Multi-Year Funding

Grants are the Lifeblood of Biomedical Research in the United States

• Grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are an instrumental part of how biomedical research in this country is accomplished. As of 2023, nearly 82 percent of NIH’s funding is awarded for extramural research, largely through almost 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions in every state.
• Disruptions to grant delivery in the first half of 2025, following the presidential transition, posed a major challenge for researchers. New grant awards lagged by more than $2 billion compared to historical norms, reflecting a substantial slowdown in funding availability.

Multi-Year Funding has a dramatic impact on grant distribution.

• “Multi-Year Funding” (MYF) as implemented is undercutting biomedical research.
• MYF requires the NIH to provide grants in lump sums upfront, in the first year of research. This differs from the previous model in which a grant could be paid out incrementally, one year at a time. To illustrate the impact, take the case of a four-year, $2 million dollar grant. Before MYF, such a grant could fund four studies at once by giving each $500,000 on a year-by-year basis. Under MYF, the $2 million is all given to one study up front, dramatically reducing the number of studies that the NIH can fund each year.

MYF’s impact on research has already been devastating and has reduced the effectiveness of taxpayer dollars

• The National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute are funding thousands fewer grants than in recent years.
• Despite the NCI’s growing number of applications, it can only fund about 8 percent of them, far below the rate at other NIH institutes and centers.
• Multi-year funding (MYF) has significantly reduced the pool of funds available for new NCI awards. As a result, FY2025 saw a markedly lower number of funded grants than initially projected.
• Many innovative studies and treatments with broad potential benefit to Americans are being shelved, not due to a lack of appropriated funding, but because multi-year funding (MYF) constrains the funds available for new awards.

MYF undermines current NIH priorities and weakens the United States’s position on the world stage

• Current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, outlined the NIH’s priorities including training future biomedical scientists and more closely adhering to “Gold Standard Science”, which prioritizes transparency and accountability in biomedical research.
• MYF does not provide principal investigators with the financial flexibility originally intended.
• MYF limits oversight and accountability of long-range studies since it provides funding in a lump sum.
• Principal investigators have less time to spend grants, while the amount of grants able to be funded has been constricted significantly.
• The MYF policy disproportionately harms early-career investigators, reducing support at the very start of their research careers when they are most vulnerable.
• This unpredictability discourages trainees from entering research careers and creates long-term risks to the U.S. biomedical and cancer research workforce, undermining America’s global competitiveness in R&D.

AACI supports a grant delivery system that offers the most opportunities for the most researchers.