Nih changes review rules reduce counted minority health research funding
Still funded, no longer counted: how NIH's 2025 award reviews changed what the government counts as minority health research
Digital LibrariesComputers and Society
Summary
The NIH changed rules for how funding awards must describe their work, removing diversity language from some projects. This led to many research projects still funded but no longer counted as minority health research because the descriptions no longer mention specific populations. The authors found that this change mostly affected projects involving Black and sexual or gender minority populations, even when reviewers agreed those projects fit the minority health definition. This means the government's counts underestimate how much minority health research it supports.
What this means in practice
- •For government funding agencies: Monitor how rule changes in award text policies affect the reported counts of minority health research to ensure accurate portfolio tracking.
- •For science policy analysts: Assess the impact of language policies in grant reviews on the visibility and categorization of research involving marginalized populations.
Authors
Fangfang Xie, Jingwen Zhang, Haining Wang
Abstract
Funders know their portfolios through software that classifies award text. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports its spending in more than 300 categories mined this way, and work on classification and indicators treats the text as the applicant's to write. In 2025 NIH required "DEI language" removed from awards not supporting DEI activities, and so policed the words it also counts. We followed population names through 37,790 continuing awards, checking them against practice records. Names were informative: in new awards with trial baselines, a title naming Black populations predicted a 60-percentage-point higher enrolled share. Text features predicted which names survived, and practice records added little. NIH's minority health category followed the names: of continuing projects carrying it, 99.4% with unchanged summaries kept it, against 15.7% of those whose summaries no longer named a racial or ethnic population, while the projects kept their funding. Blinded reviewers judged 42 of a random 50 such losses to have met its definition in FY2024. Comparing both summaries of 70 name losses, they found aims concerning the population recast in 49. Read alone, 63 FY2025 summaries no longer met the definition. Awards naming sexual and gender minorities were recorded as terminated 37.8 points more often after adjustment for listed terms, institute and activity. We call the mechanism word targeting, its boundary population targeting, and its product uncounted science: funded research the count no longer records. The count followed the edited text, and the edited record cannot say whether the research changed with it.