On Friday, The Washington Post reported on a contentious White House meeting in which the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, tried to fend off yet another effort to place funding decisions under political control. The move came from Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has sought to limit and control research funds. The Post suggested that Bhattacharya ended up on the losing side of the fight.
This initial leak has been confirmed and expanded on by outlets such as The New York Times and Politico. It now appears that the administration is drafting an executive order that would give Vought veto power over every individual grant awarded by the NIH. The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, and its $47 billion budget is larger than that of the next 10 research funders combined.
Its funding, distributed largely through grants to academic researchers at universities, supports everything from basic biological research to clinical trials and has helped the biotechnology industry flourish. But Vought seems to feel that it has funded a lot of “woke” research. Immediately after Trump re-entered the Oval Office, the agency terminated a broad range of grants on topics like pandemic preparedness and health disparities and proposed a budget that would shrink the NIH by nearly half.
That cut was rejected by Congress, and the policy behind the NIH grant terminations was also voided by a court. Vought responded to these setbacks by proposing new grant funding rules that would make political considerations key determinants in which grants get funded. Congress put that rule on hold, too.
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