Today we update our NIH grant tracker to remove 362 grants that appeared in court documents as court-ordered reinstatements, but were never detected as terminated by our system. Previously, we listed all of these grants as terminated, based on the assumption that an order for reinstatement implied prior termination. However, we have realized that grants that were not formally terminated may have been included in court documents for two main reasons:
They were non-renewed grants—the project’s budget year ended and the PI did not receive an expected notice of award for the subsequent budget year. Some of these grants may have never received a renewal, effectively ending the project, but this is a type of grant termination we don’t currently track (we are working on it though!).
PIs may have felt their grants were very likely to be terminated and submitted them as part of a lawsuit despite not having formally received a termination letter.
We now feel it is best that we remove any grants from the public data that were in these court documents but don’t have other signals of termination unless they were at institutions known to have been targeted by the Trump administration.
As always, if you have questions or notice any issues with our data, please let us know at info@grant-witness.us.