NIH reorganises its website around eight topic hubs from Monday

The starting denominator is large. NIH's web presence grew to more than 700 separate websites spread across millions of pages ^[7]. Many ran on different, non-connecting backends and hosting platforms, and the same information often sat in five or six places ^[7]. A plan drafted in 2022 would have cut that to one site per institute ^[9], or about 27 ^[1]. The version arriving Monday goes further, aiming at a single connected web environment for the whole agency ^[15], so that users no longer need to understand NIH's organisational structure to find something ^[16].

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and former director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center, welcomed the change. "It was badly needed," she said. "Trying to find something on the old website required the skills of an Egyptologist." ^[6] In her account, the pandemic exposed the problem: "It became a dramatic illustration of a dysfunctional website whose dysfunction wasn't evident pre-Covid." ^[8]

Amanda Fine, NIH's deputy director for public affairs, said the goal is "to make trusted NIH information across the agency easier and faster to find." ^[2] Her team traced the paths people take to NIH websites and how they move once there, to find where they get stuck and which information they want most, she said ^[13]. The rewritten pages then went through three rounds of review with NIH scientists and subject-matter experts ^[14]. Demand data shaped the hubs, and expert review checked the content. The design is sensible. The thing this doesn't tell you is whether people now find things faster. STAT's report includes no before-and-after measurement, and a beta without working search ^[4] cannot produce one yet.

The team has also shrunk. Working groups of more than 70 staffers from communications offices across NIH's 27 institutes and centers drew up the 2022 plan, phased over five years from 2025 ^[9]. That schedule would have run to about 2030 ^[2]. The plan was scrapped when the Trump administration fired hundreds of communications staffers in a government-wide workforce reduction ^[10]. After those layoffs and contract cancellations in early 2025, NIH sites sat effectively frozen for nearly 18 months, according to STAT ^[11]. About a dozen communications employees remain to push the consolidation forward ^[12], roughly a sixth the size of the working groups behind the original plan ^[3].

For researchers and grants staff, Monday starts a staged handover. NIH's existing websites stay available during the transition and will close on a rolling basis "as critical and mandated content is verified and redirects are put in place," Fine told STAT ^[5]. Grants is one of the eight hubs ^[1]. How fast sites close depends on how quickly about a dozen staff can verify content spread over millions of pages ^[7][12]. I'd expect grant seekers to hit friction at each closure, when an old bookmark either redirects or fails, more than on launch day itself.