On February 7, 2025, a Health and Human Services (HHS) official told National Institutes of Health (NIH) staff that submissions to the Federal Register were on hold “indefinitely.” The Federal Register is the official daily publication from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in which NIH publishes notices of upcoming grant review panel meetings. Without the ability to post the required meeting notices, NIH can't hold the review meetings, and therefore can’t issue any grants, effectively blocking a significant portion of the agency’s grant funding.
After the Trump administration froze all federal grants and loans on January 27, 2025, two federal judges blocked the freeze. Aaron Hoskins, an RNA biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research has been affected by a frozen grant application, called the hold on posting to the Register an “exploitation of a ‘loophole’” in the grant approval process.
No meetings have been posted to the Federal Register since January 21, 2025. Moving forward, the administration will also require that grant review meetings be posted 35 days in advance, rather than the standard 15 days.
Update: The Trump administration is again allowing agencies to post mandatory meeting notices in the Federal Register, effectively lifting the freeze on advisory council meetings at the National Institutes of Health and allowing the grant review process to resume. The administration has also removed a hold on NIH study sections meetings at which grant proposals are initially peer reviewed.