Don’t Be Fooled: GOP Scuffle Over NIH Grants Doesn’t Mean Science Has Prevailed

Por Sasha Abramsky — Truthout

Trump has backed down for now in his new bid to control research grants, but his tune could change after the midterms.

Honest, paywall-free news is rare. Please support our boldly independent journalism with a donation of any size.

Over the last two years, in an effort to stamp its ideology on the country’s premier academic and scientific institutions, the Trump administration has repeatedly moved to exert control over how grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are distributed.

According to reporting by The New York Times and other outlets, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), led by Russell Vought, was recently involved in drafting an executive order for Donald Trump to sign that would create an overview board with the power to veto NIH grants that do not conform with the administration’s political priorities.

When the story about the proposed executive order broke, several senators — including Susan Collins, who is facing a tough reelection fight — immediately announced their opposition to this power grab and made it clear they would do everything in their power to block it. Days later, faced with this opposition, the administration announced it was withdrawing the proposal. What it refused to do, however, was promise not to reintroduce some form of it down the road, quite possibly after the midterm elections. As a result, the Damocletian sword of political influence continues to hang over the world of medical research.

Given the administration’s dismal track record when it comes to scientific freedom, and its ongoing hostility to much of the NIH apparatus, it seems unlikely to have permanently and tamely given up the fight to expand control over the grantmaking process.

The annual NIH budget currently stands at just over $47 billion. Since Trump took office again in January 2025, there have been significant slowdowns in the approval and distribution of grants, and the administration has sought to slash NIH spending — a move that, to date, Congress has rejected. In its latest budget request, the administration asked for $41 billion to fund the NIH next year, representing more than a 10 percent cut to its budget.

Team Trump frequently talks about the need to “streamline” public health and research budgets. In reality, it is using expansive budget cuts at the NIH and elsewhere as a cudgel to eradicate any grants that study disparate impacts of disease and of medical interventions on different economic, racial, and sexual groups, and it is slowing down the awarding of competitive grants as a way to coerce research institutions to toe the new party line. Earlier this year, in the wake of the DOGE-related purges to the NIH and other grant-making agencies, the University of California, Davis’s Office of Research reported that nationally, the awarding of competitive NIH grants had dropped off by more than 50 percent since Trump’s inauguration.

On September 16, facing a second wave of cuts, a group of researchers sued the NIH, claiming that the agency is using a group of 235 keywords — each of which relates to diversity, equity, and climate change issues — to ferret out suspect projects, and is systematically rejecting grant applications containing those words. The suit, which also involves the ACLU and the Protect Democracy Project, was filed in federal court in San Francisco and alleges that “researchers with existing NIH grants or pending applications are now subjected to an algorithmic screen for a list of 235 disfavored terms that serve as proxies for the disfavored viewpoints, including ‘gender,’ ‘equity,’ ‘diverse,’ ‘racist,’ ‘queer, ‘trans,’ and ‘climate change.’ NIH requires the removal of all flagged terms upon threat of termination or funding denial. Researchers must instead parrot NIH’s preferred phrasing in public-facing grant materials, limiting researchers’ ability to communicate clearly about their work to the public and to each other in a manner consistent with their viewpoint.”

This beatdown of researchers and research institutions has led to the termination of hundreds of projects, including grants for projects the descriptions of which contained the phrases “health equity,” “climate change,” or “workforce diversity.” The Trump administration’s new rules have also terminated projects investigating sexual harassment, which is allegedly categorized as “DEI-related,” and led to the end of longstanding grants to researchers studying Alzheimer’s disease in lower-income Black neighborhoods.

Yet for Russell Vought and the ideologues now in charge of the OMB — and thus the financial and information pipelines that keep the federal government functioning and its money flowing — the assault on science has not proceeded nearly fast enough.

And so, reportedly egged on by Trump, who is furious at having failed to win his ongoing fight with Harvard and at the NIH director’s refusal to simply cuts grants to Harvard, they have sought to establish a permanent layer of political commissars, chief among whom would be Vought, to monitor and censor the country’s research pipelines.

If such a system were indeed locked into place, pushing aside the current arrangement by which grant applications are peer-reviewed and then decided on by the 27 directors of NIH institutes and centers, it would give the administration virtually limitless discretion to punish research institutions such as Harvard by denying them the grants they financially depend on, or to penalize individual researchers who run afoul of the Trump administration.

Over the past year, Congress has repeatedly pushed back against Vought’s empire-building strategies. This new proposal immediately sparked significant pushback, especially among key senators from both parties, wary of a politicization process that is undermining large swaths of American science. Stymied for the moment by this opposition, the administration may well bide its time, potentially unveiling an executive order only after the midterms.

If signed, such an executive order would, without a shadow of a doubt, lead to protracted legal battles. Major research universities would quickly enter the fray to protect their labs, and additional lawsuits from scientists and from freedom of speech advocates would follow in their wake.

Last year, a Nature newsroom poll of scientific researchers found a stunning 75 percent were considering leaving the U.S., as were three-quarters of science graduate students. In early 2025, applicants for overseas positions surged by more than 30 percent compared to the same period in 2024. Meanwhile, there has been a precipitous drop in the number of European and Chinese scientists applying to work in the U.S.

As the U.S. administration attempts to force the world of science into ideological lockstep with its right-wing agenda, these trends will likely intensify: other countries will see an opportunity in the U.S.’s self-inflicted dysfunction; they will hire U.S. scientists and fund research projects shunned by the Trump people, and, at the same time, less top talent from overseas will regard the U.S. as a welcoming work environment. The country will end up the poorer for it, and the health of the U.S. population — especially targeted populations such as LGBTQ communities, as well as people of color and lower-income Americans — will suffer as important research gets kicked to the curb. Research into the disparate health impacts faced by these groups will not be done, and, in consequence, medical breakthroughs to better their health outcomes will not be made. It is all yet another example of the entirely counterproductive, and harmful, strategies of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

This September, Truthout is celebrating 25 years of publication. For over two decades, we have been a trusted source for fiercely independent journalism thanks to readers like you.

As we look to the next 25 years, we have launched a special fundraising campaign. This campaign is almost over! We have a goal to raise $19,000 before midnight tonight.

We are asking for your support at this juncture because we face greater threats than ever before in our organizational history. Trump and his MAGA allies are determined to control the information ecosystem, and movement-based organizations are subject to dangerous censorship and scrutiny.

If you can support Truthout with a one-time or monthly donation, you will make a significant impact on our work and our legacy. Anything you can do makes a difference!

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the following terms:

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. Abramsky’s latest book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, is available for pre-order now and will be released in January. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.

Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day.

Please make a donation to Truthout during our special 25th anniversary fundraiser. We have until midnight to raise $19,000!

Fonte: Truthout