The National Institutes of Health today clarified the restrictions on travel, purchasing, and meetings that President Donald Trump’s new administration imposed on NIH staff last week, easing some concerns about measures that set off chaos within the agency. It also appears that NIH could soon resume the meetings to review grants that are crucial to keeping dollars flowing to its grantees at institutions across the country.
In a memo sent to today to senior leaders, newly appointed acting Director Matthew Memoli stated, “There has been confusion on the scope of the pause” on “mass communications and public appearance” imposed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. “This is a short pause to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization,” Memoli wrote, adding that he “wanted to provide additional guidance and clarifications.”
Communications remain on hold except for “announcements that HHS divisions believe are mission critical,” Memoli said. Clinical trials at NIH’s Clinical Center on its main campus in Bethesda, Maryland, and at NIH-funded institutions will continue and patients can travel to NIH. A freeze on purchases will not apply to “anything directly related to human safety, human or animal healthcare, security, biosafety, biosecurity, or IT security,” the memo stated. Travel for such work can also continue, as well as hiring, provided the NIH director’s office grants an exemption to the hiring freeze.
Procurement and contracting for studies by in-house NIH researchers started before 20 January can proceed “so that this work can continue, and we do not lose our investment in these studies.” However, NIH intramural scientists cannot start new studies.
These intramural researchers can also communicate with collaborators, and the program officers who oversee extramural grants can talk to grantees about work funded prior to 20 January—and can meet in person if online meetings won’t suffice. NIH staff can also continue to submit papers to journals and abstracts to meetings, and they can correspond with journals about submitted papers. (Previously, some staff were told they could submit research papers but not opinion articles; the memo does not make that distinction.) But posting preprints, or unreviewed manuscripts, online is on hold.
The memo also states that routine travel “planned after February 1, 2025, does not need to be cancelled at this time.” However, staff should be aware that new guidance on travel to public events and meetings will be released on 1 February “if the pause is still in place,” Memoli wrote.
“This is all a lot clearer and more reasonable,” one intramural researcher who asked not to be identified told Science. The memo ends by saying additional guidance is expected from HHS this week.
One topic not explicitly mentioned in the memo is the NIH study sections and advisory council meetings where grants are reviewed and approved. The biomedical research community is in an uproar about the abrupt cancellation last week of these meetings, which are crucial to keeping labs afloat and trainees paid. But a spokesperson told Science in a statement that “no meetings have been cancelled after Feb 1.”
