BY PAUL SHAFER AND MONICA ASWANI

As junior faculty members in health policy, we both heard the advice: Get a pilot grant, generate preliminary data, and then go for the big one. We have been fortunate enough to get multiple pilot grants between the two of us, allowing us to hire research assistants to build datasets that have catalyzed further research and even yielded several publications along the way. However, the second Trump administration has dramatically changed the landscape of federal grantmaking through funding freezes and cuts, while simultaneously introducing controversial criteria into the review process that has raised concerns about political appointees influencing grant application outcomes. As a result, the downstream payoff in future grant funding from pilot grants has become a lot more questionable, particularly if your research may be viewed as politically risky by funders.

Pilot grants are often pitched by universities and their research centers as a way for scholars to get seed funding to advance their work, but they often come with a catch: no salary support. For those in so-called hard money positions, such internal pilot grants are a great way to fund a research assistant, buy data and research supplies, or cover other needs in a less burdensome and less competitive way than pursuing external grants. But for those of us in the soft money world, which requires faculty to get grants to cover some to all of their salary, the value proposition for pilot grants has become less clear.

Large extramural research grants from the National Institutes of Health and major foundations often require preliminary data, which pilot grants can help create. But without salary support, and in a funding environment where the number of federal grants has contracted dramatically, pilot grants may warrant more strategic thinking. If you are an early-career researcher and have a few years of protected time to build your portfolio, apply away! If your job security depends on funding now and next year, then decisions about taking on more unpaid work through a pilot grant without salary support, as opposed to writing the larger grant from the get-go may be a toss-up.

We were both recently promoted to associate professor—Paul last year and Monica this fall—so we, thankfully, have more room to take risks. We are part of a multi-institutional team that has been pursuing an exciting project at the intersection of political science and health, assessing how political affiliation affects how patients use health care and how doctors deliver it. Paul was successful in getting two pilot grants to support much of the cost of a novel data linkage of voter registration with all-payer health insurance claims data, neither of which offered salary support. We worked with one state over multiple years to build the political support and protocol for conducting this research. We have highly regarded scholars on our team and a compelling case that no one has been able to do research quite like this in the United States before.

Despite this track record, we have continued to strike out with larger proposals. This era of slashed and scrutinized federal research funding is even spilling over to risk aversion on the part of private funders. We need funding to support the investigators and trainees to follow through on the cutting-edge research that we could do with the data infrastructure that we have built. The comments accompanying a recent funding rejection, fortunately and unfortunately, said the quiet part out loud: “I am concerned that this study will not be well-received given this current political environment . . . and I am concerned that this study can also harm [the funder’s] reputation,” despite another set of reviews noting that “the significance of this proposal is very high.” Many strong proposals are not funded, regardless of their merit, in a competitive funding environment, but avoiding topics for fear of political response is a new and unfortunate twist for scholars to consider in their career strategy.

We will find a way to follow through on this project, even if we need to do so at a smaller scale and much more slowly than we had hoped. But this leads to more questions about the equity implications of pilot grants lacking salary support, given that soft money faculty roles comprise most of biomedical and public health schools in the United States. Unpaid internships have come under scrutiny because privileged students who can subsidize their basic needs from family and other sources are more easily able to take on these opportunities; one could make a similar argument here. What are the factors that allow faculty to give more unpaid effort, and how does that shape who survives to promotion and tenure?

Investing a small amount of funds across a lot of ambitious investigators, like a mini–venture capital firm, helps create more downstream dollars for institutions, potentially with a lot of uncompensated labor as a by-product. We are all used to doing more with less, even more so now, but some researchers have more capacity than others. One of our universities recently claimed an over thirtyfold return on investment for its pilot grant program, which raises the question of whether pilot grants could be a bit more generous and flexible in allowing salary support for those who need it. Doing so would help us not miss out on the early-stage ideas that could yield to future breakthroughs while also helping to bridge gaps in this lean environment for higher education and research funding.

Paul Shafer is associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and codirector of the Boston University Medicaid Policy Lab. Monica Aswani is associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Health Professions. These views represent those of the authors and not their respective institutions.