Inside the NIH Forecast Graveyard

What NIH Is Canceling, What It Is Burying, and What It Means

This image was generated by Google AI (Gemini)

In my last essay I introduced the concept of the forecast graveyard, a growing pile of NIH Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) that are announced to the research community through grants.gov and then quietly never published. I have now done a deeper analysis of both the forecasts that were formally archived and the forecasts that remain listed as open as of this writing. Of the 35 forecasts that have been archived, 28 remain permanently canceled with no path forward. The picture that emerges is not haphazard. It is a story about two different strategies for eliminating research the current administration does not want to fund, and about a legal obligation to Congress that is being quietly abandoned.

Two Strategies, One Outcome

When people think about NIH cancellations, they typically think about explicit terminations of active, ongoing research grants killed overnight with a form letter. That is one kind of cancellation, and it generated the lawsuits and the headlines.

There is a quieter kind, and it operates through the NOFO forecast system. A NOFO forecast is supposed to announce a forthcoming funding opportunity. In it, NIH tells the research community that a funding opportunity is coming, gives investigators time to prepare, and then provides a projected date when NIH will publish the full NOFO. Instead, NIH forecasts are increasingly functioning as a way to give the appearance of activity while delivering none.

I have compiled and analyzed two lists: 35 forecasts that were formally archived, and 336 that remain open as of today. Of the 35 archived, 28 remain permanently canceled with no path forward, while 7 were eventually reissued in some form. Of those 336 open forecasts, 205 are already past their promised posting date. That is 61% of all open forecasts sitting overdue, with no full NOFO published and no explanation given to the research community waiting for them. The oldest two have been sitting since August 2024, now 581 days in the system. Both are NINDS forecasts for the BRAIN Initiative. One is overdue by nearly ten months; the other by six.

What Got Formally Canceled

The 35 archived forecasts were not all canceled at once, or by the same actors. They arrived in three distinct waves, each reflecting a different phase of the political pressure on NIH.

The first and largest wave came in April 2025, when DOGE swept out 24 forecasts in a matter of days. All carry the following notation in the grants.gov system:

“Archiving forecast pending further agency review.”

When you look at what those 24 have in common, the pattern is not subtle. Eight contained explicit equity, diversity, or health disparities language: funding opportunities for health equity research, diversity in aging, vision health equity, and cancer disparities in people with HIV. Seven involved substance use or alcohol research. Four involved HIV or AIDS. Six were workforce training forecasts. Several hit multiple flagged categories at once. The NIDA “Reaching Equity at the Intersection of HIV and Substance Use” forecasts combined HIV research with equity language and substance use, touching three screened categories simultaneously. These cancellations read like the output of a keyword search, because they almost certainly were.

To be fair, not every April 2025 archived forecast stayed buried. Seven of those 24 were eventually reissued in some form. Three of them, two NIA Alzheimer’s clinical trials and the NHLBI VINYL pediatric lung disease consortium, cleared the approval process and made it all the way to published NOFOs. Four others were reissued as new forecasts and remain in the system, still waiting. The Paul Calabresi Career Development Award in Clinical Oncology from NCI has now been in the forecast system for 19 months across two separate forecast postings, with its expected publication date already 119 days overdue. The NICHD Infrastructure for Population Dynamics Research Program has been in the system for 15 months and is 248 days past its expected posting date. It is worth noting what the three success stories (i.e., the NIA and NHLBI reissues) have in common: they are disease-focused, politically unambiguous, and carry no equity or DEI framing. The forecasts that cleared the process were the ones least likely to attract political scrutiny. That pattern holds even within the small population that got a second chance.

The second wave came in the late summer and fall of 2025, after DOGE had formally departed from NIH. Four more forecasts were archived between August and October 2025 by NIH leadership. These four include the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, a NICHD grant on bacterial STIs in HIV-affected adolescents, and two NIDCR training programs. Like the DOGE cancellations, these carry HIV and training content, suggesting the political screening criteria were already embedded in agency decision-making before DOGE left.

The third wave is ongoing. Seven forecasts have been archived since February 2026 by current NIH leadership, HHS, and/or OMB. This is where the story becomes more troubling, and the language shift in the grants.gov system is itself revealing. The earlier cancellations said “pending further agency review,” implying a temporary hold and leaving researchers with some hope of eventual publication. The 2026 cancellations carry a blunter notation:

“This NOFO will not be published. The Forecast is being archived.”

No ambiguity, no promise of reconsideration. These include a NIMH forecast for research on crisis response services for suicide prevention, an NIA T32 training program for aging research, an NIA short course for Alzheimer’s disease clinical trial workforce development, an NHLBI forecast for research on clonal hematopoiesis and chronic inflammation, the NIAAA Comprehensive Alcohol Research Centers P60 mechanism, and an NIDCR forecast for dental and craniofacial data analysis.

Only two of these seven contain equity or disparities language. The others were canceled for reasons that are not visible in their content. When forecasts for suicide prevention research and dental research methods are eliminated by the same process, the gate is no longer about flagged terminology. It is about control over what funding opportunities will be allowed.

What Is Being Left to Die Quietly

The more revealing story may be the forecasted opportunities that have not been formally canceled but have not been published either. Many of these appear to be expiring by neglect rather than by explicit decision, and the data support that interpretation.

Consider NIMHD, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. All seven of its open forecasts are overdue, by between 122 and 318 days. None have been formally canceled. The NIMHD forecasts involve health disparities research centers, minority institution programs, and the EmbraceHealth Clinical Research Network. These are precisely the kinds of funding opportunities that would attract attention and criticism if explicitly terminated. Letting them sit generates the same practical outcome, opportunities never posted, without creating the paper trail that a formal cancellation would.

NINR, the National Institute of Nursing Research, shows the same pattern. All six of its open forecasts are overdue. All six were posted in May 2025 and cover community-partnered nursing research, health disparities in rural populations, violence against women, and school health environments. They have been sitting for nearly ten months past their expected posting dates.

NIAAA, which posted zero NOFOs in all of 2025, is managing both strategies at once. Four of its forecasts were permanently archived while nine others remain listed as open, seven of them overdue by six to eight months. Researchers in the alcohol science field are sitting with a list of anticipated funding opportunities and no indication of whether any will materialize. The formal cancellations cleared out the most explicitly flagged content. The rest are just sitting.

The distinction between explicit cancellation and passive expiration matters for accountability. A canceled forecast leaves a record. A forecast that simply ages past its promised date never appears in a cancellation tally. For anyone tracking this policy, including Congress, the official record understates the damage by a substantial margin. That understated damage is especially concentrated in one category of funding opportunity that has received almost no public attention.

The Infrastructure Problem

More than half of all open forecasts (192 of 336, or 57%) are for coordinating centers, research networks, multi-site consortia, data hubs, and other large-scale infrastructure programs. These are the programs that build and sustain the platforms on which individual investigators do their work: clinical trial networks, data coordinating centers, SPORE cancer centers, genomic resource centers, and disease-specific research consortia.

Of those 192 center and infrastructure forecasts, 112 are already overdue, with a median overdue time of 166 days. That is notably longer than the 119-day median for other overdue forecasts, suggesting that large programs face a heavier approval burden. The reasons are not hard to understand. A coordinating center involves larger dollar amounts, longer project periods, and more complex programmatic coordination including a special emphasis panel review. Each of those factors adds friction in an approval process that was already slow and is now operating under a political bottleneck.

The consequences for ongoing research are serious. Large centers do not just support investigators applying for new funding. They sustain infrastructure that active researchers depend on right now: specimen banks, data repositories, clinical trial coordination, and training cores. When a data coordinating center’s renewal sits in forecast limbo for 150 days past its promised posting date, the uncertainty ripples outward to every project the center supports. NCI alone has 14 overdue center forecasts, with an average overdue time of 183 days. NINDS has 12. NIA has 10. NHGRI has 10.

Some of these programs have been waiting since mid-2025. The Experimental Therapeutics Clinical Trials Network (ETCTN) Lead Academic Organizations forecast was due in July 2025 and is now 242 days overdue. The Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials Consortium, one of NIA’s flagship clinical research programs, was due in August 2025 and is 241 days overdue. The HeartShare 2.0 heart failure research network from NHLBI was due in October 2025 and is 166 days overdue.

These are not small investigator-initiated grants that can be resubmitted quickly if timing slips. These are programs that require years of development, involve dozens of institutions, and provide the scientific infrastructure that individual investigators rely on for their own work. When they stall, the damage is not contained to the coordinating center. It spreads.

Congressionally Mandated Programs Are Not Exempt

The most legally significant finding in this analysis is the number of congressionally mandated research programs whose forecasts are now overdue with no movement. Congress established these programs through legislation and appropriated funds for them specifically. NIH does not fund them at its own discretion.

The BRAIN Initiative has eight open forecasts that are overdue, ranging from 54 to 301 days past their promised posting dates. The HEAL Initiative, Congress’s response to the opioid crisis, has five overdue forecasts ranging from 63 to 166 days. The Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program has three forecasts overdue by 243 days. This program was named for a child who died of a brain tumor and was established by Congress specifically to fund pediatric cancer and structural birth defect research. The INCLUDE Project for Down syndrome research has three forecasts overdue by 101 days. NIEHS Superfund and HAZMAT worker training programs have four forecasts overdue by 165 to 210 days, including worker health and safety training at DOE nuclear weapons sites.

When NIH fails to publish NOFOs for programs Congress has mandated and funded, it is not simply making a policy choice. Appropriated funds for specific programs that go unspent because the agency will not issue funding opportunities represent a potential violation of the Congressional Budget Act. This is not a hypothetical. It is the structural consequence of a system in which every targeted NOFO now requires approval from NIH/OD, HHS, and OMB before it can be published, and that approval is not arriving.

The Two Populations

The canceled and sitting forecasts reveal two populations of research being curtailed, though the methods used against each have grown more varied over time.

The first population is research with explicit political markers: DEI language, equity framing, HIV research, racial health disparities, and gender-related topics. Most of these were swept out in the first DOGE wave in April 2025, identified by keyword. The pattern was unmistakable and the grants.gov notation left little ambiguity about the intent.

The second population is everything else: basic biomedical science, workforce training, clinical infrastructure, center renewals, and congressionally mandated programs. What is striking is that this population is being curtailed through two different mechanisms simultaneously. Some have been explicitly canceled in the second and third waves, including forecasts for suicide prevention research, Alzheimer’s workforce development, and dental research methods, none of which carry any obvious political marker. The rest are being strangled by process, sitting overdue in the forecast system with no explanation and no path forward. Whether a forecast gets an explicit cancellation notice or simply ages past its promised date, the outcome is the same: research that was announced to the scientific community never materializes.

Every targeted NOFO now requires several rounds of approval both before and during the forecast process from NIH/OD, HHS, and OMB. Two hundred and five forecasts have passed their promised posting dates without a single public explanation from NIH. The forecast graveyard works because it offers no closure, no record of failure, and no accountability.

Researchers monitoring a BRAIN Initiative forecast cannot tell whether their anticipated funding opportunity is stuck in an approval queue, has been silently deprioritized, or is simply never going to arrive. Investigators keep waiting for the official NOFOs to post on grants.gov. Institutions keep planning. And nothing comes.

Of the 336 forecasts currently listed as open, 205 have already missed the date they were promised to the research community. Twenty-four of them are focused on topics that Congress specifically mandated and funded. One hundred and twelve are large centers and infrastructure programs that active research depends on right now. And not one of them has received a formal explanation, defense, or withdrawal.

That is not a funding pipeline. That is a waiting room with no appointments.

This essay is part of an ongoing series reflecting on what I learned over more than two decades working inside the U.S. biomedical research enterprise. Each piece stands alone, but together they examine how science is shaped not only by ideas and funding, but by the structures that support or constrain them.

In the service of open science, I have made the data underlying this analysis available for download here: NIH Forecasted NOFOs. This list of NIH forecasts was compiled from grants.gov as of March 30, 2026. Anyone working from the same source of publicly available data should be able to reproduce these findings.