After already killing more than 1700 active grants related to politically charged topics, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has flagged another roughly 3200 grants for review and possible termination, Science has learned. Some newly flagged grants had already been cleared by previous reviews or have no obvious link to controversial issues.
The new agency review comes as a federal judge is poised to consider the legality of such terminations in a 16 June hearing. Plaintiffs in that lawsuit say NIH may be violating its obligations to turn over relevant documents as part of the case’s discovery process. The agency claims it has no official guidance documents on how to select grants to kill—or that they are privileged and don’t need to be revealed.
But Science has obtained several internal NIH directives on that matter, revealing inconsistent methods and sometimes conflicting definitions of review terms.
