Board would include Vought and Bhattacharya and require unanimous votes
The Guardian reported Sunday that Trump’s latest executive order is expected to establish a board responsible for approving NIH grant funding, marking what the paper called “another attempt by the Trump administration to censor topics that do not align with the president’s agenda.” The proposed order was discussed in a Friday meeting in which senior administration officials accused the NIH of funding what they characterized as “woke” initiatives that did not align with Trump’s political priorities, according to people who spoke to the Washington Post.
Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and other administration officials proposed creating an external committee empowered to veto biomedical research awards that do not align with Trump’s goals, the Washington Post reported. The OMB is the White House agency responsible for implementing the president’s policies across the executive branch.
The board would include Vought and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, according to Politico, and would be required to reach unanimous decisions on grant awards. Bhattacharya has resisted cuts to federal research spending and defended the NIH’s grant-making process on Friday, the Guardian reported, while Vought expressed a desire to reshape federal spending. Establishing an external commission to award grants based on the president’s ideological agenda would break with the agency’s traditional process of evaluating proposals on scientific merit.
The reported move comes as the NIH — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — faces a class-action lawsuit by researchers who argue the Trump administration is hindering and terminating scientific grants to suppress viewpoints that conflict with the president’s ideological agenda. The researchers are accusing the administration of violating the First Amendment.
“What the First Amendment does not allow is the government’s use of its funding power to target or silence the expression of disfavored viewpoints within the biomedical research community,” the lawsuit reads.
Since Trump took office for his second term, billions of dollars in federal grants related to health, nutrition, the environment and disaster relief have been cut or frozen, the Guardian reported. Research with keywords including “equity,” “racist,” “gender,” and “climate change” has been flagged by the administration to hinder funding for scientific research.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.