Last month, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. In general, the executive order inserts a layer of political control over both the announcement of new funding opportunities and the approval of individual grants. Now, a coalition of more than 50 scientific and medical organizations is firing back, issuing a letter to the US Congress expressing grave concerns over the order’s provisions and urging Congress to protect the integrity of what has long been an independent, merit-based, peer-review system for awarding federal grants.
As we previously reported, the order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by the head of the agency or someone they designate, which means a political appointee will have the ultimate say over what areas of science the US funds. Individual grants will also require clearance from a political appointee and “must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”
The order also instructs agencies to formalize the ability to cancel previously awarded grants at any time if they’re considered “no longer advance agency priorities.” Until a system is in place to enforce the new rules, agencies are forbidden from starting new funding programs.
In short, the new rules would mean that all federal science research would need to be approved by a political appointee who may have no expertise in the relevant areas, and the research can be canceled at any time if the political winds change. It would mark the end of a system that has enabled US scientific leadership for roughly 70 years.
“We’ve already seen this administration take steps to exert its authority that have resulted in delays, freezes, and termination of billions of dollars in grants,” Carrie Wolinetz told Science in August in reaction to the executive order. Wolinetz is a former senior administrator at the National Institutes of Health, now a lobbyist for Lewis-Burke Associates. “This would codify those actions in a way that represents the true politicization of science, which would be a really bad idea.”
In its letter, the coalition asks Congress “to urgently exercise its oversight authority to prevent potentially significant damage to US leadership in scientific and medical research.” They outlined several specific concerns with the executive order’s provisions. These include shifting the review and selection of individual grants to political appointees; the termination of grants midstream for “convenience,” which risks squandering initial investments; and the vague criteria for how repeat grant recipients will be identified, given that in some research areas, large teams might be needed that in turn might warrant a larger number of grants.
The coalition also objected to the order’s directive to prioritize research proposals from academic institutions with the lowest indirect cost rates, which “undermines what should be the driving factor in awarding federal science funding—the ability to produce demonstrable results that lead to innovation, new technologies, and a return on public investment.” The letter concludes that “more review and oversight are needed by Congress before the full implementation of this EO goes into effect.”
The full text of the statement can be found here.