\n<\/p>\n
The NIH is one of several agencies where a political appointee will have to sign off on grant awards.<\/p>\n
Wesley Lapointe\/The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/p>\n
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 \u201cthey are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest,\u201d according to an executive order issued Thursday. And until those political appointees are in place, agencies won\u2019t be able to make announcements about new funding opportunities.<\/p>\n
The changes are aimed at both improving the process of federal grant making and \u201cending offensive waste of tax dollars,\u201d according to the order, which detailed multiple perceived issues with how grant-making bodies operate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Trump administration said some of those offenses have included agencies granting funding for the development of \u201ctransgender-sexual-education\u201d programs and \u201cfree services to illegal immigrants\u201d that it claims worsened the \u201cborder crisis.\u201d The order also claimed that the government has \u201cpaid insufficient attention\u201d to the efficacy of research projects\u2014noting instances of data falsification\u2014and that a \u201csubstantial portion\u201d of grants that fund university-led research \u201cgoes not to scientific project applicants or groundbreaking research, but to university facilities and administrative costs,\u201d which are commonly referred to as indirect costs.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Federal judges have since ruled some of those terminations unlawful. Despite those rulings, Thursday\u2019s executive order forbids new funding for some of the same research topics the administration has already targeted.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It instructs the new political appointees of grant-making agencies to \u201cuse their independent judgment\u201d when deciding which projects get funded so long as they \u201cdemonstrably advance the president\u2019s policy priorities.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those priorities include not awarding grants to \u201cfund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate\u201d the following:<\/p>\n
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\u00a0percent, but federal courts have blocked those efforts for now.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u201cthey are consistent with agency<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[8724,7589,4489,4639,1913,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-15128","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-appointees","9":"tag-charge","10":"tag-decisions","11":"tag-grant","12":"tag-political","13":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}