A fresh attack on the U.S. scientific infrastructure could be the most damaging yet.
The Trump administration is pushing alarming changes to how federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health distribute funding — changes that threaten to permanently politicize research in the U.S. And since the NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, this could be bad news for everybody’s health.
The new rules were proposed under the guise of accountability and transparency and reversing the “woke” research agenda. They would subvert the longstanding process for spending taxpayer money on research.
They would allow political appointees rather than experts to have the final say — and make it clear that funds could be pulled at any time.
“This is a five-alarm fire,” Carolyn Bertozzi, a Stanford chemical biologist who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry, said on a recent webinar.
The U.S. research infrastructure has endured attacks from almost the moment Trump was sworn in for his second term. That began with a funding freeze that harmed academic labs’ ability to research and even pay staff. Subsequent weeks brought cuts to funding that supports universities’ research and the abrupt termination of grants deemed in violation of Trump’s executive orders on race and gender.
At the NIH, mass layoffs and increased political scrutiny have hampered the distribution of money Congress appropriated for research. Meanwhile, the White House tried to slash the agency’s 2026 budget by 40%.
Many of the efforts were rejected by courts and lawmakers. And time and again, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought keeps coming up with new ways to damage U.S. science.
Vought’s latest attack is less visible, but potentially more sinister. A more-than-400-page document outlining proposed regulations emphasizes that peer reviewers, the panel of experts who weigh grant proposals, are merely advisers — and gives political appointees the power to veto funding if it runs counter to presidential priorities. Existing grants can be terminated at the whims of the administration. (Before last year’s chaos, grant terminations were exceedingly rare.)
The whole effort turns the country’s vast research enterprise into a political playground, where support for a particular project or prioritization of a particular disease might only last as long as an election cycle.
America’s dominance in science depends on its willingness to invest in ambitious ideas — and on its researchers pursuing questions that might take years or decades to answer.
Innovation in the U.S. “is likely to be massively curtailed,” says Shobita Parthasarathy, director of the University of Michigan’s Science, Technology and Public Policy Program. “You’re in a place where every four years, you’re totally changing directions, which is not the way science works.”
That would have real consequences for Americans’ health in the form of discoveries delayed or never pursued — in the U.S., at least.
Vought’s moves also raise the risk of corruption and outside groups influencing funding. Trump has already shown an alarming comfort with using other HHS agencies to further his political agenda — for example, vouchers promising speedy product reviews reportedly used to reward companies that signed onto his drug pricing scheme.
Meanwhile, universities and institutions, fearful of losing vital funds, are likely to become even more cautious. Recently, prominent physicians were kicked out of the American Diabetes Association conference for peacefully handing out an editorial criticizing the attacks — which had run in the ADA’s own flagship journal.
To be clear, none of this is to suggest that U.S. science lives outside the realm of politics. Each year, Congress apportions funds to individual institutes within NIH based on what lawmakers deem most critical. Presidents, too, have had their say, in rare cases putting boundaries on certain areas of science. Lobbyists try to influence it.
But the people tasked with deciding where those dollars are directed have always been the experts. The process isn’t perfect, but improving it is a matter of refinement — not blowing it all up.
BLOOMBERG