreign country? This is what corruption looks like.

Explore the first seven parts of American Science, Shattered A multipart series on how the Trump administration has disrupted labs, upended lives, and delayed discoveries. www.statnews.com/american-sci...

One point about the payline issue that is important. Yes, many ICs were doing a version of this, but it requires clear communication, priorities, planning and leadership. That's largely gone and for ICs that weren't doing this already, there is no scaffolding in place. Paylines are a lot easier.

My current NIH situation - FY25 R01 scored 10% at DK, dropped in July because of MYF - Resubmitted as A1 immediately, study section cancelled due to shutdown. - January council now....delayed presumably? - Paylines gone. PO has zero idea what grants will/won't be funded - FY26 CR = more chaos

So hard to believe good news these days haha. But it’s not clear if the ICs will still “punish” grants that go beyond that limit. And this may be a prelude to stacking “indirects” in the “directs” category.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is seeking input on Federal policy updates to accelerate the American scientific enterprise. This is your chance to give some feedback on how the past ~10 months have gone for science. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20... I plan to highlight:

As usual, the NIH ICs do different things: The Multi-Year Funding Edition drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/12/02/a...

Just makes me sick to the stomach. Completely unnecessary fuckery from Vought. That's all this is. The impacts of this will be felt in the years to come, especially assuming MYF continues and peer review is just.......for vibes?

Related www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/we-...

Funding cuts continue to affect the medical research we care about. #cancer 🧪 www.npr.org/2025/11/28/n...

"Three construction company executives have been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and an investigation into possible corruption has been launched" Note to UK government: We're still waiting for the Grenfell Tower arrests www.bbc.com/news/live/c2...

Yes, the Jan-Feb Council dates will be pushed back until all study sections have met & ICs can create playlists. There are so few Council members left, this shouldn’t be difficult. NCATS, for example, is down to 1 member, unless they are allowed to keep the 2 who should have rotated off on Oct 31.

I have heard through the grapevine that the January Council will be rescheduled

My grants that did not get reviewed in October due to the shutdown will now be reviewed at the end of January. I think this means they'll miss the January 2026 Council - anyone have any insights into how this will be dealt with? Lumped into May Council? That's going to screw us

NIH FY26 might be worse than FY25. We have a CR and the NIH still citing the presidents budget request, an unofficial multi year funding mandate, apparently no paylines, IC leadership turnover, continued OMB/Vought interference, more shutdowns likely This is a recipe for total paralysis.

Posting for no particular reason…. From the Archive: Comparing performance of within-payline and "select pay" pickup NIH grants at NIAID drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/c...

This is awesome as long my grant gets paid.

Which poor person or immigrant will they find to put in jail for this?

I'll be glad when the word "effectuate" is permanently removed from my memory.

The same thing happened during the 35 day shutdown. We rescheduled our late October meeting for Dec 19-20. We did 50 To 60% ND. It was a pain but not impossible. The 70% ND seems reasonable because reviewers can always call for discussion. IOW this is really not unprecedented.

NIH is chaos. USDA is chaos. It looks like we put all the effort into wrapping a grant in proper shape and form, and now they've extended the deadlines.

NIH has never changed deadlines before - just allowed late submissions (eg, could allow PIs to use Continuous Submission deadline). Sit tight, leave your app there - none will be withdrawn. The loss of institutional expertise is obvious in this “Notice” (& in more ways than updated deadline).

What if you have already submitted a grant in Oct/Nov? Will it be withdrawn? Doesn't this mean that the entire cycle has effectively been cancelled? What a nightmare.

If paylines stay around 5%ile for some ICs, this might save everyone a lot of time. You can meet for a few hours in the morning and be done with the grants that even have a chance at being picked up. With a shutdown likely end of Jan, the NIH will struggle to spend it's appropriations this FY.

The gift that keeps on giving. Epstein’s brother Mark asking Steve Bannon if Putin has “the photo of Trump blowing Bubba” - or Bill Clinton to the rest of us.

Oh oh

Responding to a 2017 message that Trump was 'so gross', Jeffrey Epstein said Trump was "worse in real life and upclose."

Every Democratic senator who votes for this should be primaried.

A CR until January 30th at FY24 levels will mean continued ultra conservative funding policies at the NIH. Expect the MYF "policy" to continue too. Not a great scenario considering the appropriations bills on the table look promising.

Democrats man. What a bunch of twats.

RFK Jr's response to someone collapsing nearby him was to haul ass out of the room as quickly as possible

I saw it in the Principled Investigator Substack, and they reference a Science article that notes an NIH presentation. open.substack.com/pub/theprinc...

and there it is. the absolutely massive change in R01s funded multi-year. our perceptions that the new mandate, sorry strong suggestion, has had a dramatic effect on forward funding and therefore success rates is validated.

This rough estimate says FY2025 new R01s should be down by about 26%. If we look at the number actually funded in FY2025, it is down 25% from FY2024, 32% from FY2023 and 34% down from FY2022. reporter.nih.gov/search/OrznV...

A government shutdown with specific carve outs is the most pathetic thing I've heard from Congress. The media is desperately trying to push the narrative that Democrats are under intense pressure, but I don't see that at all. The message is simple: the Rs have complete control.

Nature Comms was cleverly positioned as a trickle down for subfields without their own Nature sibling but in practice took papers from high-impact fields that did. 2/2

If a journal that used to occupy that space has a much lower IF and **perceived** prestige, but requires similar data and "conceptual advance" (ugh), then it's a no brainer. IMO these journals have generally failed to adapt to the new Nat Comms et al driven landscape.

While there may be "pay to publish" and "predatory" journals, the fact that an editor does not agree with the position of any given peer reviewer is not evidence of this. Peer review is merely advisory, it is not decision making. Confusion over this leads to some very bad reviewer practices.

The last sentence is critical here, and I would have assumed this anyway. These are simply CNS papers in waiting.

The truth is that journals like Nature Communications and Science Advances have disrupted the publication industry more than we care to admit, and not in a "good" way. They are wildly successful journals. I'm not sure we've adjusted to this.

The media’s apparent normalization of 3% annual inflation is wild. The framing is problematic considering the average household will spend almost $2500 more a year for the same goods and services at this rate of inflation. How can this being sold as normal? www.cnn.com/2025/10/24/e...