Buck Institute Reports 42% Drop in NIH Funding and $11M in Lost Grants

Buck Institute Reports 42% Drop in NIH Funding and $11M in Lost Grants

On September 30, the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, an independent nonprofit in California devoted exclusively to the science of aging rather than any single disease, announced the loss of $11M in grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). On its fundraising page, the institute specified that this revenue had fallen 42% since the start of fiscal year 2025. Work on Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, cancer, and neurodegeneration now faces delays.

The formal NIH budget has barely changed: in 2026, Congress blocked the 41% cut proposed by the Trump administration. But between the dollar Congress approved and the lab's bank account, a filter with no statutory basis has taken hold in the agency's own practices.

Buck survived the first such threat thanks to someone else's legal victory. In February 2025, NIH imposed a 15% cap on indirect costs across all grants; Buck CEO Eric Verdin warned of losses of $8–10M per year. It was not Buck but university associations and hospitals that took the cap to court and won: a judge blocked the cap in April 2025, an appeals court upheld the ruling in January 2026, and the protection extended to all NIH grantees.

While that litigation was underway, funding began stalling in a different way: in how NIH processes applications that have already been approved. Jennifer Troyer, who until the end of 2025 headed the grants management division at one of the NIH institutes, told NPR about a designation called Status 19: an application clears peer review and then hangs without a formal rejection, under review by the White House or the budget office.

"Even as a director, I didn't know this status existed until applications started getting stuck in it"

The grants administration staff at her institute shrank from 11 to three.

Since 2025, approved grants have been issued with a delay of 42–44 days relative to the pace of 2021–2024, and renewals of multi-year grants are delayed by 90 or more days at 4–6 times the previous rate. Past that threshold, reserves run out, putting experiments and jobs at risk. The money that does arrive is being redirected according to the administration's priorities: research on racial health disparities has lost more than $1B, while artificial intelligence received $468M, one of the largest increases. By Troyer's estimate, roughly half of outgoing grants are being rewritten: applicants remove words from an undisclosed list, including "climate change," "gender," and "inclusivity."

Where rewording offers no escape, budgets are cut directly: the San Francisco Bay Area cancer registry, led by UCSF (University of California, San Francisco) professor Scarlett Lin Gomez, dropped from $5.4M in 2024 to $3.7M in 2026. She has already laid off seven of about fifty staff members.

On September 18, OMB (Office of Management and Budget) Director Russell Vought accused NIH of funding projects "inconsistent with administration objectives" and proposed an executive order creating a board with veto power over every NIH grant. This was the third attempt in 14 months by OMB to assert control over grants: on September 1, Congress blocked until December 11 a similar May rule requiring political review. By September 23, the plan appeared dead: Republican Senator Susan Collins demanded that Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya halt it.

Congress sees no cuts in the final budget, but Buck's loss fits the same pattern NPR documented at UCSF: an administrative filter with no name and no defendant in court. The institute is now raising these $11M directly from donors.