C&EN: "Some chemists fear delays in NIH funding"

Via C&EN's Krystal Vasquez, this news: 

Scientists are on edge following the Jan. 22 cancellation of multiple meetings with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). There’s no tally of how many meetings were cancelled, but some included NIH study sections and advisory councils, which review grant and fellowship applications.

Chrystal Starbird, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, received an email stating that her study section, which was scheduled for the following week, would be canceled. The email from the federal health agency was vague and didn’t provide any reason for the cancellation, she says.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Pompano, a professor of chemistry and bioengineering at the University of Virginia, was supposed to attend a training session that day for an upcoming study section. The training session was canceled 20 min before it was set to start.

The cancellations came a day after the new administration of President Donald J. Trump put a temporary external communications freeze on all federal health agencies, though it’s not clear if the two are related. “It’s very concerning that everything has been stopped for review, which hasn’t happened in prior presidential transitions,” Pompano says. “It tells you there’s some major changes happening.”

The communications freeze at NIH, according to CNN, extends to purchases?: 

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have been told the communications pause announced by the Trump Administration earlier this week includes a pause on all purchasing, including supplies for their ongoing studies, according to four sources inside the agency with knowledge of the purchasing hold.

The supply crunch follows a directive first issued on Tuesday by the acting director of the Department of Health and Human Services, which placed a moratorium on the release of any public communication until it had been reviewed by officials appointed or designated by the Trump Administration, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN. Part of this pause on public communication has been widely interpreted to include purchasing orders to outside suppliers. One source noted they had been told that essential requests can proceed and will be reviewed daily.

Researchers who have clinical trial participants staying at the NIH’s on-campus hospital, the Clinical Trial Center, said they weren’t able to order test tubes to draw blood as well as other key study components. If something doesn’t change, one researcher who was affected said his study will run out of key supplies by next week. If that happens, the research results would be compromised, and he would have to recruit new patients, he said.

I have a very difficult time imagining that someone in the Trump White House wanted this to happen, but nevertheless, it's happened. Here's hoping that it's only the long-term prospects of grad students, postdocs and faculty that have been affected, and that the short-term, life-and-death aspects of the patients at the NIH Clinical Center will not actually been impacted by this stupidity. Best wishes to them, and to us all.