It’s official. Before the end of the year, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to dissolve its National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) and open a new center devoted to translational research.

Speaking at a NCRR advisory council meeting yesterday, Lawrence Tabak, deputy director of the NIH and co-director of the NCCR task force, presented a tentative framework for breaking up of the center, redistributing its programs and budgets, and reassigning all NCRR employees to comparable positions within the agency.

NIH officials first disclosed the plan to get rid of the NCRR last week on the institute’s blog Feedback NIH. Under the proposed arrangement, the new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) — which was given the green light by the NIH’s Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB) last month — would take on the Clinical and Translational Science Awards program, while other branches of the agency, including the National Institute of General and Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, would absorb other smaller programs. Meanwhile, an ‘interim infrastructure unit’ within the director’s office would oversee the bulk of NCRR’s portfolio until the most suitable agencies to administer them can be determined.

According to Tabak, a “smaller more focused” NCRR could be retained going forward. But last week, NIH director Francis Collins told ScienceInsider explicitly that NCRR was a goner.

Currently, the plan is to move ahead with NCRR’s dissolution by 1 October. However, many critics worry that this quick timeline for such a major agency restructuring does not allow for adequate input from the scientific community.

“I think the process has been rushed and the community is understandably concerned frustrated and a bit angry,” NIGMS director Jeremy Berg told Nature Medicine. “They were never really consulted about whether they should keep NCRR intact.”

Mark Lively, a biochemist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and member of the NCRR advisory committee, worries that by redistributing the center’s many trans-agency programs, awards and facilities to other institutes, the initiatives may be unduly influenced by the whims of individual institute directors. “Many of us are concerned… that there would then be a mission that would dictate how and when these programs should be funded,” he says.

Tabak, for his part, defended the quick turnaround time. “When you have something that is this crucially important you move forward,” he said at yesterday’s meeting.

The NCRR task force’s recommendations are scheduled to be presented to the SMRB next month.