NIH’s Use of “Multiyear Funding” Grants Poses Research Risks

The National Institutes of Health, a huge funder of universities’ biomedical research, has stepped up its controversial practice of obligating funds up front for research grants that are usually funded over multiple years, the Association of American Medical Colleges says in a new report. This practice leaves less money in the current fiscal year to fund new scientific studies and pay researchers, increasing the competition among grant applicants for a smaller pot of dollars.

The NIH has a more than $47 billion budget this year, much of which will go outside the agency to universities and independent research institutes in the form of grants. Last year, roughly $37 billion in NIH funding went out as these “extramural” grants, the AAMC said.

Congress banned NIH from obligating more money this year than last toward “multiyear grants”—also called “forward-funded grants”—by slipping that cap into an appropriations act.

But the agency is asking lawmakers to let it remove the cap next year. Its 2027 budget request proposes forward funding “all competing research project grant (RPG) awards,” which the agency says “will increase NIH budget flexibility by no longer encumbering large portions of each year’s appropriation for the continuation of research projects that were initiated in previous years.”

The AAMC and other groups have raised questions about such a quick transition. Heather Pierce, senior director of science policy for the AAMC, told Inside Higher Ed, “The concern is that a very rapid shift to using multiyear funding or forward funding for the vast majority—or all—research grants decreases precipitously the number of grants you can fund … and new ideas that happen.” She likened it to spending a $400,000 budget in one year forward funding one project instead of funding four separate $100,000 projects.

Pierce said an abrupt shift would make it difficult for universities to plan graduate programs and to budget accurately, with implications not just for future generations of research trainees but also for the “predictable and sustained movement forward” of science and health improvements.

For its report, released Tuesday, the AAMC said it analyzed the NIH’s public data on new and competing multiyear-funded extramural grants. “Given that the use of multiyear funding results in a decrease in the funding available for grants in that year, institutions are concerned about its use in grant funding and the potential impact on application success rates,” the report says.

In federal fiscal year 2024, the last to end during Joe Biden’s presidency, NIH awarded 1,067 such multiyear grants, obligating a total of $960 million, the AAMC report says. In fiscal year 2025, which ended during President Trump’s first year back in the White House, it awarded more than 2,000 such grants, totaling $2.2 billion—or 6 percent of all extramural obligations last year.

In 2024 and, especially, 2025, the amount of funding NIH obligated to multiyear grants shot up around the end of June, the AAMC report shows, meaning most of the forward-funded money was awarded in the last three months of the fiscal year. In 2025, that may have been because NIH was slow in awarding grants for most of the year and was under pressure to allocate all of its money before the fiscal year ended—so its funding wouldn’t be returned to the U.S. Treasury.

“Because disruptions, delays, and terminations of grant funding in FY 2025 left the NIH substantially behind in the amount of funding it had awarded compared to normal year-to-date totals,” the AAMC report says, “the agency used the forward funding mechanism to obligate large sums of funding rapidly before the end of the fiscal year.”

But in 2026, instead of waiting until the end of the year to obligate a deluge of multiyear funding, the NIH is already awarding a significant amount of money through these up-front awards. As of the middle of this month, it has awarded 601 such grants, totaling $402 million, compared to just 162, or $79 million, by this date in 2025, and 146, worth $75 million, by this point in 2024.

“The agency has utilized forward funding for competitive [grants] more frequently and much earlier in the year, not only relative to historical levels but also as compared to FY 2025,” the report says.

Lizbet Boroughs, senior associate vice president of government relations and public policy for the Association of American Universities, a group of the nation’s top research institutions, said the report “does a fantastic job at the macro level of documenting what’s happening at AAU’s universities and medical centers.”

“Our universities are not accepting as many Ph.D. students as they did in ’24 and even in ’25” due to a contraction in research, Boroughs said—adding that, if the trend continues, it will result in fewer trained scientists. She said NIH hasn’t been transparent in how it’s implementing multiyear funding, either, and universities with few resources will be especially unable to provide bridge funding to sustain researchers amid an abrupt shift to forward funding.

“The less research that is funded, that is fewer shots on goal, that is fewer chances for discovery, for diagnostics, for treatments and for cures,” she said.