The NIH is one of several agencies where a political appointee will have to sign off on grant awards.
Wesley Lapointe/The Washington Post via Getty Images
President Donald Trump is now requiring grant-making agencies to appoint senior officials who will review new funding opportunity announcements and grants to ensure that “they are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest,” according to an executive order issued Thursday. And until those political appointees are in place, agencies won’t be able to make announcements about new funding opportunities.
The changes are aimed at both improving the process of federal grant making and “ending offensive waste of tax dollars,” according to the order, which detailed multiple perceived issues with how grant-making bodies operate.
The Trump administration said some of those offenses have included agencies granting funding for the development of “transgender-sexual-education” programs and “free services to illegal immigrants” that it claims worsened the “border crisis.” The order also claimed that the government has “paid insufficient attention” to the efficacy of research projects—noting instances of data falsification—and that a “substantial portion” of grants that fund university-led research “goes not to scientific project applicants or groundbreaking research, but to university facilities and administrative costs,” which are commonly referred to as indirect costs.
It’s the latest move by the Trump administration to take control of federally funded research supported by agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. Since taking office in January, those and other agencies have terminated thousands of grants that no longer align with their priorities, including projects focused on vaccine hesitancy, combating misinformation, LGBTQ+ health and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.
Federal judges have since ruled some of those terminations unlawful. Despite those rulings, Thursday’s executive order forbids new funding for some of the same research topics the administration has already targeted.
It instructs the new political appointees of grant-making agencies to “use their independent judgment” when deciding which projects get funded so long as they “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.”
Those priorities include not awarding grants to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” the following:
- “Racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination by the grant recipient, including activities where race or intentional proxies for race will be used as a selection criterion for employment or program participation;
- “Denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic;
- “Illegal immigration; or
- “Any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.”
The order also instructs senior appointees to give preference to applications from institutions with lower indirect cost rates. (Numerous agencies have also moved to cap indirect research cost rates for universities at 15 percent, but federal courts have blocked those efforts for now.)
