Your study section scored your proposal in a fundable range. Twice. It still didn’t get funded, because there were so many more applications than usual and no extra funding to account for that. Or the payline moved underneath. Or worse, the program was closed before you even got reviewed. Frustratingly, many applications that would have been funded eighteen months ago are stuck in limbo. The research ideas didn’t get worse; the odds did.

These and other frustrations show that we’re living through a genuinely harder funding environment than the one many current PIs trained in, and it’s tough going. When success rates drop into the single digits for a given mechanism, a strong, well-reviewed proposal that goes unfunded isn’t a verdict on the work or on you. It’s closer to a coin flip that’s been weighted against almost everyone, no matter how good the science is. Knowing this doesn’t change the landscape, but it can inform how we interact with it. 

Shifting Funding Landscapes

While at the time it felt things could have been better, application success rates above 20% now feel like a dream. Many of us would happily return to the days when it felt that a few submissions would likely bring success, especially as reviews helped strengthen subsequent applications. At higher success rates, a rejected application often points to specific fixes for future submission: replacing a weak aim, enhancing an underdeveloped preliminary dataset, or revising to address a mismatch with the funder’s priorities. The feedback loop still works the way most people expect.

As success rates decline, that loop breaks down. At that point, many proposals in the pile are genuinely fundable on scientific merit, and the gap between funded and unfunded can have little to do with quality: which reviewers happened to be assigned, how a particular study section was calibrated that cycle, and whether a competing proposal from a more established lab edged yours out by a fraction of a point. Funding decisions are always out of the applicant’s control, but in this instance, there isn’t anything specific for the applicant to fix. Does this mean submitting applications is futile? 

While it’s not hard to understand feeling demoralized in this environment, the bottom line is that thousands of grants are, in fact, still being awarded. It’s worth throwing your hat in the ring. And with lower odds, this probably means a greater number of attempts to be successful. How many more? That part is unclear. What is clear, though, is that you can’t spend all of your time seeking money; your research, your mentees, and yes, your well-being will suffer. So, what’s an investigator to do when success rates are low? Strategize. 

What Playing the Numbers Game Actually Means

When the odds on any single submission are stacked against you, the strategy has to shift. Instead of treating each proposal as a single, high-stakes bet that has to hit, it helps to treat grant-seeking as a volume game played over several cycles, where the goal is to keep enough strong proposals in circulation that the underlying odds eventually work in your favor.

Because you don’t have limitless time and energy (and remember, some funders are detecting and removing applications that appear to have significant contributions from GenAI), in practice, this means building reusable components, honing a well-developed significance or impact section, mixing and matching datasets, and adapting your research across multiple submissions and multiple mechanisms rather than writing from scratch each time. It means planning a resubmission before the first decision even comes back, so a rejection triggers a known next step instead of a scramble. And it often means applying to more than one mechanism or funder in parallel rather than putting everything behind a single proposal and waiting to see what happens before starting the next one. Spreading submissions across a wider range of funding sources offers an important approach, both because it increases the number of genuine shots on goal and because no single rejection carries quite as much weight when there are other applications in play.

Don’t forget the importance of conversations and relationships in this strategy. In fact, relationships can matter more than usual when the landscape shifts. Identify opportunities to partner with other investigators on new ideas; explore whether your colleague with stable funding might want to cover partial effort for your research assistant or postdoc to help them with a project. Shop your ideas around, talk to program staff, and ask about what it takes to get over the funding line. When meeting with senior people in your department (e.g., your chair) or institution (e.g., dean), ask them what they think you could do differently; you might be surprised at the response. Finally, if you are facing a funding gap, be proactive in talking with leadership about what it means and how they can help. This conversation will likely be more fruitful if you can show what you’ve been doing to head off that gap.

Where Quality Still Matters

None of this is a case for submitting more proposals of lower quality just to increase volume. A sloppy proposal doesn’t get better odds by being one of five instead of one of one; it just wastes five cycles of reviewer time and your own. The volume strategy works because each individual proposal stays strong, not despite it. The practical shift is in where the energy goes: less time agonizing over a single submission until it’s theoretically perfect, since perfect isn’t actually what separates funded from unfunded at these success rates, and more time making sure a solid proposal is ready to go out the door on a sustainable cadence.

Separating the Outcome From Your Worth

The practical strategy above only works if it’s paired with an honest look at how a rejection gets processed internally, because volume strategies fail fast when every individual rejection gets treated as a referendum on competence. Feeling genuinely disappointed by a rejection is a reasonable response to real stakes, time, funding, and a project’s future, and it doesn’t need to be suppressed or argued away. (This is especially true when you might be facing a funding gap and aren’t sure what the future even looks like.) But avoid treating that disappointment as proof of inadequacy rather than as a symptom of a genuinely difficult funding environment.

A few things can help here. Give the disappointment a defined window—a day, a weekend—to keep the setback from dominating everything you do (or don’t do). When you’ve had a chance to process that feeling, review available critiques for what’s actionable. Try talking to a colleague who’s also submitting in this environment to remind yourself that this is happening to nearly everyone in the pool, not just you, even if it sometimes seems that others are having greater success.

Remember to Leave Space for What Energizes You

A genuinely unstable funding environment can make the whole enterprise feel like it’s happening to you rather than something you have any say in, and that can drive reactive behaviors. Rather than putting aside absolutely everything else to pursue funding, try to hold at least a little space for the work that energizes you. Whether meeting with mentees, analyzing data, or brainstorming with your team, energizing work will provide a counterbalance to keep you going.

Playing the Long Game

A difficult funding climate doesn’t reward the researcher who takes every rejection hardest or works themselves past the point of sustainability trying to compensate for odds outside their control. It tends to reward whoever can keep a steady pipeline of strong, submittable proposals (and solid research) moving over several years without burning out in the process. Protecting your capacity to keep playing, cycle after cycle, is what makes the numbers eventually work in your favor.