Senior administration officials argued in the Oval Office on Friday over whether the National Institutes of Health was continuing to fund priorities at odds with President Donald Trump’s agenda and if the agency should further change its spending priorities, according to three people familiar with the meeting.
Russell Vought, the White House’s budget chief, led the criticism, accusing the NIH of funding “woke” initiatives that went against Trump’s goals, including his executive order barring “equity-related” grants and contracts, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
Vought and other administration officials floated an additional review of the agency’s grant-making to Trump, the people said, and discussed a potential executive order establishing a commission to review the NIH’s grants.
Jay Bhattacharya, director of the $47 billion health agency, which is the nation’s largest single funder of biomedical research, defended the NIH’s grant-making process, the people said.
The NIH last year cut hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding for health issues in minority, gay and transgender communities. The agency has also revamped its grant-making process under Trump, issuing fewer grants on issues such as women’s health.
Trump, who attended the meeting, appeared open to Vought’s criticisms of the NIH, two of the people said.
Friday’s intense discussions, which have not previously been reported, reflect the administration’s continued focus on cutting the federal budget and cracking down on initiatives perceived to be liberal.
An NIH spokesperson on Friday night declined to comment on the meeting but said there would be no “rescissions” — an approach Vought has previously used to pull back federal money — of existing NIH grant funds.
“There will be no rescissions to NIH grant monies. All NIH grant monies will be spent,” an NIH spokesperson said in a statement.
White House spokespeople did not respond to questions about Friday’s Oval Office meeting, and a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget declined to comment.
Polls have shown that bipartisan majorities of voters generally oppose health care research cuts, and GOP lawmakers have pushed back on Trump administration efforts to further trim NIH spending.
Vought has repeatedly targeted NIH in his efforts to reshape federal spending.
“We have an agency that needs dramatic overhaul,” Vought said in July 2025 on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” citing examples of NIH grants that he called wasteful. “Thankfully, we have a great new head of it, but we’re going to have to go line by line to make sure the NIH is funded properly.”
OMB has proposed a rule to give political appointees more power over federal grant making, though it was blocked until December by a government funding measure.
Vought told members of Congress during a hearing in June that the administration doesn’t intend to cancel grants “in a heartbeat,” but “when we find something that’s problematic that our policy officials would not have caught, we need to be able to turn it off,” he said.
Lawmakers have criticized Vought’s efforts to cut research funding, and Bhattacharya has pledged that his agency will spend its full congressional allocation of grant money.
“We will spend the allocation on excellent science this year,” Bhattacharya told House appropriators in a March hearing.
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