On Wednesday, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at NIH released its funding policy for fiscal year 2025. In it, NCI claims they will be able to fund four percent of applications.

That’s not a typo. Four percent. While a few mechanisms will be slightly higher (R21s will be a whopping seven percent), this is catastrophic. Not only would 24 out of 25 proposals be rejected, but this essentially means every successful new proposal at NCI would be a ‘one and done’–though if you do manage to get funding, hopefully the funding environment will be different three to four years from now. Because what this also does is make the chances of a competitive renewal slim. Proposals that are competitive renewals, which means they’re follow up proposals to previously funded grants, are funded at a slightly higher rate (although this higher rate is included in the four percent, meaning they are at the expense of new proposals).

What ‘one and done’ does is it kills ongoing lines of research: we discovered A, B, and C, which leads us to propose studying D, E, and F. From a principal investigator’s perspective, it’s harder to keep a lab funded without competitive renewals, and from NCI’s perspective (and the country’s for that matter), it is catastrophic for basic research, since, unlike more translational projects, it often takes a very long time to see something through to the end (or a good stopping/handing off point).

It’s a good way to destroy cancer research though. God damn Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Trump.