A New Isolationism Will Diminish American Leadership in Science

Ongoing rule changes – including halting grant awards with foreign partners – represent a new isolationism that will diminish American leadership in science.

On May 1^st, following upon Nature reporting, the NIH issued guidance that undermines the ability of US-based scientists to collaborate with international partners. Effective immediately, “NIH will not issue awards to domestic or foreign entities (new, renewal or non-competing continuation), that include a subaward to a foreign entity.” The justification aims to appear principled: “In an effort to maintain strong, productive, and secure foreign collaborations in support of the NIH mission, NIH must ensure it can transparently and reliably report on each dollar spent.”

In practice, this means that awards will not be issued with substantial interactions with a foreign partner. The absence of awards means that many medical research projects will come to a halt irrespective of their innovation, rigor or potential to lead to drugs, diagnostics and therapeutics. Some scientists will lose their jobs and move on to other fields while others will choose to move abroad. Over time, this guidance will exacerbate a new isolationism that will diminish American leadership in science.

Unpacking the Guidance – How Science Funding Works

Science is hard. Teams of researchers spend years developing methods that can form the basis of strong hypotheses to understand how living systems work from molecules to cells to organism to individuals and populations. Understanding scientific principles can help translate basic research discoveries into patient-facing care.

The reason why researchers work in teams is also deceptively simple: science is complex. Researchers specialize and build collaborations by combining their skills in pursuit of a common challenge. Time and again, interactions between complementary teams is precisely what it takes to make breakthroughs possible. Although the US has significant expertise, there is world class talent all over the globe. As a result, many researcher partnerships are made up of teams based in the US and abroad.

The new NIH guidance takes aim at this global network of science collaboration: undermining projects connected by a passion for discovery and enhanced through dialogue. The guidance will have immediate consequences. After the delay of scientific review panels in early 2025, the NIH has begun to reconvene at least some of its previously scheduled scientific review groups. These groups are the front line of expert reviewing that assess the potential for discovery.

Competition for NIH funding is fierce. However imperfect, typically only 1 in 10 applications is funded. Precisely because of the complexity of science, there is often a 6-8 month gap between when a proposal is submitted and when it can read, assessed, evaluated, and funded. This means that grants that are being reviewed in April and May 2025 were typically submitted in Fall 2024.

Last year, the NIH had clear rules about foreign collaborations. Teams that submitted proposals had to include a foreign justification statement to address the rationale for why the specific expertise required to perform the project was located abroad. But today’s guidance throws that all away. Rules don’t matter & fairness is quaint. Teams that spent months preparing a proposal built on years of effort are now expected to wait only to learn that the rules have changed and that compliance with past requirements will not be honored. Although the guidance is ambiguous, it could also be interpreted to mean that ongoing funded collaborations will be halted.

The May 1^st NIH guidance goes even further, stating: “If a project is no longer viable without the foreign subaward, NIH will work with the recipient to negotiate a bilateral termination of the project, taking into consideration any need to support patient safety and/or animal welfare.” This statement contradicts the essence of collaboration. It specifically excludes working with foreign partners who were selected based on their complementary expertise. That complementarity was a required part of submission and assessed as part of the evaluation. It also means that US based scientists must now either do the work of other groups, for which they are not necessarily the experts, or forget about doing it at all.

The NIH Should Restore Regular Order

The May 1^st guidance from NIH is a mistake. It represents yet another step in a new isolationism that will diminish the capacity of US based institutions to lead and compete at a global stage. The mistake is reversible. As written, the guidance from NIH would penalize teams of researchers who proposed collaborative projects wholly consistent with NIH guidelines without taking into account the results of peer-reviewed panel scores. Instead, scientists should expect that the NIH will honor its commitments. The new guidance does not identify specific issues with performance or provide a basis for reconsidering a subset of grants that did not suitably comply with NIH rules on foreign justification statements.

Full disclosure: this guidance will impact many research teams, mine included.

For nearly a decade, we have been collaborating with an experimental team at the Institut Pasteur in Paris to advance the science of phage therapy as a means to treat antibiotic resistant infections. Likewise, since early 2021, we have explored virus transport with migrating bacterial populations with a research team based at the U of Exeter in the UK. We have one grant pending and one grant planned.

Whenever we submit a grant we do so with the understanding that our colleagues will scrutinize our application. We fail more often than we succeed. But we keep trying. The NIH’s guidance does something else altogether – it changes the rules on the fly and undermines the essence of what it means to create a level playing field where researchers compete on their merits.

It is time to restore regular order: the NIH should review grants in a way that is consistent with the guidance available at the time when opportunities were disclosed. If the leadership of NIH would like to see new protocols or financial restructuring of foreign subawards, then they should do so in regular order: solicit community input, evaluate alternatives, and then issue guidance that goes into effect with sufficient advance notice that allows teams to prepare to adapt, adjust, and compete.

The status quo of mistake making is unacceptable. In the absence of a reversal, the American taxpayers should begin to suspect that the increasing number of mistakes targeted against federal support for medical research are intentional efforts to dismantle and diminish American leadership in science. That kind of isolationism might work as talking points but it will have devastating consequences for the health and well-being of Americans and for America’s innovation economy.