Slow Release Of Federal Science Funds Holds Up Research

[AUDIO LOGO] IRA FLATOW: Hi. I’m Ira Flatow, and you’re listening to Science Friday. Today on the podcast, the ongoing saga of federal science research funding.

Earlier this year, Congress pushed back on White House attempts to slash funding for many research programs, and it restored that funding in the budget. But the process is still not operating normally. Here’s one example.

ANAT SHAHAR: What is currently happening is unusual in that the budget has passed but, from what we understand, the federal agencies have not yet been given the money in order to then give us the money. We have over 50 proposals that have been pending since March of 2025 that we’re waiting to hear the results of. People have been told that they will get the money. And they’re just waiting, and it hasn’t happened. And there are more cases where the proposals are still in this pending stage, where they have gone through review, they have gone through the panel, and the money is just not flowing out the door of the different agencies.

IRA FLATOW: That’s Dr. Anat Shahar, Vice President for Research at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington. She says her institution is waiting to hear about some $20 million in funds that are not flowing out the door, which has implications for the next generation of scientists.

ANAT SHAHAR: The problem with the money not flowing at a regular pace is that we have to plan several years in advance for not only the research that we’re doing, but also for the training of the next generation of scientists. You can imagine that waiting up to a year or more to find out if that funding is coming in really impacts the pace of our research, but even more so, it impacts the hiring of students or postdocs because that only happens once a year.

And so the uncertainty and the waiting is really, really difficult. And the inability to know whether we will be able to fund someone for several years implies that we cannot hire them. It’s really just a mess.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Anat Shahar of the Carnegie Institution. Joining me now to help untangle this situation is Alexandra Witze. She’s coauthor on a report published in the journal Nature on the funding slowdown. She’s in Boulder, Colorado. Welcome to Science Friday.

ALEXANDRA WITZE: Thanks very much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. OK, the story we just heard, is that a unique situation?

ALEXANDRA WITZE: That is not unique, according to the reporting that myself and my colleagues have done. We’ve been talking to scientists who work at various agencies and who get grants from various research agencies, and in the last couple of weeks, we have been hearing this again and again.

The thought was that Congress had gone ahead and approved research budgets for the current fiscal year. And so a lot of scientists thought, OK, great, the money’s been approved, it’s going to start flowing. But what my reporting team found out is that that’s not the case. There’s something weird going on, and it’s very unusual. It hasn’t happened before.

IRA FLATOW: Is there any mechanism for holding back money that has been approved by Congress? You say this is very weird, it has not happened before. Explain that, please.

ALEXANDRA WITZE: It’s a very unique thing at the Office of Management and Budget. So that’s the White House office that’s in charge of disbursing funds. It’s the budget office for the administration.

And once Congress has approved funds, what normally happens is the OMB would start giving out 30-day blobs, apportionments, they call it, so, here, you get your 30-day check, you can start spending the money that Congress says is OK to spend. But what’s happening this year is OMB has different rules. When they’re starting to give out these 30-day checks, there’s a new sort of restriction on it.

In many cases they’re saying, hey, you can only spend this money on things like salaries for your employees. And what that means, practically speaking, is that if you’re working at the NIH and your job is to funnel money out the door to grants to scientists, you can’t do that because that money is only supposed to be going to salaries. Long story short, OMB is dispersing a lot less money than it normally would, and there’s these restrictions on it, which means scientists can’t use it for what they normally would.

IRA FLATOW: And those restrictions were not put there by Congress.

ALEXANDRA WITZE: No, the OMB rewrote a lot of these rules last year.

IRA FLATOW: Hm. So if the money is not going to the researchers, where is it?

ALEXANDRA WITZE: I guess it’s just sitting at the OMB. I’d love to know whose bank account that’s in. It’s sitting wherever the holding pattern normally is, I think.

We did an analysis on, for instance, the National Institutes of Health, which is a $47 billion agency that is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. And we’ve found that as of this point this year, so kind of early on in the year, the NIH was only putting out 30% as much grant funding as it did in prior years.

And so something’s going on here. There’s obviously a lot of challenges with funding the government this year. We had a big shutdown last October, November, that slowed things down. But when we went looking at how the money was flowing, we found it was cut off more than it normally is. The spigot has not been turned on like you’d expect at this point.

IRA FLATOW: Do you suspect this is politics?

ALEXANDRA WITZE: Well, depending on who you talk to, some people might say that. When it came to NASA, for instance, which is the portion of the story that I reported, I’ve talked to a policy expert who points out that this is kind of part of a broader pattern, in which the White House has basically been pushing back on the agency and saying, you know, there are these science missions at NASA that we don’t want to spend money on, and here we are finding a new way to say you, NASA, shouldn’t be spending money on these things that we don’t think mesh with White House priorities.

IRA FLATOW: So has anybody in the OMB given any kind of explanation for holding back the funding?

ALEXANDRA WITZE: So the OMB did not respond to our queries about this. But Russ Vought, who’s the director, has been very clear in a lot of things he’s said in the past and has written in the past. You’ll remember Project 2025, which was kind of the blueprint for what a lot of the current Trump administration has put into place.

So the OMB has not talked to us directly, but Russ Vought and others, they have said essentially that OMB has the authority, has the power to control the disbursement of funds in order to meet with administration priorities. So they wouldn’t tell us what was going on, because they didn’t reply to our questions. But it’s pretty clear from what they’ve said in the past that, hey, they don’t think these funds are anything that the administration should be spending money on, so it doesn’t matter, essentially, in that interpretation, what Congress says.

IRA FLATOW: Mm-hmm. But as you say, there are some people, like NASA, who are getting their funding. So this is pick and choose your favorites.

ALEXANDRA WITZE: Yeah. So at NASA, for instance, there’s a big priority right now to be flying, for instance, the Artemis II mission to the Moon, which is supposed to be going in the next couple of weeks. And NASA’s gotten all the money it wants, and almost more, for that. That has been released. It’s other things, like Earth science missions at NASA, that have been sort of picked out, and that’s the thing that the OMB doesn’t want to fund.

There are other administration priorities, of course. You think about the National Science Foundation, which the White House has a lot of interest in the National Science Foundation and how it’s funding especially research into priorities like AI and quantum stuff. But even at the NSF, we found, the moneys aren’t flowing as quickly as they normally would.

IRA FLATOW: Does Congress have any levers to pull that could open the tap again?

ALEXANDRA WITZE: Yeah, our understanding is that a lot of members of Congress are really pretty mad, especially those on the Democratic side, who are trying to use funding as a way to kind of get at administration priorities. So Congress is pretty angry. So I suspect we’ll see a lot of behind-the-scenes pressure, and our reporting suggests that some of that’s already going on.

So we’ll see. Like so many things in this administration, what’s happening right now, with the money being kind of slow-walked out the door, is something we haven’t seen before. And as you heard from that vice president of research you talked to earlier, this is having day-to-day impacts on scientists, on students, who are just trying to go out there and make discoveries. The chaos that’s happening in so many research labs across the country, simply because they aren’t able to hire the person they need to do the work or get the money in the door to buy the lab equipment, it’s really impacting people’s lives on a day-to-day basis, as you have heard.

IRA FLATOW: And you’re talking about a long-term effect, because these talented researchers could go somewhere else, could go to another country.

ALEXANDRA WITZE: We’ve done some reporting at Nature on this brain drain, this concept that folks might leave and go abroad. And we’re really interested to be tracking that and to see whether folks are leaving. Anecdotally, I mean, I’ve talked to many scientists at all sorts of career stages who have decided to go and live abroad.

Just a couple days ago, I was talking to an astronomer who’s moving to Europe. Week before last, I was talking to a graduate student who is looking at Australia or Mexico or somewhere else to go abroad. It’s just hard to stick around, right, I mean, if you’re not getting the support for the research and the discovery that you think you’re going to get. Yeah, we’re hearing that a lot from scientists.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, we’ve had scientists on this program– because we’ve been on the air for decades and followed scientists over their careers– and some of them have said, you know, I’m in Canada now.

ALEXANDRA WITZE: [LAUGHS] Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: I’m not where I used to be.

ALEXANDRA WITZE: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: So you mentioned NASA. I just want to make sure that– to know if there are other agency winners or losers, from your reporting.

ALEXANDRA WITZE: We haven’t found a whole lot of winners across agencies, to be perfectly honest. NSF is really into AI and quantum stuff these days. But that funding still isn’t quite flowing at this point in time, that we can tell. There’s a whole initiative at the Department of Energy, a thing called the Genesis Project, to take national labs’ data sets and do kind of AI analysis on them and do new types of discovery.

But as far as we know, the DOE is still working to stand that kind of thing up. So there are winners. The winners are not necessarily, like, going out the gate faster than anybody else.

IRA FLATOW: Now, I know you’ve been reporting in this area for a long time. I know you don’t really have a crystal ball. But do you have any educated guess of how this is all going to play out?

ALEXANDRA WITZE: I think we can expect more chaos and disruption, like we’ve seen over the past year. There haven’t been any major changes that make me think suddenly everything is going to settle down, and the kind of ongoing battles about how to fund science, how to support science, what should science be doing as part of our national conversation, I don’t see that changing anytime soon. We’re in such a disruptive landscape right now. I suspect we’re going to have to buckle in for the long haul here.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. It’s going to be a rough ride. Thank you for your reporting.

ANAT SHAHAR: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: Alexandra Witze is a correspondent for the journal Nature. She’s based in Boulder, Colorado.

[THEME MUSIC]

Thanks for listening. And you know, we’re always looking for your ideas. Give us a call on the listener line, 877-4-SCIFRI. That’s 877, number 4, SCIFRI.

This episode was produced by Charles Bergquist. I’m Ira Flatow. We’ll see you soon.

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