NIH Moves to Consolidate Grant Peer Reviews to Save $65M

In a move projected to save the National Institutes of Health more than $65 million, the agency late last week announced a plan to centralize peer review of applications for grants and contracts under its Center for Scientific Review.

“At NIH, we are working to optimize our resources to support the best science,” Dr. Matthew J. Memoli, acting director of the NIH, said in the notice published March 6. “By centralizing the peer review process, we will not only reduce costs—we will also improve the quality, consistency and integrity of review, and maximize competition of similar science across the agency.”

Noni Byrnes, director of CSR, told Inside Higher Ed in an email Monday that the consolidation plan has been under consideration since last summer, when the agency conducted a cost analysis that showed that CSR’s peer-review process costs a fraction of the reviews overseen by the NIH’s 23 institutes and centers (ICs) with peer-review offices.

Costs of Peer Review

According to the NIH’s announcement, CSR used 0.3 percent of the NIH’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget to review more than 66,000 applications; institute-based reviews cost an average of 300 percent more than CSR’s. Under the new plan, CSR would conduct all first-level reviews, eliminating institute-based study sections.

“Cost savings will result from assigning fewer total staff to oversee peer-review meetings and reducing costs associated with the meetings themselves such as by reviewing all applications received, but in fewer total review meetings,” Byrnes said. She added that the number of resulting layoffs “is not certain,” as grant applications pile up and staffing levels at the NIH remain “in flux due to the multiple options of voluntary resignation and early retirement, etc., that are being provided to all federal employees.”

The plan will be implemented pending review by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget. While it doesn’t appear likely to compromise the efficacy of the $47 billion agency’s peer-review process, some university researchers and former NIH staffers are metabolizing the plan with a heightened suspicion fueled by ongoing chaos at the NIH.

The NIH—which sent about $26 billion to more than 500 grant recipients connected to colleges in 2024—has a two-part process for reviewing grant applications. First, a study section, typically composed of academic scientists, reviews and scores applications; their work is overseen by scientific review officers at the NIH. Once an application makes it through the study section, an advisory council from one of the NIH’s 23 ICs with peer-review offices and the NIH director’s office gives it a second review, and the institute director makes the final funding decision.

The CSR already manages the first part of the peer-review process for 78 percent of NIH grants, while study sections within the 23 relevant ICs—each with separate administrative processes and overhead—handle the remaining 22 percent. Shifting the oversight of the first level of peer review entirely to the CSR mitigates “the potential for bias by entirely separating the peer review and funding components of NIH,” Byrnes said in the announcement.

Context Drives Skepticism

But some medical researchers aren’t embracing the change just yet.

“I’m very skeptical that this will serve any real purpose or benefit investigators,” Kevin King, a psychologist at the University of Washington, posted on Bluesky.

“This sounds kind of ominous to me … what will happen to the peer review process?” Eric Lau, an associate director of the Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute, wrote on LinkedIn. “Considering how the Trump administration is dismantling other independent govt agencies, is this just a power grab that will result in AI-based hunt-and-elimination of ‘transgender mouse’ and ‘DEI’ grants applications/awards?”

Others are waiting to see what happens.

“If this plan is implemented thoughtfully and carefully, it could have some benefits,” Jeremy Berg, who served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “However, ‘thoughtfully’ and ‘carefully’ are not terms I would associate with the actions directed at NIH to date.”

The NIH’s peer-review centralization effort is the latest in a series of big changes that have been underway at the world’s largest funder of biomedical research since President Donald Trump took office in late January. Over the past seven weeks, he’s signed a blitz of executive orders aimed at eliminating alleged “waste, fraud and abuse” and so-called woke ideology within the federal government.

As a result of the broader shakeup, NIH study sections were paused for weeks and meeting notices for NIH advisory councils still haven’t been posted to the Federal Register, creating a grant-review backlog that’s left many university scientists uncertain about the future of their jobs and research.

The NIH is also reviewing both proposed and existing grants for compliance with Trump’s partially blocked executive orders banning mention of concepts related to diversity, equity and inclusion; last week, Stat reported that the NIH terminated numerous already-awarded grants that focused on studying health in LGBTQ+ communities.

When grant reviews do fully resume, the NIH will also have fewer staff to support the process. Last month, the agency laid off some 1,200 employees, including many who support the grant-review process. Meanwhile, a federal judge has enjoined the NIH’s guidance from Feb. 7 to drastically cut the amount of money it sends to colleges and universities to help cover the indirect costs of research, including lab space and safety compliance. But even though the courts blocked the guidance hours after it went into effect, some institutions are already preparing for that possibility by freezing hiring and spending.

One NIH-funded university biologist, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of jeopardizing their grant application, which already made it through the first round of peer review, said they’re still waiting on a final funding decision. “There’s no indication on when the advisory councils will be rescheduled and meet again,” said the researcher, who is focused on developing new cancer treatments. “I’m not getting any replies from my program officer.”

It was against that backdrop that they heard about the NIH’s peer-review consolidation plan last week.

“If this was any other year, people probably wouldn’t be freaking out about it. It would be a bit of a surprise, but it wouldn’t feel as scary,” the researcher said. “I don’t think it would change that much about the actual review meeting or the expertise of any of the reviewers.”

Dr. Norman Sharpless, professor of cancer policy and innovation at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine who served as director of the National Cancer Institute from 2017 to 2022, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that he believes the plan will “save money and may improve review in some cases.”

“The ICs will complain this will make reviews less good for certain awards, but I don’t think this is a bad idea,” Sharpless said. “I predict there will be few mechanisms where CSR has to basically set up a study section that is essentially dedicated from one IC (like a special emphasis panel for the Cancer Ctr Program), but I am confident they can figure this out.”

The anonymous NIH-funded researcher, who has reviewed scores of NIH grants throughout their career, believes peer-review consolidation could play out in a couple of different ways.

The “best-case scenario” would involve folding the expertise from the institutes and centers into the CSR’s review process.

They said in the “worst-case scenario,” the policy could create a “shrinking down” of the NIH’s capacity to review the current volume of grant applications. “The other potential worst-case scenario way down the line is if people who don’t have science’s best interest at heart are in charge at CSR, then then there would be a much more centralized ability to control how the reviews happen.”