Detecting “frozen” grants is one of the most difficult data science challenges we face at Grant Witness and we’ve made a number of updates to our methods in the past.123 Today, we launched one more important update to our methods that has affected the list of frozen/possibly unfrozen/ and unfrozen grants quite a bit.
There are many reasons why a grant may recieve $0 in outlays in a particular period including that it is simply fully paid out. Because of that, one of our criteria for a frozen grant is that its total outlays didn’t match it’s total obligations. At the time of the freezes, this worked. However, as grants became unfrozen and received additional obligations and outlays, this logic stopped making sense as it was using the current total outlays and obligations. The fix was to check that a grant was not fully paid out at the time of institutional targeting which we can get by subtracting outlays/obligations since the start of the freeze from the current total outlays/obligations.
We also made some changes to better account for the fact that grants may move away from or to institutions while they are experiencing a freeze.
The results are that, compared to last week, 134 grants no longer meet the criteria for frozen/possibly unfrozen/unfrozen because they were paid out or nearly paid out at the time the institutional freeze began and therefore are no longer in our data. On the other hand, 63 grants were added to our data with the status of frozen, possibly unfrozen, or unfrozen because they were not actually fully paid out when a freeze was enacted.
There is still an outstanding issue with frozen grants at Duke University. Many grants at Duke were frozen in late July of 2025 and while most of these frozen Duke grants still have not received outlays, a good number of them appear to have received outlays in December 2025 (our most recent outlay data as of the time of writing). Currently our criteria require that a grant must have no outlays the entire time an intitutional freeze is in place to be frozen, and as far as we know it is still in place. Because these grants don’t meet the criteria, they have been removed from our data rather than being updated to “unfrozen” status (116 of the 134 grants removed are currently at Duke). We are currently working on investigating what is going on at Duke with frozen grants and coming up with a definition that would better suit the situation.