Today, NAVREF submitted formal comments to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in response to a Request for Information (RFI) on the framework for the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2027–2031 (NOT-OD-26-047). Our response makes the case that VA research — and the NPC network that supports it — deserves an explicit seat at the table in NIH's next five-year vision.
The NIH-Wide Strategic Plan sets the agency's overarching priorities and guides how it invests in research, workforce, and operations across the entire biomedical enterprise. It doesn't dictate funding for specific diseases or replace Institute-level plans — but it does shape the policy environment that affects all of us: grant eligibility, indirect cost frameworks, workforce development investments, and cross-agency coordination.
Our comments were organized around NIH's three priority areas:
On Research Areas (Priority 1): We pushed back on the tendency to treat VA research as a parallel system rather than an integrated part of the biomedical ecosystem. Veterans carry a disproportionate burden of the exact conditions NIH prioritizes — cardiovascular disease, cancer, TBI, mental health — and VA's longitudinal patient data and embedded clinical infrastructure offer research conditions that are genuinely hard to replicate elsewhere. We called on NIH to address the structural misalignments that prevent VA-affiliated investigators and NPC-administered projects from fully accessing NIH research investments.
On Research Capacity (Priority 2): WOC and IPA credentialing delays, centralized hiring bottlenecks, and compliance processes designed for academic institutions — not VA — are actively suppressing research capacity across our member community. We made clear that NPCs are research infrastructure, not administrative overhead, and that NIH's workforce and infrastructure goals will fall short if they don't account for the operational backbone that makes VA-based research function. We also highlighted the NPC network's potential as a regional innovation anchor, particularly in rural communities where VA facilities are often the only research infrastructure available.
On Research Operations (Priority 3): We called for genuine interagency coordination between NIH and VA — not parallel planning, but joint investment mechanisms and shared accountability for research outcomes. We also made the case that in a moment when public trust in science is under pressure, VA research is a high-return story to tell: it serves a visible, broadly supported population, and its outcomes have direct, demonstrable impact on Veterans and their families. NPCs' existing accountability structures should be recognized and leveraged, not buried under duplicative reporting requirements.
