Government Accountability Office Report Says NIH Did Not Consistently Track Unused Funds

A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that the NIH “didn't consistently track unused funds or act when financial and progress reports from grant recipients were late.” CIDRAP has the news.

The report studied the roughly $35 billion in 65,000 external biomedical research awards in 2023. The GAO “reviewed agency policies, documents, and data through 2023, checked NIH monitoring data, and interviewed federal officials, including those from four NIH institutes chosen based on factors such as funding, staffing, and mission. The chosen entities were the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the National Eye Institute.”

The NIH is “the largest public funder of biomedical research in the United States, and more than 80% of its budget funds external research on health-related topics.” The NIH had been growing both in the amount of money it awarded in grants and the number of people it had been hiring until President Donald Trump “ordered agency leaders to prepare to fire staff on a large scale, which happened in the ensuing weeks, along with massive cuts to NIH-funded research.”

The GAO report found that nearly 1,000 final progress reports from grant awardees from 2014 through 2024 were “delinquent.” This means that the NIH did not close out those awards when the recipients did not comply with policy by “filing a final report within 1 year of project completion.” The NIH has also not developed an “informational resource to help recipients make the best decision about carryover. Nor does it require institutions to track even large unused balances, which are common.”

The GAO “recommended that the NIH identify and address factors behind delinquent final financial and progress reports in revised guidance, develop an informational resource for managing unspent funds, and require NIH institutes and centers to monitor unused balances across their award portfolios. The NIH agreed with all three recommendations.”