NIH Proposes Major Overhaul to Research Grant Application Scoring

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has proposed a major overhaul of its research funding review system. Instead of sharing the precise numerical scores assigned to grant applications, the agency would place proposals into one of three broad categories: “Most Competitive,” “Competitive” or “Not Discussed.”

Inside the new political review delaying NIH grants

The proposed changes were announced by the NIH on Friday. They form part of a broader shift away from relying solely on traditional scientific peer review and toward giving NIH institutes and centers greater discretion when awarding research funding.

Under the new approach, the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers would consider peer-review results alongside factors such as national health priorities and the balance of their broader research portfolios. The agency says the system is intended to help officials make funding decisions that better reflect strategic research needs.

Supporters of the NIH funding review changes argue that exact numerical scores create a false impression of precision. A proposal’s score is generally based on the opinions of only three reviewers, whose assessments can differ substantially. However, some scientists warn that reducing transparency could make it more difficult to identify political influence in federal research funding decisions.

Jenna Norton, an NIH program official who organized a letter challenging changes introduced under the Trump administration, said that researchers could be less likely to question rejected applications if they did not know how closely those applications had ranked. She also cautioned that scientists might feel pressured to support projects that align more closely with the administration’s political priorities.

“The change is quite significant,” says Michael Lauer, who led the NIH’s Extramural Research Program for a decade. The program distributes funding to scientists across the United States. However, Lauer added: “There’s a lot of sense here, barring concerns about political interference.”

How the new NIH grant review system would work

The NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the United States. Under the current grant review process, the agency typically convenes panels of independent scientists from across the country to assess the scientific merit of applications.

At least three reviewers are assigned to each proposal and provide preliminary scores. After those scores are averaged, applications ranked within the top 50th percentile are generally discussed by the full review panel. The panel then assigns a final “impact score.”

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Reviewers share the final scores and written critiques with the applicant, the applicant’s institution and NIH program staff. Each NIH institute also has an advisory council made up of external scientists and other experts. These councils review applications and recommend which projects should receive funding, while the institute director makes the final decision.

Under the proposed NIH funding system, the agency would stop sharing impact scores with researchers, university officials and its own program staff. Instead, applications would be grouped into three categories: the top 25th percentile would be labeled “Most Competitive,” applications ranked from the 26th to the 50th percentile would be considered “Competitive,” and applications in the bottom half would be classified as “Not Discussed.”

Lauer says the change could help reduce some of the bias associated with exact rankings. Research on peer-review bias has shown that peer review can be inherently unfavorable to novel research proposals. By treating applications in the top quartile more similarly, the new system could encourage institutions to support innovative projects that might otherwise be disadvantaged by small differences in numerical scores.

Norton agrees that encouraging innovative research is important but argues that the goal would be better served through targeted recruitment. Under that approach, institutions actively seek proposals addressing specific scientific questions or unmet research needs. She noted that the NIH issued only a fraction of the targeted solicitations in 2025 that it had previously released.

NIH pivots away from agency-driven science

Still, Norton and other researchers agree that the existing NIH peer-review system has weaknesses. The process is effective at distinguishing research that is clearly fundable from applications that fall below the funding threshold, but differences among the highest-ranked grants are less clear. Papers produced from the highest-scoring NIH grants are cited nearly as often as papers from grants ranked around the 20th percentile, according to an analysis by Ferric Fang¹, a molecular bacteriologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his colleagues.

“When you get to the top quartile of grants, the ranking criteria become more arbitrary, because all of these grants have a lot of merit,” Fang says. He and his colleagues support a lottery-style funding model in which grants that pass a defined quality threshold are selected randomly. Similar approaches are becoming more popular, particularly in Europe, as research agencies seek alternatives to highly competitive grant rankings.