Fact Check, Part 2: NIH Director Conceals the Harmful Consequences of Multiyear Funding Transition

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya oversells benefits, ignores harms from the rapid transition to multiyear funding during the March 17, 2026 House Appropriations Committee Hearing

“Sometimes for early career scientists, what you need is a front loaded grant…”

-NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya claiming falsely that multiyear funding benefits early career scientists

Figure credit: @jeremymberg.bsky.social

Welcome to the second edition of our series fact checking NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya! This series is brought to you by recent and current NIH staff (in our personal capacities), as part of our fight for scientific integrity at the NIH and for future treatments for our fellow Americans. We hope it will help prepare you to distinguish fact from Bhattacharya’s fictions when he testifies later this week before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies.

This series focuses on where Bhattacharya flagrantly mischaracterized, obfuscated, or just plain lied about the state of NIH under oath to members of Congress during the March 17 House Appropriations Committee hearing. In case you missed it, we covered NIH’s ability to spend 2026 funds this past weekend. Today, we address multiyear funding (MYF).

In fiscal year (FY) 2025, the White House mandated that NIH multiyear fund 50% of its new research awards. Because MYF awards the full dollar amount of a 4- to 5-year grant upfront, each MYF award uses a larger portion of the annual budget and reduces the number of new awards. (You can either pay for 4 grants for 1 year each, or 1 grant for 4 years.) As a result of the MYF mandate, NIH funded 24% fewer new research awards and had a substantially lower application success rate in FY25 compared to FY24.

In the words of United for Cures and 33 Patient Groups, “It saves the taxpayers no dollars, but costs them cures.”

Despite the substantial drawbacks of MYF, Bhattacharya, ignoring these well-known ill effects, tried to shift blame for low success rates to AI-generated applications, and overstated the benefit to early stage researchers, who now face launching their careers during a period of extreme competition.

What Bhattacharya said

In response to Representative Hoyer, asking about the sharp reduction in paylines caused by multiyear funding:

“...we fund roughly about 8 -10% of the grants... the previous year, there were people that were putting in 60 grants applications... the total number of applications includes a lot of AI-generated content. We’ve taken action to try to address that. The pay lines are, of course, a numerator and a denominator.”

In response to Representative DeLauro:

“So yeah, I’m committed to following exactly what you all told me to do. So whatever that limit [for multiyear funding] is.”

“Sometimes for early career scientists, what you need is a front loaded grant, because they’re building their lab and so they can’t wait till year two or three to get the money to build the labs. So it’s scientifically justified to have it front loaded. And I’ve been focused on when we’re front loading to make sure that it has that scientific justification.”

What’s actually happening

While Bhattacharya committed to adhering to the MYF limit set by Congress in the FY26 appropriation bill, the bill only limited MYF to the level used in FY25. Thus Bhattacharya only committed to the same level of MYF that contributed to a 24% decrease in new NIH-funded research and constrained award success rates in FY25 relative to FY24. Thus, we can expect similar constraints on new research funding in FY26, even if Bhattacharya adheres to the appropriation bill. Fewer grants were funded in FY25 than in previous years, largely as a result of MYF mandates. According to NIH data, the success rate (awards per application) was 13% (8,161 awards of 62,592 applications) in FY25, compared to:

• 19% (10,265 awards of 55,418 applications) in FY24

• 21% (11,052 awards of 51,883 applications) in FY23

• 21% (11,311 awards of 54,571 applications) in FY22

• 19% (11,229 awards of 58,872 applications) in FY 21

While the number of applications (denominator) did increase in FY25 by 13%, the number of awards fell by a much larger proportion: 20%. Thus, the reduction in the numerator (i.e., funded awards) was the primary driver in the drop in success rate in FY25. Instead of acknowledging the low success rate in FY25 and the role that MYF played in it, Bhattacharya distracts with a an exaggerated example. While NIH did identify a single case where a PI submitted more than 40 (not 60) applications in a single year, the case is an extreme outlier, and not a primary driver of the drop in success rates.

As for the benefits of MYF, any that exist far outweigh the costs of the top-down MYF mandate implemented under Bhattacharya. NIH applicants have always been able to request a higher amount in their year one budget, if needed. Further, the MYF mandate divorces scientific considerations from decisions about whether to use MYF on an individual grant, forcing NIH to MYF grants regardless of the scientific justification. Importantly, some grants are not amenable to multiyear funding, such as clinical trials, because many trials exceed the 5-year shelf life of obligated funds. MYF also reduces the ability for program staff to oversee research progress on awarded grants or to ensure money is being spent appropriately.

What you can do

• Stay informed!

  • Read the full fact check on the 27UNIHTED website.

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  • Look out for the next post in our fact check series on how NIH has implemented discriminatory censorship of research.

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• Call your members of Congress and urge them to enact protections for NIH, including limiting the pace of any transition to multiyear funding.

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