Trump’s Dangerous Litmus Test for NIH Grants

In his January 1961 inaugural address, John F. Kennedy issued a clarion call to “invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors … [to] … eradicate disease and encourage the arts and commerce.” Donald Trump’s administration has proposed rules governing grants across all federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which, if finalized, could bomb scientific research back to the Stone Age. We needn’t mention its jaundiced approach to the arts and commerce. 

Scientists are on DEFCON-1. Scientific research has always had bipartisan Congressional support. Trust in science polls 75 percent across the country. Research funded in part by NIH grants has prolonged and saved lives, led to the discovery of cholesterol as a cause of heart disease the development of statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs), HIV therapies, the discovery of GLP-1 (diabetes management and weight loss), and mRNA vaccines (teaching the body to fight pathogens, like the virus that causes COVID-19). Childhood leukemia, not long ago a death sentence, is now survivable for most children. Cancer immunotherapy is extending life for many who, just a decade ago, would have died. New technology is letting us repair genetic diseases at their source. 

The proposed rule, recently released by Trump apparatchik, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, a key architect of Project 2025, would change how federally funded research is managed across the federal government. If finalized as written, it would superimpose a litmus test on a peer-review process that, for 80 years, has been run by scientists evaluating the work of other scientists. Peer review would remain a part of the process, but political appointees would make final decisions on grant funding. This shift threatens to erode the core principle of scientific independence that has driven American research success. [See “Trump Escalates War on Science” by Merrill Goozner on his Substack, GoozNews, and in the Washington Monthly on June 8, 2026.] 

The sweeping proposal would impose new binding regulations requiring that every research grant “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” 

Mixing scientific judgment and political preference pours oil on water and does not improve research. It undermines scientists’ freedom to follow the evidence wherever it leads, without bureaucrats determining whether it goes left or right. 

Lawyers, like scientists, understand the need for a firewall between political opinions and scientific research. Scientist-led peer review is why American science remains the envy of the world. The 400-page draft regulation would require federal agencies to adhere to the current administration’s ideology. 

Previously, if a cancer researcher had an idea about how a particular protein behaves in tumor cells, she would write a grant proposal. That proposal is read, scored, and debated by other researchers, experts who can recognize a promising idea. No one in Washington weighed whether her quest for knowledge was politically palatable. No one got to fast-track the project or kill it for political reasons. Cures and treatments should be immune to such interference lest it imperil cures we have and cures we have not yet imagined. 

A central feature of the rule would require federal agencies to designate “senior appointees” as untrained scientific commissars to review both new and existing research grants. 

“What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management,” Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), writes in a Substack post. “What OMB is proposing is a vehicle for complete political control of science … over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.” Physicist John Holdren, a science adviser to Barack Obama, thinks the new rules “are clearly intended to erase the last vestiges of unbiased merit review in the federal government’s grantmaking. It is one more nail in the coffin the Trump administration has been constructing as the final resting place of U.S. preeminence in science and technology.” 

Representative Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat, a leading critic of the Trump administration’s research policies, calls the proposal “a dystopian move that would destroy what remains of merit-based review.” 

The proposed rules explicitly prohibit the use of federal funds for diversity, equity, and inclusion activities and gender-affirming care programs because such policies favored certain groups and slighted others. It says tighter oversight by MAGA political appointees is needed to prevent research agencies from “promot[ing] a woke policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public.” Really? Last I checked, Trump’s approval rating hovered around 37 percent, hardly a “vast majority of Americans.” 

Asked last fall about the order during a meeting of NIH’s top cancer advisory board, Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH Director, said, “The NIH director has always been a political appointee, and the NIH director sets priorities for the entire NIH.” True, but what Trump has in mind is something more sinister. 

Neal Lane, who led the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Bill Clinton before serving as his science adviser, believes there’s an important distinction between funding good science to further a presidential initiative, which is what Bhattacharya says NIH is doing, and rejecting equally good research ideas because they don’t square with a president’s political views. 

“NSF makes grant decisions based on the deep knowledge of experts in the field, not on whether it meets an ideological agenda,” Lane says. “That’s what merit review is all about. Replacing it with top-down decision-making will destroy that process and result in bad science being funded.” 

Since Kennedy’s New Frontier, the American approach to research based on peer review has survived budget fights, ideological storms, and presidential transitions because of the guardrails Congress and the executive branch have historically left in place. 

Today, the playing field appears to be dramatically different. 

NIH funding is an economic powerhouse. According to the annual analysis from United for Medical Research, every dollar of NIH funding returns $2.57 in new economic activity. Over the past decade, that has added up to $822 billion in economic activity and an average of nearly 370,000 jobs a year. Crucially, it draws the world’s best minds to American laboratories, where many of them stay, build companies, train the next generation, and contribute to the American economy. 

Under the proposed rule, membership in organizations that “undermine public safety or national security” may disqualify applicants, and funding agencies may terminate active grants at any time and for any reason. This may include organizations advocating for civil rights, the environment, or public health. Disqualifying scientists from receiving grants for their private beliefs about civil rights, the environment, public health, or other matters would be an obvious violation of the First Amendment. We will see what the courts say about the proposal if it is ever finalized. 

Trump wants the NIH, like all federal agencies, to prioritize institutions that demonstrate rigorous and reproducible scholarship, incorporate benchmarks for measuring the performance of “Gold Standard Science,” and weigh institutional commitment to research integrity when making award decisions. All reputable scientists would support the importance of rigorous and reproducible scholarship. But “Gold Standard Science” is so vague as to become a ready shibboleth for a political litmus test. 

Such a standard for federally funded research is dangerous. An administration’s scientific goals should drive advances in treatments and responses to new threats, not drive fear into every scientist that promising ideas will be ignored or halted midstream because of a mismatch with some amorphous political slogan. Reevaluating every research grant through a political lens each time a new party is in power could end America’s scientific progress and leadership. There is no Democratic or Republican way to find a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s. 

Meanwhile, our competitors are marching on. China now leads R&D funding in several fields, and the European Union actively courts American scientists with promises of stability. Politicizing our research review process casts a shadow, giving comfort to our adversaries who strive for scientific and geopolitical supremacy. The Trump approach is riddled with severe economic, geopolitical, and national security ramifications. 

Presidents and members of Congress of both parties have understood for decades that American science is too valuable to be afflicted with political considerations. The proposed revisions are just stupid and dangerous, but that has not stopped Trump before. 

The administration aims to finalize the regulations by October 1. The public comment period is open for 45 days, with submissions due July 13. OMB aims to finalize the new rules in the fall. It is unknown whether Vought will modify the proposal in response to public comments, but he is required by law to respond to each one.

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