The National Institutes of Health wants to stop telling grant applicants their scores — and scientists aren’t happy about it, as Adam Kovac reports for Scientific American. Critics warn the change would reduce transparency and invite political meddling in funding decisions.
Under the current system, at least three expert peer reviewers evaluate each NIH grant application, write up its strengths and weaknesses, and score it from 1 to 9, with 1 being best. Applicants learn the average, called the impact score.
The proposal would swap that number for three broad buckets: “most competitive” (top 25 percent), “competitive” (the next 25 percent), and “not discussed” (the bottom half). According to an NIH document outlining the rule change, the goal is to communicate “valuable information about the assessed scientific merit” while giving program officers more flexibility in making awards. Applicants would still receive written critiques, including individual criterion scores.
Joshua Weitz, a biology professor at the University of Maryland, argues that an application scoring in the top 1 percent could be treated the same as one that barely cracked the top quarter. “By concealing scores, the NIH proposal would make it harder for program officers to assess consensus, lead to greater uncertainty for applicants and undermine scientific peer review,” he told the magazine.
Weitz sees the move as part of a broader pattern. Earlier this year, a Trump administration plan to let political appointees, rather than peer review panels, pick grant recipients drew heavy backlash and was put on hold until at least December after Congress rejected it. “In the absence of transparent data sharing, there is an increased risk that political priorities override scientific review in grant decisions,” Weitz says.
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Research groups echoed his concerns. The North American Vascular Biology Organization warned the change “will compromise accountability, and breed uncertainty, inefficiency, and distrust,” and hamper congressional oversight. The public comment period on the proposal, which opened in August, has now closed.
