The National Institutes of Health unveiled a plan on March 6 to move the peer review of grant applications, cooperative agreements and research and development contracts to a central location at the agency’s Center for Scientific Review (CSR). The move is intended to save more than $65 million annually, the agency said.
Peer review at the NIH is done in two phases, with the first traditionally taking place either at CSR or within one of the agency’s institutes and centers (ICs). If this policy change is enacted, the first step of review will always take place at CSR, before moving to advisory councils at the ICs and the Office of the Director.
“At NIH, we are working to optimize our resources to support the best science,” acting NIH director Matthew J. Memoli, M.D., said in the announcement. “By centralizing the peer review process, we will not only reduce costs—we will also improve the quality, consistency and integrity of review, and maximize competition of similar science across the agency.”
CSR uses about 0.3% of the NIH budget to review more than 66,000 applications, the agency said, while ICs cost about 300% more than CSR to review grants.
The NIH consists of 27 ICs which each cover specialized areas of medicine or research. These include the National Cancer Institute, National Institute on Aging and National Library of Medicine, for example.
The grant applications that come out of NIH typically come from one of the ICs, the agency explained in the announcement. CSR currently handles peer review for more than 78% of all NIH grants, with the remainder reviewed by subject-area experts at the respective ICs.
“Centralized peer review will mitigate the potential for bias by entirely separating the peer review and funding components of NIH,” CSR director Noni Byrnes, Ph.D., said in the announcement.
Related
NIH cancels some grants for LGBTQ+ health research effective immediately: Stat
Jeremy Berg, Ph.D., who served as director of the NIH's National Institute of General Medicine from 2003 to 2010, wrote on social media website Bluesky that ICs handle some reviews because they have specialized knowledge and better understand the goals of the funding programs, as well as to reduce the burden on CSR.
Saving $65 million per year on review could require terminating 260 out of 375 review staff from the ICs, Berg estimated.
These staff members "are not dots on an org chart," Berg wrote. "They are real scientists, who have committed years of their lives to helping NIH review applications rigorously."
The proposed centralization of grant review is not yet final, the NIH said, as it is still under review by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget. Congress also needs to be provided a 15-day notification period, and the proposed change will be posted to the Federal Register.
The proposed peer review shake-up is the latest possible change to NIH funding under the new Trump administration. The administration tried to freeze some research funding, including using an administrative loophole, but a judge blocked those efforts on March 5.
Meanwhile, some NIH grants for LGBTQ+ health research have also been scrapped, while agency leaders have departed—including former NIH Director Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D.