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August 12, 2025<\/p>\n
4 min read<\/p>\n
Trump Order Gives Political Appointees Vast Powers over Research Grants<\/p>\n
Researchers are alarmed that an expansive executive order issued by President Donald Trump might upend a long-standing tradition of peer-review for grants<\/p>\n
Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
US President Donald Trump issued an expansive executive order (EO) yesterday that would centralize power and upend the process that the US government has used for decades to award research grants. If implemented, political appointees \u2014 not career civil servants, including scientists \u2014 would have control over grants, from initial funding calls to final review. This is the Trump administration\u2019s latest move to assert control over US science.<\/p>\n
The EO, titled \u2018Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking\u2019, orders each US agency head to designate an appointee to develop a grant-review process that will \u201cadvance the President\u2019s policy priorities\u201d. Those processes must not fund grants that advance \u201canti-American values\u201d and instead prioritize funding for institutions committed to achieving Trump\u2019s plan for \u2018gold-standard science\u2019. (That plan, issued in May, calls for the US government to promote \u201ctransparent, rigorous, and impactful\u201d science, but has been criticized for its potential to increase political interference in research.)<\/p>\n
Impacts might be felt immediately: the latest order directs US agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to halt new funding opportunities, which are calls for researchers to submit applications for grants on certain topics. They will be paused until agencies put their new review processes in place.<\/p>\n
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Trump\u2019s EO comes after the US Senate \u2014 which, along with the House, ultimately controls US government spending \u2014 has, in recent weeks, mostly rejected his proposals to slash the federal budget for science, totalling nearly US$200 billion annually.<\/p>\n
The White House did not respond to questions from Nature about the EO.<\/p>\n
Trump, a Republican, has previously used EOs, which can direct government agencies but cannot alter existing laws, to effect policy change. In January, on his first day in office, he signed a slew of EOs with wide-ranging effects, from pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement to cutting the federal workforce, which had included nearly 300,000 scientists before he took office.<\/p>\n
Scientists and policy specialists have lambasted the latest EO on social media. \u201cThis is a shocking executive order that undermines the very idea of open inquiry,\u201d Casey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society, an advocacy group in Pasadena, California, posted to Bluesky.<\/p>\n
Also on Bluesky, Jeremy Berg, a former director of the NIH\u2019s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, called it a \u201cpower grab\u201d. Speaking to Nature, he said: \u201cThat power is something that has not been exercised at all in the past by political appointees.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement, Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from California, called the EO \u201cobscene\u201d. It could lead to political appointees \u201cstanding between you and a cutting-edge cancer-curing clinical trial\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n
The EO justifies the changes to the grant-awarding process by casting doubts on past choices: it accuses the US National Science Foundation (NSF) of awarding grants to educators with anti-American ideologies and to projects on diversity, equity and inclusion, which are disfavoured by the Trump team. It also points to senior researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Stanford University in California who have resigned over accusations of data falsification.<\/p>\n
To \u201cstrengthen oversight\u201d of grants, the EO imposes several restrictions, including prohibiting grants that promote \u201cillegal immigration\u201d and prohibiting grant recipients from promoting \u201cracial preferences\u201d in their work or denying that sex is binary. In some cases, the restrictions seem to contradict Congressional mandates. For instance, the NSF has, for decades, been required by law to broaden participation in science of people from under-represented groups \u2014 an action that takes race into consideration.<\/p>\n
In addition to these broader restrictions, the EO directs grant approvals to prioritize certain research institutions, such as those that have \u201cdemonstrated success\u201d in implementing the gold-standard science plan and those with lower \u2018indirect costs\u2019. As part of its campaign to downsize government spending and reduce the power of elite US universities, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to cap these costs \u2014 used to pay for laboratory electricity and administrative staff, for instance. It has proposed a flat 15% rate for grants awarded by agencies such as the NSF and the US Department of Energy, but federal courts have so far blocked such policies.<\/p>\n
Some institutions with the highest indirect-cost rates are children\u2019s hospitals, Berg told Nature. \u201cDoes that mean they\u2019re just not going to prioritize research at children\u2019s hospitals?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n
At the heart of the grant-awarding process is peer review. Project proposals have typically had to pass watchful panels of independent scientists who scored and approved funding. \u201cNothing in this order shall be construed to discourage or prevent the use of peer review methods,\u201d the EO notes, \u201cprovided that peer review recommendations remain advisory\u201d to the senior appointees.<\/p>\n
The EO worries many researchers, including Doug Natelson, a physicist at Rice University in Houston, Texas. \u201cThis looks like an explicit attempt to destroy peer review for federal science grants,\u201d he says. Programme officers at agencies, who have been stewards of the grant-review process, are similarly alarmed. \u201cThe executive order is diminishing the role of programme officers and their autonomy to make judgments about the quality of the science,\u201d says an NSF employee who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with the press. \u201cThat\u2019s disheartening, to say the least.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on August 8, 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
August 12, 2025 4 min read Trump Order Gives Political Appointees Vast Powers over Research Grants Researchers are alarmed that an expansive executive order issued by President Donald Trump might upend a long-standing tradition of peer-review for grants By Dan Garisto & Nature magazine Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images US President Donald Trump issued an expansive executive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[8724,4489,116,254,1435,1913,1664,516,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-15368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-appointees","9":"tag-decisions","10":"tag-funding","11":"tag-give","12":"tag-order","13":"tag-political","14":"tag-power","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15368","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=15368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}