NIH reviews

Less opportunity to work with and mentor grad students, if that’s something that’s important to you. Labs can feel a bit top-heavy (with mostly postdocs and staff scientists), and then a big gap before post-bacs. Your mentor(s), especially if he or she is more senior and/or has been at NIH a long time, may be less savvy about the academic job market: what search committees look for, what goes into preparing successful job talks, etc.; especially if you are targeting arts & sciences departments (some of them may or may not have a bit better insight into medical school departments). The emphasis on high-risk, high-reward stuff – combined with the relatively high number of NIH “lifers”, i.e., PIs and staff scientists who have been and/or are planning on being at NIH for basically their whole career – means it can sometimes feel like there is less of a sense of urgency to complete projects quickly and publish. This is not an entirely bad thing, but as a postdoc you will generally be on a quicker timeline than many of those around you, so you have to stay on yourself to be publishing/hitting certain milestones/etc. Because this is the federal government after all, certain bureaucratic things (travel, getting purchases approved, etc) can be really annoying and time-consuming. Health benefits for postdocs and other fellows are not the greatest.

Bureaucracy and slow timelines make it difficult to move projects forward rapidly.