White House Drafts Order Creating Political Board to Approve NIH Grants
核心洞察
Trump directed the Office of Management and Budget (搜索) to draft an executive order creating a board to decide which NIH grants receive funding.
The proposed board would include OMB Director Russ Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, with unanimous approval required for awards.
The plan would give White House political appointees more influence over NIH's $48 billion biomedical research budget, replacing peer review.
The White House is drafting a sweeping change to how the National Institutes of Health awards research funding, after President Donald Trump directed the Office of Management and Budget (搜索) to prepare an executive order creating a new board to decide which NIH grants receive funding, according to multiple reports.
The proposed board would include OMB Director Russ Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, with unanimous approval required for grant awards. The plan would give White House political appointees more influence over NIH's $48 billion biomedical research budget.
The Office of Management and Budget (搜索) is drafting the order, but it has not been issued or finalized. OMB and the White House did not immediately comment on the proposal.
A Break From Peer Review
NIH currently relies on scientific peer-review panels, advisory councils and agency officials to evaluate and award research grants. 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 executive order, reported by outlets including the Washington Post and Politico, was discussed in a Friday meeting where senior administration officials accused the NIH of funding "woke" initiatives that went against Trump's political priorities. Vought and other administration officials proposed the external committee, which could veto awards in biomedical research that do not align with Trump's goals, according to several people who spoke to the Washington Post.
The directive followed a Friday Oval Office meeting in which Bhattacharya reportedly declined Trump's request to cut Harvard University's NIH funding. Bhattacharya has resisted cuts to federal research spending and defended the NIH's grant-making process on Friday, while Vought expressed a desire to reshape federal spending.
An HHS spokesperson said NIH grant money will be distributed.
Legal Challenge and Prior Cuts
The reported move comes as the NIH, described as the world's largest public funder of biomedical research, faces a class-action lawsuit by researchers arguing that the Trump administration is hindering and terminating scientific grants to censor views opposing the president's ideological agenda. 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," reads the lawsuit.
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. Research with keywords including "equity," "racist," "gender," "climate change" and others has been flagged by the administration to hinder funding for scientific research.
Congress earlier blocked an OMB plan to expand political review of federal health grants through mid-December.