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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.

Cuts to Biomedical Research Will Cost Lives, Scientific Breakthroughs & Careers

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........

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