NSF Lowers Grant Review Requirements, NIH Hunts for Phrases

Two major federal research funding agencies are altering their grant review processes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, according to a Dec. 1 internal memo that Science obtained and published, while STAT reported that the National Institutes of Health distributed guidance Friday ordering staff to use a “text analysis tool” to search for certain phrases.

The NSF memo says the government shutdown, which ended in November, hampered its progress toward doling out all its funding by the end of the new fiscal year. It said “we lost critical time” and “now face [a] significant backlog of unreviewed proposals and canceled review panels. In parallel, our workforce has been significantly reduced.”

The memo said the changes “enable Program Officers to expedite award and decline decisions,” including by moving away from the “usual three or more reviews” of proposals. It said that, now, “full proposals requiring external review must be reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers or have a minimum of two reviews. An internal review may substitute for one.”

NSF spokesperson Mike England didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed the memo. He said in an email that the changes are “part of a comprehensive approach to streamlining processes and reducing administrative burden” and “also help expedite the processing of shutdown-related backlogs while maintaining the rigor of the external merit review process.”

As for the NIH guidance, while it instructs program officers on how to review and possibly terminate grants, STAT reported that “some outside experts said the guidance is a positive step, making future terminations more of a dialogue that researchers can push back on.”

But another media outlet, NOTUS, published a more critical article on the guidance, saying the “Trump administration is pausing new funding for National Institutes of Health grants that include terms like ‘health equity’ and ‘structural racism,’ pending review.” NOTUS reported that the guidance says new funding won’t be provided to “misaligned” grants until “all areas of non-alignment have been addressed.”

Both articles said NIH ordered staff to use a “computational text analysis tool” to scan proposals for terms that may mean the submissions are misaligned with NIH priorities. (The NSF memo similarly said “Program Officers are also expected to maximize their use of available automated merit review tools, especially tools that identify proposals that should be returned without review.”)

Andrew G. Nixon, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department, which includes NIH, didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed a copy of the NIH guidance. In an email, he wrote that “claims that NIH issued a ‘banned words list’ or conducted word searches to remove specific terms from grants are unequivocally false. NIH has never prohibited the use of any particular words in grant applications.”