Donald Trump’s latest executive order is expected to establish a board responsible for approving National Institutes of Health grant funding, marking another attempt by the Trump administration to censor topics that do not align with the president’s agenda.
The executive order, reported by outlets including the Washington Post and Politico, was discussed in a meeting on Friday where senior administration officials accused the NIH of funding “woke” initiatives that went against Trump’s political priorities.
Russell Vought, the director of the White House’s office of management and budget (OMB), and other administration officials proposed an executive order that would create an external committee that could veto awards in biomedical research that do not align with Trump’s goals, according to several people who spoke to the Washington Post.
The board would include Vought and the NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, according to Politico, and it would be required to reach unanimous decisions on grant awards. The OMB is the White House agency in charge of implementing the president’s policies in the executive branch.
Establishing an external commission to award grants based on the president’s ideological agenda breaks with the agency’s traditional process of evaluating proposals on scientific merit. Bhattacharya has resisted cuts to federal research spending and defended the NIH’s grant-making process on Friday, while Vought expressed a desire to reshape federal spending.
The reported move comes as the NIH, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, faces a class-action lawsuit by researchers arguing that the Trump administration is hindering and terminating scientific grants to censor opposing views to the president’s ideological agenda. Researchers are accusing the administration of violating the first amendment.
“What the First Amendment does not allow is the government’s use of its funding power to target or silence the expression of disfavored viewpoints within the biomedical research community,” reads the lawsuit.
Since Trump took office for his second term, billions of dollars in federal grants related to health, nutrition, the environment and disaster relief have been cut or frozen. Research with keywords including “equity”, “racist”, “gender”, “climate change” and others has been flagged by the administration to hinder funding for scientific research.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
