The Trump administration has paused funding for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that include terms such as “health equity” and “structural racism” while they undergo additional review, according to new guidance issued to agency staff. The guidance stipulates that the review must first be conducted using a “computational text analysis tool” to scan for these and other terms that do not align with the administration’s priorities.
NIH staff have been ordered to review all new and existing grants that are not currently involved in litigation and to manually evaluate those flagged by the computational text analysis tool as having “any potential aspects of the project that do not align with NIH priorities.” According to the guidance, no new funding will be provided to flagged grants “until the project has been assessed, and all areas of non-alignment have been addressed,” including replacing flagged terms with “well-defined, scientific concepts that have objective and measurable variables.” Grants for which such changes can be made will be eligible for renegotiation, but grants that focus entirely on topics the Trump administration deems objectionable will not.
The guidance also limits the language that grants can include regarding gender, foreign affairs, race, and ethnicity, and states that health disparities research fits NIH priorities only if it is “directly influenced by healthcare or biomedical science.”
A Health and Human Services Department spokesperson said the tool “was developed to uphold gold-standard scientific rigor,” but did not respond to questions about who developed it, whether it uses artificial intelligence (AI), or which specific terms will be flagged.