Once again, the Trump administration is trying to exert political control over federal research grants. And once again, lawmakers from both parties are warning about the potential economic damage caused by undermining public investments.
Last week, Politico reported, President Donald Trump instructed his budget director, Russell Vought, to draft an executive order that would create a board of political appointees responsible for reviewing grants issued by the National Institutes of Health. The purported goal is to stop the agency from funding “woke” research. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya defended the grant-making process during a heated Oval Office meeting on Friday, The Post reported, but Trump seemed to side with Vought.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, joined her Democratic colleagues on Monday in sharply rebuking the proposal, noting that its aim would be “contrary to congressional intent.” Just this month, Congress passed a provision as part of its stopgap funding bill to temporarily block a White House plan to give political appointees more power over grants.
The spat dates to Trump’s first term. At the time, the president asked Congress to cut funding for NIH grants. Lawmakers responded by not only increasing funding for the agency, but also by restricting the administration’s power to change how the government pays for the “indirect costs” of research, such as the utility bills, equipment and other expenses that support laboratories.
Similar attempts by the U.S. DOGE Service last year ended with bipartisan condemnation. That included the usual critics on the left, as well as firm Trump allies such as Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Alabama).
Why do lawmakers consistently rebuff Trump on this? Partly because every state has universities, so elected officials have constituents who would be directly affected by grant cancellations. Lawmakers no doubt are also aware that investing in basic science is one of the most powerful tools the government has to promote long-term economic growth.
Unlike private research, which typically focuses on applications that might foreseeably turn a profit, government grants allow scientists greater freedom to pursue blue-sky projects. That structure has led to countless discoveries, unlocking billions of dollars in innovation.
United for Medical Research, a coalition that includes universities, estimates that, last year alone, NIH research funding sparked more than $94 billion in economic activity. That amounted to a return on investment of $2.57 for every $1 spent. In just the past year, such spending led to new treatments for cancers and rare diseases and opioid use disorder.
It is true, as critics complain, that some grants are lost to administrative waste, and that the NIH’s spending approach tends to favor larger universities with established research infrastructure. That system is ripe for reform. Another useful reform would be the elimination of countless burdensome government regulations that serve mainly to impede scientists.
But giving the president’s allies greater power over scientific endeavors in the name of fighting wokeness or promoting the White House’s priorities would do nothing to fix those problems. If anything, doing so could risk damaging research. Trump’s musings on vaccine policies — such as his declaration on Friday that some childhood shots should be split into smaller doses — illustrate this vividly. Taxpayers deserve to be confident that their money will be spent on research that could prove invaluable in the long run, not on satisfying the immediate whims of politicians.
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