Straws in the Wind - Part 204

From Stat: The MOSAIC program is the type of early-career research grant that checks many of the boxes of the Trump administration. National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya listed “training future biomedical scientists” as one of his top priorities, and has spoken often about the need to support researchers at the start of their careers, when they tend to do their most original work. MOSAIC is meant to do just that, funding scholars during the precarious transition from postdoctoral researchers under the wings of more established scientists to independent lab heads. Dispersing federal research funding, largely concentrated at private universities on the coasts, to the rest of the country is another NIH goal, and scientists supported by transition awards have a track record of migrating away from the coasts, and from private institutions to public ones. 

But none of that mattered. Over the first several months of the administration, the MOSAIC program was terminated because it was seen as running afoul of President Trump’s executive order to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. It was one of several awards that the NIH had created to diversify its grant recipients, targeting a point in the training pipeline where academia often loses people underrepresented in the field. It was offered to scientists from a broad range of disadvantaged backgrounds, defined more broadly than just race and ethnicity.

Many of the MOSAIC scholars felt betrayed, because they had been urged to seek funding through the program when they could have qualified for other training grants not focused on diversity. Now they’re scrambling for other jobs, or to set up their new labs with limited resources... 

Early-career scientists... have been pummeled by the administration’s various cuts. All told, 104 researchers saw their MOSAIC funding terminated, according to Grant Witness, an independent project tracking NIH grant terminations, although some have had their grants restored for now under a court order. In addition, a STAT analysis of NIH data shows that the agency awarded new transition grants to 172 fewer postdoctoral researchers in the nine months before the government shutdown than in the same period the previous year — a 10% reduction...

Full story at https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/08/trump-nih-cuts-impacts-next-gen-researchers-american-science-shattered-series/.