DOGE Screening NIH Awards, Ordering Projects Killed

The U.S. Department of Government Efficiency has been screening all National Institutes of Health grants since early this month, Nature’s news arm reported last week. The journal said it received “internal correspondence” showing this.

NIH officials testified that DOGE representative Rachel Riley gave them lists of grants to end, according to Nature. The journal said this testimony was part of a lawsuit by four states against the federal government over the cancellation of NIH research on gender-affirming care. One NIH official said Riley ordered her on Feb. 28 to cancel hundreds of grants that day, the journal reported.

Citing NIH employees and internal documents, Nature said the required DOGE review slowed down the process and could prevent the agency from not spending all its funding by the Sept. 30 end of the federal fiscal year—meaning it would have to return funds to the U.S. Treasury. The journal said NIH awarded fewer than 600 projects between May 5 to 16, compared to five times as many during another 11 days last month.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published a paper earlier this month saying the NIH terminated $1.81 billion in grant funding between Feb. 28 and April 8, 30 percent of which hadn’t been spent at the time of termination. That represented 694 grants.

Later, Senate Democrats, looking at the first three months of this year, reported that the NIH cut $2.7 billion in grant funding compared to the same time frame in 2024.

The NIH, the Health and Human Services Department, and the White House didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Friday. But a spokesperson told Nature that “paying so-called ‘experts’ to deliberate bad ideas for hundreds of hours is exactly the kind of waste that DOGE is eliminating.”