Sneak Preview: NIH Touts Results of Peer Review Changes
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) transition in 2025 to a centralized peer review system under the NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR), “has effectively increased efficiency while strengthening peer review processes,” wrote CSR Acting Director Bruce Reed in a recent blog post. However, Reed also acknowledged that “important challenges remain, and we look forward to continued engagement with the research community to thoughtfully address them and further strengthen the peer review system in the years ahead.”
In March 2025, NIH announced that all peer review would be consolidated and centralized within CSR as a cost-saving, efficiency effort, adding that it “would maximize scientific competition to better identify the most innovative ideas.” The agency noted that the new system is expected to save more than $65 million annually by eliminating duplicative efforts throughout the agency. More than 80% of NIH’s funding overall supports research institutions across the country, largely through competitive grants.
Under the new peer review strategy, CSR assumed responsibility for the first level of peer review of all applications for grants and cooperative agreements and proposals for contracts. The Advisory Council/Board of the potential awarding NIH institute/center (IC) performs the second level of review. Reed recently provided an update on the consolidation and its initial effects on the peer-review process.
Also impacting the new peer review strategy is NIH’s implementation of a new Unified Funding Strategy (UFS) announced by Director Jayanta Bhattacharya, M.D., in August 2025. At that time, Bhattacharya outlined UFS and the benefits of NIH taking a “holistic approach to award decisionmaking” (see “NIH Releases New Grant Funding ‘Strategy’”). In November 2025, NIH announced that it would implement the UFS framework to align NIH priorities and funding approaches, and create a plan for consistent and transparent funding decisions by institutes, centers and offices. The framework provides “the rubric,” NIH said, by which ICO funding strategies are to be “developed, implemented and evaluated.”
Bhattacharya established a dozen priorities to ensure that his agency’s mission is fulfilled and implemented through funding decisions consistently made across all ICs, and that his agency supports “quality projects” selected based on the scientific merit of the proposal. He went on to underscore that the strategy attempts to balance “scientific opportunity with mission-critical objectives.”
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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