This is super helpful, thank you. Not a good picture.
I'm laser focused on the F31 mechanism and an wondering the extent to which the decreases can be attributed to the discontinuation of the F31D mechanism. I guess you would see this by looking at 2023 and 2024, looking at the number of F31Ds in those years, and subtracting them from the total F31 numbers, and comparing those to 2025. A complication is that some of the canceld F31Ds were reinstated after some lawsuits. But no new F31Ds were issues and not all active F31Ds were reinstated.
When the F31D came along, I wondered why NIH didn't just increase the F31 budget to provide more F31s overall, rather than add more that were earmarked. I mean, I never imagined we would have such a hostile government, but the F31D made it very easy for them to reduce the number of F awards with the stroke of a pen.
On a related note, you don't mention at all here that the overwhelming majority of PhD students are NOT supported by Fs, and in fact are paid as research assistants on RPGs, mostly R01s, and R35s. This doesn't undermine the argument of your article here at all, in fact given the cuts to Rs, this is likely to have an even bigger impact on the early career scientist pipeline. But the decision, or maybe it wasn't so much of a decision as it was a slide, to grow graduate programs via R grants was a phenomenally stupid one and has had all kinds of negative implications for training. Certainly a topic for another post. I was just noting the omission.
OK so far not a whole lot of movement with the T32s. F32s are crashing! But this seems to have stated pre 2025. What's that about? I still think that the biggest impact will come from cuts to R grants, which fund at least twice as many PhD students as Fs.
I choose to focus on this set of awards because I think the sharp decline is illustrative of the hypocritical claims from new NIH leadership about trying to support more early-career people. The individual awards are a large part of putting a scholar on a path to independence (not the only way, though!).
As you noted, the R, T, and center grants also support a ton of PhDs and Postdocs. They’re also the largest part of the NIH portfolio. New awards for them are contracting so heavily it’s making opportunities evaporate in real time!
This is super helpful, thank you. Not a good picture.
I'm laser focused on the F31 mechanism and an wondering the extent to which the decreases can be attributed to the discontinuation of the F31D mechanism. I guess you would see this by looking at 2023 and 2024, looking at the number of F31Ds in those years, and subtracting them from the total F31 numbers, and comparing those to 2025. A complication is that some of the canceld F31Ds were reinstated after some lawsuits. But no new F31Ds were issues and not all active F31Ds were reinstated.
When the F31D came along, I wondered why NIH didn't just increase the F31 budget to provide more F31s overall, rather than add more that were earmarked. I mean, I never imagined we would have such a hostile government, but the F31D made it very easy for them to reduce the number of F awards with the stroke of a pen.
On a related note, you don't mention at all here that the overwhelming majority of PhD students are NOT supported by Fs, and in fact are paid as research assistants on RPGs, mostly R01s, and R35s. This doesn't undermine the argument of your article here at all, in fact given the cuts to Rs, this is likely to have an even bigger impact on the early career scientist pipeline. But the decision, or maybe it wasn't so much of a decision as it was a slide, to grow graduate programs via R grants was a phenomenally stupid one and has had all kinds of negative implications for training. Certainly a topic for another post. I was just noting the omission.
Also, what about T32s? What's happening there?
You can see trends for many of these mechanisms on the NIH Data Book website. This page shows T32s and F awards: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/category/18
OK so far not a whole lot of movement with the T32s. F32s are crashing! But this seems to have stated pre 2025. What's that about? I still think that the biggest impact will come from cuts to R grants, which fund at least twice as many PhD students as Fs.
I choose to focus on this set of awards because I think the sharp decline is illustrative of the hypocritical claims from new NIH leadership about trying to support more early-career people. The individual awards are a large part of putting a scholar on a path to independence (not the only way, though!).
As you noted, the R, T, and center grants also support a ton of PhDs and Postdocs. They’re also the largest part of the NIH portfolio. New awards for them are contracting so heavily it’s making opportunities evaporate in real time!