Last month, Dr. Michael Lauer, NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research, explored a question that routinely confounds investigators: “Why don’t success rates neatly track the NIH budget?”
In the blog post “How Grant Success Rates Do (Or Do Not) Track With the NIH Budget: A Model of Funding Dynamics,” he builds a scenario around a hypothetical funding agency that receives a constant annual budget and a constant incoming application volume to make a constant number of awards (which are assumed to all be the same size and for the same length of time) at a constant success rate. Then he introduces real-world complications—budget increases and cuts, changes in application volume, and inflation—to show how those factors impact the annual success rate.
A key takeaway is that outyears—our term for the supported years of a grant beyond the initial year the award was made—largely explain the discrepancy between annual changes in the NIH budget and success rates. The volume of awards that NIH is already obligated to fund each year can amplify, limit, or delay changes in success rates following a change in the overall budget.
We encourage you to read Dr. Lauer’s explanation in full to better understand this topic, as well as the 2012 paper that inspired it: Magnified Effects of Changes in NIH Research Funding Levels.