The funding freeze implemented by the Trump administration in January has forced the National Institute of Health to stop considering new grant applications related to billions in medical research, NPR reported on Saturday.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley extended the temporary restraining order blocking the administration’s cuts, yet the administration in turn blocked the NIH from posting any new notices in the Federal Register, a procedural step that is required before federal meetings can be scheduled. Aaron Hoskins, an RNA biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the administration was exploiting a “loop-hole” in the process and has forced him to pause his own hiring of graduate students due to the frozen grant application process. “It’s really quite nefarious,” he said.
The freeze has resulted in a backlog of approximately 16,000 grant applications hoping to get a piece of the $1.5 billion in NIH funding, according to a source familiar with the agency’s grant process. Due to the freeze, “applications will come in and basically they go into a black hole, and nothing can be done with them,” the source said. “That is where we are now.”
Read more at Newsmax© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
