By SHANNON O. WELLS

Many comments from Association of Public Land Grant Universities (APLU)-affiliated schools surrounding the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) updated strategic plan emphasize common research-field standards such as robust peer review and international engagement.

“It feels kind of like a nothingburger, because it’s at the NIH director level (who) by statute of discipline has control of 2% of the budget. Everything else is sitting at the institutes and centers,” noted Mike Holland, Pitt’s vice chancellor for science policy and research strategies. “Each institute center has their own strategic plan, and this is not a substitute for those (which are) disease-specific or whatever the focal point of that institute is.”

The “nothingburger” becomes more substantive, however, when it comes to federal funding and the Trump administration’s interest in seeing NIH money spread “more evenly” across the country.

Holland shared such insights during an update on the NIH strategic plan at the May 15 Senate Research Committee meeting.

Although cuts are not surprising, Holland said concern is high about the administration’s fiscal year 2027 request for 40% to 70% cuts to research agencies. The first major markup is for the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies (CJS) appropriations subcommittee, which dictates funding for agencies like National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Holland described receiving a “sort-of panicked” email from certain departments noting that the House of Representatives mark for NSF is down approximately 12%. “They were like, ‘That’s terrible.’ And it is, but it’s setting up negotiation with the Senate, which will mark up later.”

In other words, it’s not quite as bad as it initially seems.

“I noted that, ‘Yes, it looks bad,’ but relative to the House mark out of CJS last cycle, on FY 26, where the administration proposed … more than a 50% cut. CJS markup was a minus 22%,” he said. “We’ve gotten the House to go from minus 22 to minus 11. That’s progress.”

Properly interpreting budget requests and appropriations markups requires looking “at the deltas relative to the prior deltas, which makes it a little bit of a pain … to interpret, but that’s kind of how you have to do it,” he explained. “So, while it does look bad … it’s less bad than it was last go-round, which probably bodes well for us in the final shakeout. So, that’s that.”

Labor and Health and Human Services (HHS), a more “complicated bill” that includes NIH funding, has yet to be marked up, he noted. “So, we’ll find out later. Because of the labor part and the other parts of health and human services ... it tends to come later in the queue.”

Responding to a question about the diminished influence of the NIH director in the process, Holland said the Trump administration is “kind of throwing lots of rules out the window, but isn’t really respecting norms or traditions, and then also not necessarily really respecting the letter of the law, so that’s a lot more fluid,” he explained. “The prior process was when you had permanent institute/center directors in place. They were much more comfortable with pushback.”

With this administration, as several seats of centers and institutes remain open, interim leadership is common.

“It is, in this environment, squishier, but the formality of that strategic plan is technically only that very thin layer that’s cutting across everything,” he noted. “That’s a little difference between the formality of the strategic plan thing and how things are actually working in practice these days. There is a little bit of a disconnect.”

Holland said while he recalls seeing an email encouraging people to apply, federal jobs have become “far less attractive.”

“Before, those were very attractive jobs, and now with a secretary you might not agree with, the director you might not agree with and an administration feeling super comfortable to reach in and get in your shorts and not have the autonomy that your predecessors would have had traditionally, they have become far less attractive jobs,” he said. “I don’t know how that recruiting process is going, but there was an effort through the APLU and some of the other professional societies to sort of encourage people to apply.”

Addressing a question about NIH grant disbursement being “very slow this year,” Holland clarified that Pitt research is “fully committed to spending all the money that has been appropriated to us by the end of the fiscal year. … They just haven’t been doing it.”

Part of the slowdown in CJS agencies, including NASA and NSF, is because the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is “very aggressively” using its apportionment tools to slow spending, he added.

“They were doing that similarly with NIH out of the Labor HHS account, so that explains part of the slowdown. … Purportedly those spending plans have been approved by the appropriators, so now they can start again. But they haven’t.

“It hasn’t really started money moving as much,” he said. “We’re not entirely sure why, but what they’re saying is, they’re going to spend. Probably it’ll be the same kind of behavior as last cycle, which is not in any way, shape or form comforting. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Melanie Scott, associate professor of surgery in the School of Medicine, said she’s heard that NIH attributes the slowdown to the earlier government shutdown and subsequent employee layoffs.

“A lot of people were laid off and they haven’t been taken back on again, so they’re operating at a deficit from that point of view,” she noted. “Also … the number of grants is down, and in part because they’re going along with a lot of this multi-year funding … for the whole period. … They can’t fund the number of grants that they were funding over the same fiscal year, because it’s the same amount, as it were, but it’s not the same number of grants, which is concerning.

“It disproportionately affects early-career investigators, in particular, and it’s not necessarily a good practice,” Scott added, noting the “pros and cons” of multi-year funding. “It’s the problem of how they implement it, and they’ve decided to just sort of do it, and that’s obviously bad … because you get this backlog and you get a decreased number of actual grants funded, etc.”

Peer reviewer restrictions

Although Pitt doesn’t receive a lot of Department of Energy (DOE) money, Holland shared the encouraging news that a network recently formed to support awardees who were affected by the $1.7 billion DOE awards terminated in the energy technology space.

“DOE on the energy technology side seems to be spending again in a way that they had not been spending for months,” he noted. “I don’t know if that’s a sign that something has unlocked, and now we might expect to see some more, but honestly, that’s one of the first positive things I’ve heard.

“(Pitt doesn’t have) a lot of DOE money, but at least in that space there seems to be a positive sign,” he added. “But again, don’t over interpret.”

In the wake of the recent termination of the NSF’s entire governing board, Holland shared that Rebecca Keiser, NSF acting chief of staff and chief of research security strategy and policy, told him that NSF appointments from President Trump’s first term are ending.

“Because they went through (President) Biden, and now it’s the second Trump administration, all of their appointments ended, which left (NSF) comprised solely of Biden administration appointees,” Holland said. “And through probably just a lack of interest of actually having any input, (they thought) ‘Because we kind of don’t get what they say anyway, and it’s just Biden folks, we’ll just like chuck them all out, dissolve it, instead of do anything to put new people in there’ and ‘Well, they’re all Biden’s people. We don’t care what they say anyway.’ So that’s kind of why that happened.”

In more somber research news, Melanie Scott noted that NIH stopped its continuous submission for peer reviewers.

“This was the one sort of remaining perk that you might possibly have as a peer reviewer, if you’re a permanent member on a study section,” she noted. “Because you spend all your time reviewing other people’s grants, that can sometimes mean that your grants take a little longer to get together, so you were allowed that extra time.

“You could submit, I think it was like two weeks before the council met, or something like that. … NIH have stopped that now, after this next peer review group.

Scott called the change “another sort of nail in the coffin of peer reviewers.” Scientists, she explained, now have “very little incentive to really get involved with this. … Your peer review isn’t also taken as seriously as it used to be, with the continuation of the new competitive-discussed/competitive-not-discussed criteria, which mean that half the ones that you don’t discuss actually could be funded based on who-knows-what criteria, certainly not necessarily on scientific quality basis.

“It’s just another reason to wonder what’s going on at NIH about peer review and what they are actually wanting to fund or not fund,” she said.

Shannon Wells is a University Times reporter. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

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