NIH Limits Funding for Research on Public Policy Health Effects

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has started rejecting research grant applications whose “primary function” is to inform policymakers and legislators, according to internal documents reviewed by Nature. The policy shift could reduce NIH funding for studies that examine how government policies influence human health and public-health outcomes.

Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants

The change marks a significant departure for the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research. The NIH has historically supported research with direct relevance to policymakers, including studies on the health effects of firearm regulations, abortion restrictions and environmental protections.

“Policymakers are not considered a stakeholder group within the scope of NIH’s mission,” the internal documents state. “NIH-funded research must empower decision-making by NIH mission-relevant stakeholder groups.” Those groups include patients, health-care professionals, hospitals and scientists, but not policymakers, according to the documents.

The change has not been formally announced, and NIH officials say there is still uncertainty within the agency about how it will be applied. The officials requested anonymity because they fear retaliation.

Scientists warn that excluding policy-focused research from the NIH portfolio overlooks the powerful role that laws, regulations and social conditions play in determining health. Medical advances cannot improve lives if distribution policies are poorly designed or social barriers prevent treatments from reaching the people who need them, they say.

“Public policy that is blind to current evidence risks safety and effectiveness,” says Meredith Matone, a health-services specialist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

The NIH did not respond to Nature’s questions about the policy change or the reasons behind it.

NIH removes policy research from grant reviews

Some NIH employees learned about the change in May, when political appointees at the NIH and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), began flagging and freezing policy-related grant applications that had already been approved by peer reviewers and agency staff. In an unprecedented move, the administration of US President Donald Trump has added political appointees to the grant-approval process, Nature reported in June.

NIH pivots away from agency-directed science

Since then, dozens of applications have been returned to NIH programme officers, who were instructed to remove the word ‘policy’ and related terms and assess whether the proposals could be revised, according to two NIH officials. More than 3,700 projects funded during fiscal year 2025 include these terms in their titles or abstracts, according to the NIH’s project database.

NIH leaders have not explained the rationale for the change. However, senior officials have described some flagged proposals as ‘lobbying’. The agency defines lobbying as using federal funds to pay someone to influence a federal employee or a member of the US Congress, an activity prohibited under NIH rules.

Michael Lauer, who led the NIH’s extramural research programme for a decade, says policy analysis should not be classified as lobbying. “When people do a thorough scholarly assessment of whether heart-attack risk or gun deaths are related to various policies, that’s not lobbying, that’s science,” he says.

Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist and former president of the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, is concerned about the NIH’s new approach, particularly as political appointees gain greater influence over federal research grants. Scrutinizing policy-related research, she says, could result in projects being evaluated selectively based on whether their findings support the Trump administration’s position.

NIH defines ‘relevant stakeholders’

NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya discussed the agency’s position on health-policy research at several health-economics conferences in June. A summary of those discussions later distributed to NIH staff said the agency was “setting forth three rules for all NIH research”: studies must be actionable, rigorous and ‘in scope’.

Under the agency’s interpretation, research is ‘in scope’ when it serves “NIH mission-relevant stakeholder groups”. The summary states that policymakers are excluded from this category, raising concerns among scientists about the future of policy research and evidence-based public-health funding.

NIH grant cuts disproportionately hit minority and female scientists