{"id":907237,"date":"2026-09-24T00:54:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T00:54:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/907237\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T00:54:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T00:54:15","slug":"this-is-a-five-alarm-fire-for-medical-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/907237\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is a Five-Alarm Fire for Medical Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman\/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)<\/p>\n

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION appears to be preparing yet another audacious power grab.<\/p>\n

This time, the plan calls for tightening control over the National Institutes of Health<\/a>\u2014the massive research agency that has played a role in almost every major biomedical breakthrough of the last half century and, in the process, has made America\u2019s innovation ecosystem the envy of the world.<\/p>\n

Evidently that\u2019s not good enough for the president and his lieutenants.<\/p>\n

According to a report in the Washington Post<\/a>, confirmed and expanded upon by Politico<\/a> and the New York Times<\/a>, officials are preparing an executive order that would change the way NIH awards grants to outside researchers at universities and other institutions. Instead of a process that relies heavily on the judgment of scientists, applications would require additional approval from a committee that includes political officials.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a huge deal, because outside research accounts for roughly four out of every five dollars in the agency\u2019s annual budget<\/a>, which for this year is about $50 billion.<\/p>\n

The administration has not commented on the proposal, or even acknowledged that it\u2019s in the works. The media reports made clear that nothing is final. But it\u2019s no secret that some high-ranking members of the Trump administration have long had it in for NIH\u2014and that one official in particular has been pushing for something like this.<\/p>\n

That official is Russell Vought, the policy analyst who helped put together the right-wing Project 2025<\/a> agenda between Trump\u2019s terms and who has become Trump\u2019s \u201cShadow President<\/a>\u201d since reassuming control of the Office of Management and Budget. One of Vought\u2019s top priorities has been smashing what he imagines is a deeply entrenched cabal of left-wing scientists who control federal research funding.<\/p>\n

This crusade has included suspension or cancellation of already-approved grants because they don\u2019t align with administration priorities, especially when it comes to a prohibition on anything that sounds like DEI. The crusade has also included calls to reduce the NIH budget by as much as 40 percent, plus a series of bureaucratic moves\u2014like changing the timing of grants and laying off key staff\u2014that have undermined the agency\u2019s ability to operate as it has before.<\/p>\n

The latter changes have proven unpopular even with many Republicans, who joined Democrats in spurning Trump\u2019s budget proposal in order to keep NIH funding stable for this year.<\/a> GOP lawmakers also voted with Democrats to push back on a separate Vought initiative that would subject all federal grants (not just those from NIH) to some kind of review by political officials. The stopgap spending bill that Congress passed last month to keep the government operating through year\u2019s end prohibits<\/a> the administration from implementing that change, at least for now.<\/p>\n

This latest proposal\u2014the one that appeared in those media accounts over the past few days\u2014would reportedly target NIH directly. And it has provoked opposition from NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who squared off with Vought in an intense Oval Office debate. But Vought\u2019s proposal has reportedly found support from the only administration figure whose opinion ultimately matters: Trump.<\/p>\n

The president has had it in for federal science agencies and their career officials ever since the end of his first term, when he accused them of undermining him during the pandemic. And more recently, Trump has made clear he\u2019s angry at the universities defying his administration\u2019s efforts to exert control over them, with a particular animus toward Harvard, the university that has resisted most publicly. Like most major research institutions, Harvard relies heavily on the NIH research grants that Vought\u2019s proposal would put under the president\u2019s political control.<\/p>\n

At any other time, in any other presidency, it would be nuts to suggest that the entire foundation of America\u2019s biomedical research enterprise could be in jeopardy because the budget director obsesses over supposed denizens of the Deep State in lab coats or because the president has a grudge against certain Ivy League schools. But this sort of behavior is entirely in character for the Trump administration\u2014and, as it happens, a vivid example of the very kind of interference that the architects of agencies like NIH were desperate to avoid in the first place.<\/p>\n

Politicians have opinions. Scientists have evidence. Independent journalists have a job: finding out when the former starts interfering with the latter. Help us keep doing our job\u2014join Bulwark+ today.<\/p>\n

THE MODERN ERA OF RESEARCH FUNDING dates to World War II, when the federal government financed research that led to the development of key military instruments like sophisticated radar and the atomic bomb, as well as better antibiotics<\/a> and blood products<\/a> that helped to keep the troops alive.<\/p>\n

Vannevar Bush<\/a>, Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s wartime science adviser, saw an opportunity to keep that relationship going\u2014partly because he knew science would be essential for addressing the emerging Soviet threat, partly because he could see all the possibilities for advances in fields like medicine and physics that would benefit all of humanity. His now-famous 1945 report, Science: The Endless Frontier<\/a>, called for the federal government to take the lead in sponsoring research through the creation of new agencies (like the National Science Foundation) and dramatically greater funding for existing ones (like NIH) that would partner with investigators at outside institutions.<\/p>\n

A key principle for the lawmakers following Bush\u2019s advice was independence for the scientific enterprise. \u201cFor, in order to be fruitful, scientific research must be free\u2014free from the influence of pressure groups, free from the necessity of producing immediate practical results, free from dictation by any central board,\u201d Bush had written. And in order to guarantee that independence, lawmakers made sure NIH adopted the peer-review model<\/a> already in place at the National Cancer Institute (which had been established in 1937, and in 1944 would become part of NIH).<\/p>\n

That basic structure<\/a> still exists<\/a> today. NIH or one of its divisions will announce that grant money is available, through a temporary or ongoing program. Once researchers apply, applications go through reviews by study sections composed of external scientists who work for token payments\u2014and then through a stage of sifting by scientists who are career staff at HHS. That, in turn, is followed by another round of peer review by advisory councils<\/a> of outside scientists and public representatives.<\/p>\n

The process often has other steps, too, with the directors of the 27 specialized \u201ccenters\u201d and \u201cinstitutes\u201d within NIH playing a key role in both deliberations and eventual decisions. But historically, those directors<\/a> have mostly been career scientists. The process is highly competitive, with roughly one in five<\/a> applications for its basic grants getting funds in the years before Trump\u2019s current presidency began. And until very recently, it was widely understood\u2014outside the United States, as well as within it\u2014to have been the source for a remarkable run of discovery.<\/p>\n

Even just the past year has provided some especially vivid examples, including some breakthroughs that may be familiar to readers of The Breakdown\u2014like the trial results of a promising new drug<\/a> for pancreatic cancers long thought to be \u201cuntreatable,\u201d the use of genetic-engineering treatments<\/a> for sickle-cell disease, and what looks like proof that mRNA technology<\/a> can be used to prevent recurrences of certain melanoma strains. The foundation for all of these discoveries was research funded by the federal government, and in many cases NIH, through a peer-review process that judged projects on their merits and allowed researchers to pursue their curiosity in precisely the way Bush had hoped they would in 1945.<\/p>\n

NIH leaders haven\u2019t always exhibited the best judgment: They were by many accounts too slow to react to the emergence of AIDS<\/a> in the 1980s, for example. The grant-review process has also attracted scrutiny, leading to improvements like the introduction of grants<\/a> designed specifically for young researchers who had struggled in the previous system.<\/p>\n

But that is precisely the point: The mechanisms for reform, redirection, and refinement already exist. Some of them are already at the disposal of the executive branch, whether through the president\u2019s ability to appoint top officials like the NIH director or through the authority of the secretary of health and human services to write regulations for how the grant process works. And if an administration wants to do more, it can always ask Congress to give it more authority.<\/p>\n

The trouble for the Trump administration is that Congress hasn\u2019t been willing to go along with what Russ Vought wants to do.<\/p>\n

Share The Bulwark<\/a><\/p>\n

TRUMP\u2019S WAR ON MEDICAL RESEARCH and medical researchers is one of the very few administration endeavors to provoke a serious backlash from Republican lawmakers\u2014because they genuinely care about finding better treatments for cancer, or because they value the investment in research institutions back home, or some combination of both.<\/p>\n

Right after Trump returned to office and tried, using executive authority, to slash NIH support for the \u201cindirect costs<\/a>\u201d at prominent medical schools and universities, some of the most high-profile objections came from Katie Britt<\/a>, the Republican senator from Alabama. The backbone of her state\u2019s health care system is the University of Alabama at Birmingham<\/a>, which is a major recipient of NIH funds. (The courts ended up blocking that change, and the administration has since dropped<\/a> it.)<\/p>\n

This new proposal from Vought would be a way to head off further congressional interference\u2014or at least make it a lot more difficult\u2014by giving him and his political allies what amounts to a veto over research funding. It would also run smack into statutory requirements for NIH, according to University of Michigan law professor Sam Bagenstos<\/a>, because there are several overlapping laws that not only require peer review for grantmaking but specify how it should work.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can\u2019t just be, \u2018Well, we had somebody with a Ph.D. look at this,\u2019\u201d Bagenstos, who served as HHS general counsel during the Biden administration, told me in a phone interview. \u201cThere has to be this kind of extensive, ongoing process.\u201d<\/p>\n

And as much as Vought and his supporters might want to exert more control over the grantmaking process, Bagenstos said, the lines of authority seem clear.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our constitutional system, those decisions are vested in Congress because Congress has the power of the purse,\u201d Bagenstos said. \u201cAnd we made a democratic decision through Congress\u2014established in the 1940s, but then reaffirmed many times through the years\u2014that once these broad priorities are set by Congress, the best way of figuring out where specific streams of money go is to very significantly rely on scientific communities to advise on that question.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bagenstos stressed that he thought an administration had the right to steer agencies within their given authority\u2014and to petition Congress if it wants more fundamental changes. \u201cI think we can have lots of political arguments about what should be the priorities for funding scientific research, what areas of science should be explored, how much money to spend on particular areas,\u201d Bagenstos said. But to have the White House making decisions about specific grants \u201cis just giving a tool for corruption on the one hand, or oppression on the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

The concern isn\u2019t hypothetical. Earlier this year, in a court case about the cancellation of Energy Department grants, administration officials admitted<\/a> in their filings they had canceled some funds \u201cbased solely\u201d on political criteria\u2014namely, whether districts or states had backed Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

VOUGHT\u2019S ATTEMPT TO RE-ENGINEER grantmaking is part of a broader push by him and many fellow conservatives to realize their conception of the \u201cunitary executive<\/a>.\u201d This is the theory in which the president\u2019s constitutional authority includes direct control over federal agencies\u2014and in which the budget office, which Vought heads, is understood to be<\/a> \u201cthe keeper of \u2018commander\u2019s intent.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

When pressed on why that control is so important in the context of medical research, Vought has frequently attacked the longtime scientists at NIH who he says have steered money toward projects that seem unlikely to yield insights\u2014or, even worse, that promote DEI principles.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have waste, fraud, abuse of funding, injecting dogs with cocaine and studying the impacts of it, giving money to Harvard to study lizards being blown off of branches by leaf blowers,\u201d Vought said on CNN<\/a> last year, while defending NIH\u2019s freezing of some grants.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery step of the way, you have fundamental DEI across the board,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The reality is a lot more complicated, starting with the fact that\u2014as Bush envisioned eight decades ago\u2014seemingly pointless scientific inquiries sometimes lead to breakthroughs. A perfect example is the federally funded research into venom from lizards<\/a> that led to the discovery of GLP-1<\/a> drugs that have already transformed obesity treatment and may have many other uses, as well.<\/p>\n

DEI can also have a more defensible rationale than Vought and his allies concede, given all the ways differences of race and sex can affect biology\u2014and require different kinds of clinical subjects, and benefit from different kinds of researchers bringing different perspectives.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve known for decades, for example, that people of color were not in many studies,\u201d<\/p>\n

Diana Zuckerman<\/a>, president of the National Center for Health Research, told me in a phone interview. \u201cSo for at least a decade or two, there\u2019s been an effort to try to include other kinds of patients\u2014and sometimes that has meant including different researchers who served less affluent patients or patients of color. That\u2019s not affirmative action. That\u2019s just good science.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether the federal government pushed too far in that direction, or did so in a clumsy, performative way that gave short shrift to more promising research, is a separate question that generates plenty of honest, intelligent debate. But it\u2019s telling that even some high-profile critics of DEI in medical research\u2014like Jeffrey Flier<\/a>, former dean of Harvard Medical School\u2014are furious about Vought\u2019s proposal.<\/p>\n

\u201cAspects of how NIH funding works are suboptimal, and I would like to see those improved,\u201d Flier told me in a phone interview, citing some of his past<\/a> warnings<\/a> that DEI was undermining honest inquiry and threatening academic freedom. Then he turned to the new Vought proposal and its potential to exacerbate trends he\u2019s already seeing at institutions like Harvard\u2014like hiring fewer professors because future funding levels are so uncertain, and causing promising young thinkers to quit academia because they\u2019re not sure it\u2019s a reliable career track.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea that you would embed a political actor into decisions about what should be funded and how it should be funded is just inimical to the system that I think we should have,\u201d Flier said.<\/p>\n

Later Flier mused about the possibility of Vought or \u201cone of his lackeys\u201d with no scientific training weighing the merits of proposals. If \u201cyour goal is to advance science in the United States,\u201d he said, that kind of political interference \u201cwould be like shooting yourself in the head.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leave a comment<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman\/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION appears to be preparing yet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":907238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":["post-907237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/907238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}