Mike the Mad Biologist

Last Friday*, NIH released a proposed grant score reporting format (David Gorski has a thorough discussion of the details). The key change is that, while percentile scores will be estimated**, they will be converted into one of three categories: the top 25% of scores, the second quartile of scores (26-50%), and the remainder. For some context, with extremely rare exceptions, less than 10% of grants to a given panel will be funded, meaning the majority in the top category will not be funded.

Importantly, even though the reviewers are still calculating scores, the principal investigator (the scientist submitting the proposal), applicant institution, NIH program staff, ICO leadership, and the relevant NIH Advisory Council will not see the scores. The primary reason for doing this is to allow Trump administration flunkies to reject politically incorrect projects that score very well, without far less political fallout***. You really don’t want to have tell Congress that the reason the second highest scoring grant was rejected in spite of expert consensus that it was a good grant, especially when the reason for rejection by the commissariat would probably be something like “it focuses on Black people.” So it’s bad.

But there’s another consequence–it wastes researchers’ time. Back to Gorski:

When paylines are under the 10th percentile, there is a huge difference between a grant application whose mean overall priority score leads it to be ranked as 25th percentile versus one ranked as, say, 11th percentile. The latter grant is in striking distance of being funded on a resubmission, the first grant much less so. Moreover, what is being proposed is a lot less transparency, not more transparency. The “raw data”—i.e., the raw priority scores and the percentile ranking—that led to an application being grouped in one of the above three categories will, contrary to past practices, be withheld from the grant applicant.

Back in 2025, when Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published their book, Abundance, the Abundance Bros decided to make one of their topics NIH funding and progress. They came up with some real doozies, like ‘fund more transformative research’ (gee, why didn’t anyone ever think of that before?)–Drugmonkey has the definitive takedown. But one thing they did want to reduce was the administrative burden of proposal writing, including the repeated rounds of proposal submissions.

Well, they seem to have been very quiet about this new proposal, which, as noted above, actually will create more work for some proposal submitters, who figure they might as well try again (even though it’s a longshot), while at the same time, other researchers will give up on promising proposals.

But paying attention to the details doesn’t make you a Thinky Thought Leader, so I’m guessing they won’t comment on this. Would love to be surprised though…

*If this were a popular change, they wouldn’t have done it Friday afternoon.

**Confusingly for many, a lower percentile is a better score (i.e., the first percentile is the best).

***Other granting agencies do use broader categories, but there is no legitimate reason to reduce the amount of information passed onto the submitters. The broader categories do not reflect less work by the reviewers, since proposals are still ranked; the results of that ranking, however, are obscured. Given how the administration has treated NIH so far, and the reality that the administration lies all the time, there is no reason to give Trump et alia the benefit of the doubt here.