NIH moves to block grants that primarily study public-policy health impacts

According to internal documents, the National Institutes of Health is now refusing grant applications whose primary purpose is to provide evidence for policymakers, arguing that legislators are outside the agency’s stakeholder scope. The policy shift, learned by staff in May, followed the addition of political appointees to the grant-approval process at NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services, who began flagging and freezing policy-focused proposals that had already passed peer review.

Dozens of applications have been sent back with instructions to strip the term “policy” and assess whether they can be salvaged, affecting over 3,700 projects funded in fiscal 2025 that mention policy in titles or abstracts. NIH leadership has not publicly explained the change, but some flagged work is being classified as lobbying, which federal rules prohibit. Experts such as Meredith Matone and Michael Lauer contend that rigorous analysis of how laws influence health outcomes is scientific research, not lobbying, and caution that the move could impede evidence-based policy making. Concerns are also voiced by Marcia McNutt and NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya, who note the new “actionable, rigorous, and in-scope” criteria exclude policymakers from the stakeholder group.