Last month, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jayanta Bhattacharya, gave the keynote address at the National Health Research Forum. He expressed concern about various problems facing early career researchers and pledged that the NIH would support them. Notably, however, he neglected to mention the biggest issue currently affecting early career researchers: recent actions by NIH leadership that—on his watch—have thrown biomedical research in the United States into chaos.
I am a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and a steward of the NIH Fellows Union–UAW 2750, which represents more than 5,000 early career researchers across the NIH. Over the past eight months, early career researchers at the NIH have faced setback after setback, affecting our training and research. These challenges are still ongoing.
Early Career Researchers Are Struggling on NIH Campuses
Currently, we struggle to get supplies for our work due to the reduction in force that impacted over 1,300 NIH employees, including many essential administrative, purchasing, and communication staff. When leaks sprung in our building, threatening our sensitive scientific equipment, I found out that the people responsible for fixing the building had been fired. For months, the lack of purchasing agents has created bottlenecks for acquiring essential research supplies. These bottlenecks have gotten so bad that some labs have had to ration gloves and paper towels.
We no longer have access to equipment service contracts, lab managers, technicians, and training programs due to the cancellation of $2.6 billion (35 percent) of NIH contract spending. Without equipment service contracts, we now have to choose between paying exorbitant fees or giving up on research projects entirely when our equipment inevitably breaks down. With the ongoing hiring freeze, highly trained early career researchers can no longer transition to more permanent positions at the NIH, so we are losing top talent who want to stay in the United States and contribute their unique skills to our economy but are now being forced to look elsewhere. On top of all of this, clinical fellows don’t have enough patients to treat, because patients are understandably reluctant to come to an understaffed facility that has even detained some patients at its gates.
Early Career Researchers Across the United States Face Uncertainties
The effects of NIH leadership’s actions also have ramifications for early career researchers beyond the internal NIH training program. Across the United States, early career researchers have been hit hard by the funding uncertainties created by the NIH terminations, delays, and withholding of funding to trainees, labs, and academic institutions, implementing a 15 percent cap on Facility and Administration (F&A or indirect) costs, and awarding fewer grants this year by abruptly switching to the use of multi-year funding.
As a result, prospective students spent time and money applying to graduate and medical schools only to learn that many of these schools were reducing or no longer accepting students this year. Some schools even rescinded acceptance letters after sending them out. Junior graduate students are struggling to find labs to join. Senior graduate students are struggling to find postdoctoral researcher positions.
In one survey, nearly half of postdoctoral researchers reported that their jobs or positions have been threatened, and in another, 70 percent reported reduced access to mentorship and career development opportunities. Senior postdoctoral fellows are struggling to find faculty positions because universities have tightened their budgets and implemented their own hiring freezes.
Support from NIH for these early career researchers amidst all these funding uncertainties has been severely lacking. One postdoctoral researcher transitioning to a faculty position told me that the NIH took away their fellowship when their university was forced to switch their new position from a tenure-track to a non–tenure-track position.
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NIH Early Career Researchers Met with Bhattacharya
In early April, I, along with other representatives of the NIH Fellows Union, wrote to Bhattacharya laying out the issues facing early career researchers and requesting an urgent meeting. After repeated follow-up requests were ignored, we staged several public displays of dissatisfaction. He eventually agreed to meet with us—four months later.
In advance of our meeting with Bhattacharya, we spent significant time preparing and assembling a group of early career researchers who could give him firsthand accounts of the issues we are facing and propose actionable solutions to these problems. When we got to the meeting, each representative clearly presented their case. Yet, the meeting ended with no commitments or timelines for addressing any of these issues.
In his keynote address at the National Health Research Forum last month, Bhattacharya expressed concerns that early career researchers are leaving science. But it is not just “science” per se that we are leaving. Rather, due to recent NIH actions, more than four in five early career researchers are considering leaving academia or relocating outside the United States. When I directly pressed Bhattacharya about this exodus during our meeting, he said that if researchers did not like the way things are in the United States, they were welcome to go elsewhere. More than two months later, we have had no follow-up and seen no evidence that Bhattacharya intends to take action.
Taking Our Future into Our Own Hands
So, where does that leave early career researchers? While some might be happy to relocate, many, including myself, do not want to (or cannot afford to) leave the United States. Nor do we want to forsake the specialized research that we have spent decades training for. We want to stay and contribute to the next big scientific discoveries that boost the United States economy and improve the health and wellbeing of Americans, as well as people across the globe. We want to make these discoveries here, where they can lead to new and better treatments for cancer, infectious diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, mental health disorders, substance abuse disorders, cardiovascular disease, and many other conditions.
Given the current situation, it is abundantly clear that early career researchers need to take their futures into their own hands. We do have influence when we come together. We need to join groups and build coalitions to advocate for our interests and for the future of biomedical research.
One great example is the growing movement of academic workers who are organizing and unionizing. In fact, the UAW now represents over 120,000 academic workers across the United States. These unions have been the first line of defense against attacks on science and early career researchers. They have initiated lawsuits against the cancellation of grants, supported workers who have been affected by funding uncertainties, and lobbied Congress to support robust research funding.
Thanks in part to union efforts, the proposed Fiscal Year 2026 Senate budget bill includes an increase in funding for the NIH, protections against multi-year funding (which counterintuitively leads to funding scarcity), support for early career training programs, and a comprehensive strategy to reevaluate indirect costs in place of the current arbitrary 15 percent cap. Academic workers can help with these efforts by joining and supporting unions.
In addition to supporting unions, all of us should join and support organizations and coalitions that have been working to support biomedical research, public health, and science more generally, including the Union for Concerned Scientists, Stand Up for Science, Defend Public Health, and others.
Closer to home, each of us as a scientist or science enthusiast has a place in teaching the public about the importance of biomedical research and the value of early career researchers. Most people in our local communities don’t know about what’s happening to science right now. Only by going out into our communities and talking to people—by tabling at farmers’ markets, hosting teach-ins at cafes or bars, talking to reporters, chatting with our neighbors, and, of course, reaching out to elected officials—can we garner the public support we need to truly support early career researchers like me.
