President Donald Trump’s reported plans to establish a committee to oversee—and possibly veto—scientific grants issued by the nation’s top health agency via an executive order would undermine U.S. science and innovation leadership, advocates and scientists say.
The planned executive order was reported by the New York Times and Politico and has yet to be released.
“Scientific grants should be judged by scientific expertise, not political ideology,” says Jennifer Jones, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. If finalized, she says, the reported plans would “upend the way we do science in this country.”
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The move would overhaul how federal money is allocated to science—a similar rule change was already proposed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which garnered significant criticism from scientists and national science organizations. Earlier this month Congress temporarily blocked the regulations from going into effect.
Under the reported executive order, an appointed committee would sign off on grants issued by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which has a budget of more than $40 billion. The NIH funds research on cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and more—“the kind of biomedical research that touches everybody’s lives,” Jones says.
The committee would reportedly include OMB director and Project 2025 proponent Russell Vought and NIH head Jay Bhattacharya. The Washington Post first reported on discussions among Trump officials about such a panel.
Historically, the NIH has followed a “gold standard” practice of independent peer review for federal grants, says Arthur Caplan, an emeritus professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, who previously served on NIH advisory committees. The process requires researchers to submit a lengthy proposal and go through multiple rounds of screening and review by independent experts.
“I think it’s a very, very dangerous and bad idea to layer in an ideologically driven, new oversight board to the process,” Caplan says. “I don’t think peer review at the NIH is broken. So what are we fixing, unless it’s imposing a political agenda?”
Colette Delawalla, founder and CEO of Stand Up for Science, a scientific advocacy nonprofit, says the Trump administration’s reported plans appear to be designed to exert political control over American scientists.
“It’s extremely obvious that Russell Vought is not going to stop trying to dismantle the American scientific ecosystem and the American higher education system,” Delawalla says. “Is the NIH going to continue to be the gold standard of scientific review if a nonscientist whose singular task is to destroy science is the one that all grants have to pass through? I don’t think so.”
Trump’s second term has been marked by repeated efforts to cut federal funding for research, particularly in fields examining racial disparities in health, LGBTQ+ issues and climate change. At the same time, the administration has targeted universities and other institutions in moves that have included a largely unsuccessful attempt to freeze federal funding for Harvard University over alleged failures to address antisemitism on campus.
When asked for comment, an NIH spokesperson told Scientific American that “NIH remains committed to its mission of funding biomedical research to benefit the health of the American people.”
The OMB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.