Back in June, we added indicators for frozen grants in response to a wave of funding freezes at targeted institutions. This list of frozen grants was created carefully by our data scientists, but wasn’t made part of our semi-automated pipeline that updates our data roughly weekly until now. In the process of automating detection of frozen funding from USAspending File C, our definition of “frozen” has changed slightly. Also, grants at several institituions targeted for freezes have since been unfrozen, and now we can confirm that with data on grant outlays.
Candidates for frozen grants must meet the following criteria:
- At an institution that has been targeted for freezes
- Has a project end date after freezes began
- Between the month after the month in which the targeting began and the month before the month in which the targeting ended, received only outlays < $100.
- Has had total outlays of at least $100 in the 6 months prior to the start of targeting
- At least 20% of the periods prior to Jan 2025 had positive outlays (this excludes grants that have no info in File C before Jan 2025 as well)
- Aren’t 100% outlaid (i.e. the total outlaid is not equal to the total award amount)
- If they are within 3 periods of the project end, aren’t more than 95% outlaid
Finally, if a frozen grant was since terminated, it is listed as terminated.
This definition is slightly different from the original definition we used and while we believe it is still quite conservative, it captured an additional ~400 frozen grants that were not previously in our initial attempt in June (we also added Duke University to the list of targeted institutions since then).
“Possibly Unfrozen” grants are grants that met the above definition at some point, but are no longer known to be targeted (e.g. at Columbia and Brown, due to capitulation to White House demands). “Unfrozen” grants are “possibly unfrozen” grants that have received outlays after targeting ended. Frozen grants that reached their project end date before receiving outlays remain listed as “frozen” or “possibly unfrozen”.
In the spirit of transparency, in the downloadable CSV, frozen grants have a file_c_outlays column listing the history of outlays from usaspending File C and targeted_start_date and targeted_end_date columns indicating the time the institution was targeted for freezing. You can also now see the outlay history for frozen grants in the individual record view by clicking on a row in the NIH table.
Terminated grants that have been reinstated, but are also at institutions targeted for freezes, currently show up as “Possibly Reinstated” (as opposed to, say, “confirmed reinstated”) even if the outlay history shows recent outlays to those grants. Eventually we will also use File C outlay data to confirm that “possibly reinstated” grants have received outlays, but for now it is only used to confirm unfrozen grants.
If you spot any frozen grants that you don’t think should be marked as such, please don’t hesitate to contact us.