The Trump administration has given notice that political appointees, rather than scientists, will ultimately decide who gets grant money from the world’s largest biomedical research funder — the federal government’s National Institutes of Health.
In an Aug. 7 executive order, President Donald Trump announced that political officers would have the power to summarily cancel any federal grant, including for scientific work, that is not “consistent with agency priorities.” Senior officials should not “routinely defer” to recommendations from peer reviewers, who have provided the backbone of federal science funding for eight decades.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya reinforced the message in an Aug. 15 internal memorandum stating that political priorities may override the scoring system provided by outside experts appointed to hundreds of review panels.
“While the score and critiques an application receives in peer review are important factors in determining the scientific merit of a proposal,” his memo stated, NIH institutes and centers should not rely on the scientific merit rankings “in developing their final pay plans.”
Like ongoing conflicts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Reserve, NIH scientists told KFF Health News, the disruption of the peer review process represents an attack on agency expertise that the country has relied on for decades.
Although the priorities of top agency staffers have always influenced some NIH funding, those people were nearly always career scientists in the past. By downgrading its peer review process, the NIH could allow political appointees who now occupy key positions to stop grants that typically …