Starting out as a small federally-funded Laboratory of Hygiene in 1887, the National Institutes of Health (the NIH) has become the largest and, arguably, the most prestigious biomedical institution in the world. It has fueled virtually all of the advancements in the treatment of heart disease, cancer, stroke, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, other infectious diseases, and much more. It can be considered the jewel in the crown of scientific excellence. It funds a cadre of in-house scientists as well as academic scientists across the United States and around the world. Explain to me, then, why the Trump administration is trying to hobble it…no, destroy it.
Beginning in February 2025 the administration terminated 2,300 ongoing research grants, amounting to cuts of almost $4 billion. Most of the cuts were at medical schools and hospitals, but they reached into other institutions — mostly universities — as well. More than 60% of these terminations were aimed at research and development, but an alarming 38% targeted research training and career development. Most of these were Post-doctoral Individual National Service Awards. Is this a problem? Yes. Emphatically, yes.
Training to become a scientist is time-consuming and expensive. It usually begins (in the U.S. at least) at the 4-year undergraduate level. Graduate training (course work and hands-on laboratory experience) can consume another 4-6 years. A written thesis and its defense are required for completion of the doctorate. Attainment of the PhD, however, is only the beginning of the ending point. It’s followed by another 2-4 years of post-doctoral training. When one finally takes her place as an assistant professor with a research lab of her own, she needs microscopes, centrifuges, PCR machines, supplies (glassware, chemicals, paper towels, for heaven’s sake), computers, animals, and a helping hand to get things underway. NIH often provides a good deal of the funding for this extensive training. Moreover, those recipients of NIH training grants at the graduate and post-doctoral level provide established laboratories with essential intelligent labor. Experiments that would not get done without trainees get done with them. Explain to me, then, why the Trump administration is cutting the very training that leads to the health of a scientific future.
One answer is a sad one. Over the years it had become clear that the scientific work force was almost exclusively white and male. Surely there were women and minorities out there who could be recruited to this important enterprise, and it just might be in the national interest to find them. So the NIH (and other scientific agencies) began to actively recruit from these populations, and sometimes, even to insist on the inclusion of them.
Then came Executive Order 14281, issued in April 2025 just months after Trump took office. It was the opening salvo of the Trump administration’s assault on Civil Rights legislation. This EO direct all agencies (not just scientific ones) to “deprioritize” enforcement of statutes and regulations imposing “disparate impact liability.” In everyday language this meant that agencies could not take into account the fact that certain groups had been discriminated against, and that they should not give priority to these so-called “underrepresented minorities.”
This injunction was elaborated more specifically for scientific grant funding in EO14332 later that year. “Discretionary awards” it states, “must…demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” One has to assume that some of those policy priorities were enumerated in EO14281. So, in short, no priority is to be given to minority groups.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is given the task of implementing Executive Orders, and it has recently promulgated its new rules that will apply to scientific grants funding. It includes the language of EO14332, but goes further: A “federal award is not to be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate ‘diversity, equity or inclusion’ (DEI)….This includes racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination used by the recipient”[Emphasis added]. Technically, awards are granted to institutions, not to individuals. This means that even if a scientific study has nothing to do with DEI, funding can be withheld if the formal recipient of the grant (e.g., a university) engages in something that is determined to be in violation of the administration’s DEI policies. This appears to be designed to punish institutions that are in presumed non-compliance at the expense of what might be relevant and meritorious science.
Moreover, and more insidiously, the OMB regulations would give final approval authority not to a scientific advisory council, but rather to a political appointee whose job it will be to ensure that grant applications are consistent with administrative priorities, do not espouse “anti-American” (undefined) ideas, and are in the “national interest” (undefined). This can and will lead to decisions based on political considerations (undefined), not scientific merit. It is ironic that the EO14281 is entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.”
Another provision of EO14332, the order underpinning these new OMB rules, is that funded grants must not “compromise public safety.” This, too, is ironic. Because some of the current administration policies are demonstrably anti-intellectual and anti-scientific (anti-vaccine rhetoric that has undermined public confidence in vaccines that have been in use for decades, quashing anti-mRNA research, decimating the Centers for Disease Control, removing the U.S. from the World Health Organization, canceling studies examining effects of global warming, etc., etc., etc.), the administration itself poses threats to national safety thereby violating its own prohibition. Political appointees of this administration cannot be considered qualified to determine what is a threat to national safety.
There are other egregious aspects to the new OMB regulations (they log in at 238 pages of single-spaced type). Many of them handicap researchers sometimes to maintain accountability (not necessarily a bad thing), but often to punish them and their institutions for perceived grievances — grievances defined by political appointees, not scientists. The most troubling rules allow an authoritarian overreach that can have a chilling effect on creative and necessary scientific endeavor. These proposed regulations taken together do not advance the scientific enterprise. American scientific know-how and ingenuity used to be the envy of the world. The Trump administration is rapidly darkening that sparkling reputation.
