Oh the NIH grant applications with October Council reviews! They lead to such consternation among applicants.
Remember that at the first level review (the study section), reviewers award a score, not money. The second level review (at Council) is where award decisions are made — and contrary to popular belief, the decision is not based entirely on the score. Unfortunately, if your application is discussed at an October Advisory Council for your institute, your funding decision is being made just as NIH is awaiting its funding bill from Congress. For those who do not know, federal agencies have an October 1 fiscal calendar. However, Congress rarely has funding bills approved by October 1 — except in presidential election years, when Congress sometimes approves a bill quickly to demonstrate to voters that they can ‘play nicely’ with their colleagues. For most years, on October 1 there is no funding bill and federal agencies operate on a Continuing Resolution, which is a temporary spending bill. With a CR in place, most ICs will operate at 80% of their previous year’s budget, to be on the safe side, until they get a firm budget number for the new year.
NIH is currently operating under a Continuing Resolution, meaning that they do not yet have a funding bill from Congress and do not have a firm budget number for FY23. That can delay funding decisions. It looks like there is already a draft bill from the Appropriations Subcommittee, with some comfortable increases yet again for NIH. But Congress has not yet approved the entire funding bill for Health and Human Services.
What does that mean? It means that if your application was reviewed at October Council, your funding decision is likely to be delayed. There isn’t much you can do but sit tight and await the funding bill, after which the ICs will finalize their FY23 budgets, after which (hopefully) you will receive your NOA.
