President Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating that his appointees will review all funding announcements and grant awards to “verify that each grant dollar benefits Americans instead of lining grantees’ pocketbooks or furthering causes that damage America.”
The Aug. 7 order, “Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking,” cites critical race theory, transgender sexual education programs, and DEI research as “far-left initiatives” that are an “offensive waste of tax dollars.”
Award decisions will undergo “more rigorous evaluation by political appointees and subject matter experts to ensure they benefit the American public, align with administration priorities, and are coordinated across agencies to avoid duplication,” the EO manadates.
Also, agencies are directed to simplify funding opportunity announcements with plain language.
The order states:
The grant review process itself also undermines the interests of American taxpayers.
Writing effective grant applications is notoriously complex, and grant applicants that can afford legal and technical experts are more likely to receive funds—which can then further support these non-mission functions.
In addition, there is insufficient interagency coordination and review by relevant subject matter experts to reduce duplication.
As a result, the best proposals do not always receive funding, and there is too much unfocused research of marginal social utility.
Early reactions to the executive order include criticism from the medical research community.
“Much of this executive order is predicated on misinformation,” Jeremy Berg, former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH and member of Stand Up For Science’s advisory board, said in a statement. “Even though it has been exactly seven months since OMB forced NIH to release the notice capping indirect costs, OMB has still not bothered to learn what they are or how they are reimbursed. If we approached science in this way, we would still be studying the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.”
The order also mandates that “all else being equal,” preference for discretionary awards should be given to institutions with lower indirect cost rates.
“The indirect cost directive of this order will have a great impact on institutions such as children’s hospitals and rural institutions, with higher indirect cost rates (despite significantly lower actual reimbursement rate from the government) because these institutions are unable to pool resources with neighbors, setting back advances in pediatric research and privileging institutions in urban areas,” Stand up for Science said in a statement. “The order states preference for grant-recipients at institutions with the lowest indirect costs rates versus reimbursement, thus failing to consider that the tools of scientific research—qualified staff, sophisticated equipment, specialized facilities, and premium materials—are costly and required to support innovation.”
Victor Ambros, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNA, called the order “unpatriotic in the extreme.”
Said Ambros:
China is surely cheering this latest Trump/Vought stupidity. [The order is] a shameless, full-bore Soviet-style politicization of American science that will smother what until now has been the world’s preeminent scientific enterprise.
Until this administration, the single overarching priority for public funding of research has been scientific excellence. That is why our country has been so successful in delivering life-saving and life-enriching discoveries.
