The Privilege to Wait
Academic research has always been a game of delayed gratification. When the system falls, waiting becomes a privilege.
Disclaimer: The views here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer or sponsors.
Today, I start a position as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. If you told me a few years ago that I would land a position at one of the premier public health schools in the globe, at a research institution like Johns Hopkins, I would not believe it.
My position is supported by a National Institutes of Health F99/K00 award. This is a grant designed to support a promising PhD student through their dissertation and into a postdoctoral position in which they establish the foundation for an independent research career. It is something I was only able to pursue because I was in a privileged position to wait through very long periods of uncertainty.
Waiting is a part of life. So is uncertainty. But the context around your life determines how long you can afford to wait and live in uncertainty. Privilege is not a skill, and often it is an inherited trait instead of an earned one. Despite claims of emphasizing merit and competition in science from senior government officials and their supporters, it is quite clear to me that the most valuable trait right now is the privilege to wait. This essay will highlight evidence demonstrating that claim.
Waiting Timeline
After submitting my grant application in October 2023, I spent 11 months waiting to receive the funds for my pre-doctoral fellowship. After submitting my Postdoctoral Transition Plan in October 2025, I spent another 5 months waiting to receive funds for my postdoctoral fellowship. In normal times, this kind of waiting is routine. You wait because the process works, and the NIH had credibility when it came to honoring its commitments.
These are not normal times. Over 2.5 years, my grant was assessed once by a scientific study section, in February 2024. I was asked twice to fundamentally rewrite my science after that review was already complete to comply with ideological demands from the NIH Director and Deputy Director. There were also two government shutdowns in the middle of my transition process.
Here is what that looked like:
October 2023: Applied for my F99 grant.
Waited 4 months to receive my score.
February 2024: Received my score.
Waited 7 months to receive my Notice of Award.
September 2024: Received my Notice of Award.
July 2025: Submitted my Year 1 Progress Report. One week later, received a notice that my award needed to be “renegotiated.” One-week deadline.
Waited 1.5 months.
August 2025: Received my Year 2 Notice of Award.
October 2025: Submitted my K00 Transition Plan, in the middle of a government shutdown.
Waited 3 months then got another renegotiation request.
January 2026: Received a request to “renegotiate” my K00 plan. One-week deadline.
January 2026: Submitted my revised K00 Transition Plan.
Waited 2.5 months.
March 2026: Received the Notice of Award for my K00 Transition. I can finally start my postdoc, 5 months after sending NIH the detailed plan outlining work I first described in brief in October 2023.
Two years and five months after my initial submission in September 2023, I transitioned to my postdoctoral position in April 2026. The entire purpose of the National Institute on Aging F99/K00 is to “transition a pre-doctoral student to aging research.” Through this award the latter part of my PhD and now my postdoctoral work focuses squarely on aging research. By the program’s own description, the mission was accomplished.
Earning this award was mentally taxing. It was taxing because of policy decisions that inflict real harm on early-career researchers. It was taxing because NIH staff were put in a position where they could not offer guidance on timelines for reviewing and administering awards. Unclear timelines undermine science. Unclear guidance on whether an award will even be delivered holds you in professional and personal limbo. You do not get to select for the best and brightest candidates when you create these conditions. You also do not get the benefits of innovative research, because you are building an environment so hostile that any rational person would consider doing their work elsewhere.
A funeral and a renegotiation
The second request to renegotiate my grant was particularly painful. The one-week deadline I was given overlapped with my grandfather’s funeral. The deadline for resubmitting my “renegotiated” grant was the exact day of his funeral. There is no process to request an extension for this forced renegotiation.
My grandfather died of congestive heart failure. His experience navigating healthcare (and many of my other family members) was the main reason I decided to pursue a career in health research focused on systemic issues. It is deeply ironic that I was instructed to strip the foundation of my work, work that was built on a body of scientific evidence and rooted in personal experience. I was told to remove the words that described why this research matters to me, and to the communities I study, under the premise that it was unscientific.
The grievances driving these policy changes are built primarily on anecdotes and a set of assumptions about health that ignore structural realities. The idea that health outcomes are principally a matter of individual choices, that people simply need to eat better, exercise more, and make smarter decisions, has a long history. It is the comfortable position. It also does not survive contact with the data. My grandfather did not die of congestive heart failure because he lacked willpower. He died in a context shaped by decades of limited access to quality preventive care, by the neighborhoods available to him, by the clinics that served those neighborhoods, and by how he was treated when he walked into those clinics. That is what my research studies. And that is what I was told to scrub from my grant. There is no evidence that removing this kind of research improves health outcomes, or scientific rigor, or the return on taxpayer investment. There is no published analysis showing that the termination of 977 NIH grants representing $1.7 billion in funding has advanced any of the goals that were cited as justification. There is no before-and-after comparison. There is no data. There is only an assertion that this research is ideological, made by people who have offered no scientific standard for that identification of “DEI” beyond their own preferences.
We know what arbitrary scientific standards look like in practice because we have seen it applied elsewhere. When the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) operatives arrived at the National Endowment for the Humanities last spring to identify grants for termination, they did not conduct a substantive review. According to court documents reported by the New York Times, two DOGE employees acknowledged in depositions that they had no background in the humanities. They fed grant summaries into ChatGPT with the prompt: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results flagged a documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust as DEI because it risked “amplifying marginalized voices.” An effort to digitize the papers of a British general from the American Revolution was flagged for “promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research.” Nearly every active grant made during the Biden administration was terminated. This is the rigor behind the ideological claim. When I was asked to renegotiate my own NIH award, I received similarly opaque instructions with no clear criteria and no precedent. Again, I ask: what is the rigorous standard here that prioritizes merit?
The privilege of patience
I was privileged enough to wait out the uncertainty of my renegotiation period. While I am not where I want to be financially, I had enough wiggle room. I went without a paycheck, aside from a part-time bartending job, and without stable health insurance for January, February, and March. By privilege, I mean this concretely: having no dependents, some financial cushion, and the personal circumstances to unexpectedly go three months without a full-time paycheck or health insurance. Many people who would be tremendous assets to this field cannot do that. Forcing trainees to demonstrate resilience during one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives is a fundamentally different value proposition than selecting for merit. As Jim Olds, former head of NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate, has written, the compensation for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers is staggeringly low, and prolonged periods of poverty-level wages justified through “training” dramatically limit the type of person who can play this waiting game. This is compounded by the fact that NIH’s budget, when adjusted for inflation using the Biomedical Research and Development Price Index, has never recovered to its 2003 peak. In FY2025, the inflation-adjusted NIH budget was nearly 9% below that level. Scientists are expected to produce more innovative work with less money, higher personal costs, and intensifying competition.
Prior to the current disruption, research was already a cutthroat environment where dollars drove the science. The disruption has made it worse. Schools of medicine and public health now have a smaller and less stable pool of money to attract and retain faculty. I have colleagues who are extremely well-qualified by every traditional measure (20+ quality publications, teaching experience, mentoring experience, clear paths to funding) who cannot get an interview for jobs that 5 years ago someone with half their experience could easily land. When I entered my program in 2021, postdoc positions stayed open for months and departments struggled to attract candidates given low salaries and relocation costs. Now, positions fill almost immediately, and young scholars have no negotiating power because so many people are simply looking for a place of employment.
The consequences are already measurable. A Boston Globe survey, the first of its kind to poll NIH-funded researchers about the impact of federal cuts, found that over two-thirds now recommend their students consider careers outside academia. 40% said their institutions had rescinded offers to students, staff, or postdoctoral researchers. 61% said postdocs or staff had been laid off. At UMass Chan Medical School, biomedical PhD enrollment dropped from 73 to 15 in a single year. As Nicholas Lemann, a staff writer at the New Yorker, detailed in a recent investigation, NIH grants to universities are down more than 90% this fiscal year, and the National Cancer Institute has not made a single new grant at the time of their article in March. Meanwhile, as the Guardian reported, young researchers are leaving the country for positions in Europe and beyond, with more than 10,000 postdoctoral experts lost from the federal scientific workforce last year alone according to Science magazine. European universities are openly recruiting American scientists for what they are calling “scientific asylum.”
Many people were not given the opportunity to survive
The experience of Jahn Jaramillo, a PhD candidate at the University of Miami studying HIV prevention in the Latino immigrant community, illustrates how the system is failing researchers who play by every rule. According to STAT News, the NIH terminated 405 F31 awards meant to fund doctoral students, and most were “diversity” awards. Jaramillo’s grant, which had received a perfect peer review score, focused on HIV in the Latino immigrant community. His work aligned directly with the Trump administration’s own stated initiative to end the HIV epidemic, and Miami is a high-priority area for that initiative. His grant was terminated anyway.
These “diversity” NIH grants were reviewed in the same study sections as all other awards. The applications were evaluated on the same criteria of scientific merit. Jaramillo scored the highest possible score. Still, his work was cut. His ability to engage research participants from a community that had never participated in research before, an asset enabled precisely by his identity and language, was turned into the reason his funding was pulled. Something that, by any honest measure, makes rebuilding trust in research harder.
This pattern is not isolated. Data reported by the blogger Drug Monkey (an anonymous biomedical scientist who has tracked NIH funding disparities for nearly two decades) and confirmed in a STAT News story shows that new fellowship awards to Black PhD students fell by 40% in FY2025. Awards to White trainees dropped by 9% over the same period.
The raw numbers make the scale of this undeniable. New fellowship awards to Black trainees dropped from 205 in FY2024 to 122 in FY2025. That is 83 fewer early-career Black scientists receiving funding in a single year. White trainees, by contrast, receive roughly 75% of all NIH fellowship awards in any given year, about 2,500 to 3,000 awards annually according to NIH Data Book figures. A 9% drop in a pool that large means roughly 250 fewer awards, spread across a population of thousands. A 40% drop in a pool of 205 turns a small pipeline to a trickle. While underrepresented minority researchers are disproportionately losing existing awards through terminations, and others like me are being forced to renegotiate, the odds of receiving a new award are simultaneously shrinking.
Science is shrinking for all. In FY2024, 3.7% of NIH research project grant PIs were Black. By FY2025, that number had dropped to 3.5%. A 0.2 percentage point decline may sound small. It is not. That figure is a trailing indicator, reflecting grants that were largely in motion before the full effect of the current disruption hit. The leading indicators are far worse: a 40% collapse in new fellowship awards to Black trainees, the termination of hundreds of diversity fellowships and awards that were specifically designed to build the pipeline from postdoc to independent investigator. There have been targets placed on “DEI” research topics, population health, health disparities, community-based work, that minority scientists disproportionately study. Add to that the moral injury of being told that your lived experience, is itself disqualifying. What should we expect the 3.5% of Black PIs to be by 2028?
The public conversation around DEI has been weaponized as though it is all about admissions slots at elite universities or corporate board composition. We now see a kitchen-sink approach targeting early-career minority researchers for whom even the standard of “merit,” the metric their critics claim to champion, confirms they belong. Researchers with the highest-scoring projects, including on topics that had nothing to do with their minority identity, are being told that science is not the place for them.
What comes next
I am living to fight another day. I also recognize that I am just one researcher. Researchers who were told between 2020 and 2024 that their voices and ideas matter, that their institutions would address deficiencies in their research programs and the composition of their staff, are now being picked away. Meanwhile, many of those same institutions are looking the other way.
On March 28th, I stood outside the NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, and spoke to about a thousand people who gathered as part of the nationwide “No Kings” protests. I shared a stage with Bill Bien, a lymphoma survivor whose life was saved by NIH-funded research at the National Cancer Institute. I spoke alongside Jeanne Marrazzo, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was placed on administrative leave and ultimately fired for resisting cuts imposed by NIH leadership. And I spoke alongside doctoral students whose research has been upended by this administration’s policies.
I told the crowd what I have written below (you can also watch the full speech on YouTube here):
“I became a researcher because I saw the needs of my family members not being met. I study discrimination in healthcare, and while I care about discrimination against Black adults because of my own experiences, no form of discrimination is acceptable because it stops people from seeking care in our health system. Apparently, studying whether people of any background feel listened to or welcome in healthcare settings is a topic so sinister that my career needed to be thrown into a prolonged state of uncertainty.”
I talked about trust, because that is what my research is about. I have heard the NIH Director talk about how his main goal is to restore trust within the NIH. But I told the crowd that his version of trust looks nothing like mine:
“The best science has always come from democratic processes: open competition, agencies honoring their prior commitments, and transparent criteria
…
What I see instead is one person trying to run science like a king, deciding which research is acceptable based on political ideology rather than scientific merit.
…
Trust does not come from going on podcasts claiming that it is important to you. Trust comes from clear processes and integrity. Trust comes from not letting your partisan beliefs ensure that thousands of scientists lose their jobs or get pushed out of the field.”
Institutional leaders need to reckon with the fact that the recent policy changes have not produced evidence that they are improving scientific outcomes. Congress increased the NIH’s FY2026 budget and rejected the proposed 40% cut and expansion multi-year funding scheme that contributed to 2,000 fewer grants being awarded in FY2025. The courts have repeatedly ruled on actions against science. And yet the instability continues. Institutional leaders have the data. They have the resources. What they lack is the willingness to demand accountability from the people dismantling the system they depend on. From my vantage point, you are being actively harmed whether or not you are silent. It is hard to ask your employees to keep doing their jobs if you do not fight for the policies that determine whether those jobs exist.
The incentive structure of academic research has been reshaped in a way that rewards the ability to endure uncertainty, which is a function of privilege, not merit. Incentives determine outcomes. Media tours about science do not lead to structural changes. My question for institutional leaders is this: come 2028 and 2029, what will you say to the next cohort of researchers who are supposed to join whatever iteration of university research exists then? What pipeline will be left? What trust will remain?
Planning for that future needs to happen today. Urgently. Because every month of passive policy is another researcher who did everything right and still could not afford to stay.
