NIH funding update- the truth…

SDianeL

I saw a post on social media this week that there were cuts being made at the NIH. My husband died in August from Alzheimer's and I have been fighting cancer since 2017 so this worried me greatly. Also my daughter works for a major cancer hospital that receives funding for cancer research So I decided to look into it myself and get some facts. Here's what I found: 

NIH NEW research grants have been suspended temporarily for review. The review will be quick & proper funding will resume. Old grants already approved will not be cut unless they find fraud. 

There were other cuts but only for INDIRECT costs such as administrative & overhead. NO cuts for actual research have been or will be made. Just the bloated overhead. This will mean more funding for actual research. 

The Neurosciences group that does Alzheimer's research had a director who was fired by the former administration in Sept 2024 after a 9 month investigation into research misconduct. The interim person was declared acting director internally but not by the administration and was never confirmed even as "acting". He was fired recently along with 10 other administrative employees of the 100 administrative employees in the NIH Neurosciences Division which oversees research grants for Alzheimer's, Dementia & other brain diseases. None of these 11 employees had anything to do with research. There will probably be a new director named shortly. 

All of this info is readily available online. 

So if you hear anything about this, don't worry. We have enough to worry about. Pray for a cure for this terrible disease. 🙏

annie51

Thank you so much for this information and for your diligence in getting it. We always need to be very careful what our sources are for important information.

Bailey's Mom

Thanks for taking the time to research this…appreciate the info.

White Crane

Thank you!

harshedbuzz

@SDianeL

Coming from the perspective of someone who has a husband who is a retired research scientist, several friends who also research scientists and a niece and bestie who are on the administrative side of pharmacological research—

It takes more than the people in the white coats standing at the bench to do research and subsequent trials and the safely get medication to the people who would benefit. The scientific side needs the support of staff at a minimum to set up and run trials, to manage the financial piece, to recruit and schedule candidates for trials, to analyze data and liaise with other stakeholders and manage publicity.

HB

Russinator

I'm praying, as are you all, for a cure for this terrible disease

CindyBum

As a researcher, I can tell you that the Indirect Costs pay for the appropriate upgrades to lab equipment needed to do groundbreaking research and for staff to support it. The staff are frequently lab techs and for graduate students who participate in the research as they learn how to become scientists.

There will be a great deal of research that is stopped without those costs included. There will be many universities that will not enroll PhD students, because they will no longer have funds from Indirect Funds for those PhD student salaries. That's already started happening - Pitt, Penn and Boston U have paused PhD enrollments due to the funding freezes. American science as we know it will be slowed or stopped and we'll have fewer scientists doing less research. Now that may be what folks want, but to pretend like this won't have an impact on important research is simply not true. Sorry all. Them's the facts from on the ground. The American university system is the envy of the world and only Americans seem to hate it. What a shame.

BPS

Our government has a lot of waste and abuse in it and can't continue on the course of overspending. I am afraid that there will be many good programs and people hurt in the effort to get control of the budget.

SDianeL

https://alzconnected.org/discussion/comment/237005#Comment_237005

https://alzconnected.org/discussion/comment/237005#Comment_237005

https://alzconnected.org/discussion/comment/237005#Comment_237005

k

https://alzconnected.org/discussion/comment/237030#Comment_237030

To recap, they fired 10 people. Out of 100 at the one agency within NIH. They are first looking at probationary employees and non performers.

howdoidothis

https://alzconnected.org/discussion/comment/237052#Comment_237052

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a plan. Slashing for the sake of show and then realizing that the people fired were necessary to the operations seems to keep happening.
Nobody disputes that some things could be streamlined to increase efficiency and reduce waste. It’s the nonsensical way they’re going about it that is terrible.

harshedbuzz

@SDianeL

Probationary employees are the newly hired. In DH's position, one of his most important responsibilities was recruiting new PhD scientists at Harvard and MIT. These new hires are critical to future research. If they're not funded at the university level do research and offered positions on graduation this country will no longer be a leader in innovation.

Takeaways to understand ‘indirect costs’ and NIH funding | Penn Today

HB

LBC83

https://alzconnected.org/discussion/72371/nih-funding-update-the-truth

I would challenge the following statement: "There were other cuts but only for INDIRECT costs such as administrative & overhead. NO cuts for actual research have been or will be made. Just the bloated overhead. This will mean more funding for actual research."

I am a retired civil servant, and I helped manage a $2B government contract for NASA. So I have first hand knowledge of direct & indirect costs in government contracting.

The presumption seems to be that Indirect costs are only for things like administration and bloated overhead. That is a false presumption.

As an illustration of indirect vs direct costs, consider if you only had to pay what the gov't classifies as direct cost when going to McDonalds to purchase a Big Mac and a Coke. Your direct costs would include the meat, cheese, bun, Coca-Cola, cup, labor to assemble the Big Mac, labor for the clerk to take your order, etc. This is presumably a very small price you normally pay for the Big Mac. The definition of indirect costs are those items which cannot be directly tied to making your Big Mac & Coke. In this case, the indirect costs could perhaps include an amortization of the purchase price of the land on which McDonalds was built, amortization of the cost to build the McDonalds, the cost of utilities to operate McDonalds, real estate taxes, depreciation costs of all of the equipment used to make the Big Mac & dispense the Coke, etc.

Perhaps a great example for AD research might be an institute that utilizes costly PET scanners for imaging of the brains of those of us with the disease. Besides the expensive purchase price of the PET scanners, I would guess the costs of the electricity to operate the machines is also very high. These would all be indirect costs. So if you want to make extensive use of PET scanners to better understand AD for developing new drugs in your research, well, you aren't going to get much support with the proposed new guidelines.

For anybody interested in reading the other side of the story, see

https://academyhealth.org/blog/2025-02/academyhealth-situation-report-nih-abruptly-slashing-indirect-grants-what-means-researchers