The National Institutes of Health’s director ordered employees to “conduct an individualized review of all current and planned research activities,” including active grants and funding opportunity announcements, according to images of a document provided to Inside Higher Ed. The review comes amid concerns that the NIH won’t distribute all of its allocated grant money by the time the federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30, meaning those dollars will return to the U.S. Treasury.

The document images, provided by a source who wished to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation, show that NIH director Jay Bhattacharya sent the memo Friday and that the review is effective immediately. According to the memo, “relevant NIH personnel” must review grants, funding opportunity announcements, contracts, contract solicitations, applications for new and competing renewal awards, intramural research and research training programs, cooperative agreements, and “other transactions.”

Science reported earlier on the review.

The order is part of a larger memo in which Bhattacharya outlined “select agency priorities” and said projects that don’t align with these priorities may be “restricted, paused, not renewed, or terminated.” The focuses are, among other things, artificial intelligence, “furthering our understanding of autism” and “ensuring evidence-based health care for children and teenagers identifying as transgender.”

In response to a request for an interview about the review and why it’s needed, the NIH press team sent a public statement from Friday, in which Bhattacharya listed the priorities.

Regarding health care for transgender youth, he said, “There are clearly more promising avenues of research that can be taken to improve the health of these populations than to conduct studies that involve the use of puberty suppression, hormone therapy, or surgical intervention.” He says that “by contrast, research that aims to identify and treat the harms these therapies and procedures have potentially caused … and how to best address the needs of these individuals so that they may live long, healthy lives is more promising.”

Bhattacharya’s letter comes after President Trump, earlier this month, ordered senior appointees at federal agencies to annually review discretionary grants “for consistency with agency priorities.”

Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that the president’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 already outlined a set priorities for the rest of the current year.

“Switching gears at this stage reinforces confusion, diminishes trust, and increases concerns within the scientific community,” Carney added. “It joins the long list of tactics risking impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds rather than funding biomedical research that is essential for the people’s well-being.”