As the U.S. government shuts down due Congress' failure to pass a spending bill, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is implementing a contingency staffing plan that will again roil a research apparatus that has already been heavily disrupted during the second Trump administration.
The NIH will retain 4,477, or 24.5%, of its staff during the shutdown, primarily to maintain operations at the NIH Clinical Center, which is a hospital run by the agency, according to the plan. Other employees will stick around to care for lab animals or perform upkeep for infrastructure and facilities.
In total, 32,460 employees across the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will be furloughed during the shutdown, according to an HHS contingency plan.
All basic research at the NIH will cease, as will all grant-making activities, including payments for ongoing external grants. No new clinical trials will be launched at the Clinical Center.
“During the shutdown, no grants can be awarded or disbursed by NIH and those funds may be permanently lost,” analysts from Leerink Partners wrote in a Sept. 30 note. “We believe grant recipients will be conservative with obligated funds until a shutdown is lifted, thus prolonging any potential recovery in the academic market.”
No training of graduate students or postdoctoral researchers will occur during the shutdown, and all scientific meetings and employee travel will be halted, according to the NIH plan.
Historically, the world's largest funder of biomedical research, the NIH’s ability to support science has been significantly hampered since President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. The HHS has been hit with mass layoffs, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of NIH grants have been terminated and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, Ph.D., has threatened to pull funding from research that doesn’t fit with new agency priorities.
Despite these challenges, the NIH was on track to spend all of its allocated research funding for 2025 by the Sept. 30 deadline, according to a Sept. 29 report from Nature. However, the White House budget office directed the agency to spend more funds upfront than usual, the report noted, meaning overall fewer new research projects have been funded this year.
While Trump proposed an $18 billion cut to the NIH in May, Congress has thus far been reluctant to follow his lead. The Senate, in particular, has instead proposed a $400 million increase to the biomedical research agency’s budget. Citing an unnamed source, the Leerink analysts wrote that Sen. Susan Collins of Maine believes this budget bump “is in a strong position.”