Federal Grants Must ‘Demonstrably Advance President’s Policy Priorities’
Politicizing scientific inquiry is a bad idea.
Ars Technica (“New executive order puts all grants under political control“):
On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. 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 to “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.
The opening paragraphs of the order, like so many others in this administration (and unlike any I’d seen in prior administrations, including Trump 45’s), contain rhetoric more typical of a campaign rally:
Every tax dollar the Government spends should improve American lives or advance American interests. This often does not happen. Federal grants have funded drag shows in Ecuador, trained doctoral candidates in critical race theory, and developed transgender-sexual-education programs. In 2024, one study claimed that more than one-quarter of new National Science Foundation (NSF) grants went to diversity, equity, and inclusion and other far-left initiatives. These NSF grants included those to educators that promoted Marxism, class warfare propaganda, and other anti-American ideologies in the classroom, masked as rigorous and thoughtful investigation.
The harm imposed by problematic Federal grants does not stop at propagating absurd ideologies. An unsafe lab in Wuhan, China — likely the source of the COVID-19 pandemic — engaged in gain-of-function research funded by the National Institutes of Health. The NSF gave millions to develop AI-powered social media censorship tools — a direct assault on free speech. Taxpayer-funded grants have also gone to non-governmental organizations that provided free services to illegal immigrants, worsening the border crisis and compromising our safety, and to organizations that actively worked against American interests abroad.
Even for projects receiving Federal funds that serve an ostensibly beneficial purpose, the Government has paid insufficient attention to their efficacy. For example, a significant proportion of the results of federally funded scientific research projects cannot be reproduced by external researchers. Even at Harvard and Stanford, once considered among America’s most prestigious universities, senior researchers have resigned following accusations of data falsification. A substantial portion of many Federal grants for university-led research goes not to scientific project applicants or groundbreaking research, but to university facilities and administrative costs.
It’s easy to cherry-pick from the thousands of grants ever issued to find a handful that seem problematic when uncharitably described. Furthermore, almost by definition, cutting-edge studies are going to fail to produce the desired outcomes quite frequently; the very nature of science is to experiment and rule out what doesn’t work.
Is there waste and abuse? Almost certainly. Show me any large program where there isn’t.
Elections have consequences, of course, and a new administration should have some leeway to pursue its priorities. But it’s just bad policy to condition scientific funding on changing ideological whims.
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Would any of these numbskulls have had the vision to approve the grants that led to Velcro? The internet? GPS?
Doubtful.
There’s not a functioning brain amongst them.
The age of Lysenko comes to America.
@Scott:
Generated by AI
Seems there is a common thread…
As was the case in Trump 1.0, the campaign never stops. So many Hatch Act violations that the media doesn’t even notice – until a Hatch Act claim is ginned up against Jack Smith; and Trump and Karoline Leavitt can’t go a day without slandering Joe Biden or Obama, and Trump does campaign-esque rallies for no good reason other than to feed his ego (inadvertently demonstrating the cognitive decline that Jake Tapper chooses to ignore). The governing by E.O. is part and parcel of Trump – and the GOP’s – politicization of EVERYTHING.
The rhetoric is indeed something. We recently received a notice of award for an NIH T32 institutional research training grant. This grant provides funding for 10 PhD students and post-docs. It covers stipend, benefits, tuition, conference travel, and provides a modest amount of funding for research on [topic]. In short, it funds people focused on [topic] more so than discrete projects on [topic].
The notice of award contains all the typical language about terms, compliance, blah blah. And then there’s this new language, in bold red font, font size at least 3 units higher than the rest, and highlighted in yellow.
Is there a clear definition of DEI? Nope.
What is a non-priority? Dunno.
This is especially troubling because, as I said above, this award funds people — promising early career scholars, helping them to launch their research careers. As such, they should use the time to pursue their specific line of research, as well as spread their wings into new areas, methods, etc. Priority vs. non-priority (especially when it is unspecified) doesn’t really align with this funding mechanism.
Also, when a trainee publishes, we are expected (required) to acknowledge the T32 grant that funded them in completing the published work. What if the work reports on demographic group differences as a primary, secondary, tertiary aim? I think that is now considered naughty science and grounds for grant termination and funds recovery.
Thus, either we don’t report on these group differences, we report them and do not acknowledge the T32 funding, or we report them and acknowledge the T32 and risk losing funding.
But Mimai, you can contact the funding IC (Institute or Center) for clarification, just like it says in that big beautiful red font with yellow, ahem, gold highlight.
Who at the IC can/will give me such clarification… that won’t be further clarified, ie contradicted, by someone else? The program officers who have been fired, rehired, cowed, etc? Or maybe I should contact the IC directors, who have been made accountable but not responsible? Or maybe Jay Bhattacharya. Or RFK Jr.
Science!
@Mimai: This is profoundly depressing.
It should be noted, not that it isn’t obvious, that this administration used “DEI” along with “antisemitism” as ill-defined blankets to allow them to do whatever it is that they want to do.
And being anti-DEI, in particular, is just an excuse to try and remake the default norm as white, male, straight, and at least vaguely Christian. It is pure white nationalism disguised as some concern about fairness or “wokeness” (another term that currently is just a cudgel for these people).
@Charley in Cleveland:
I’ve come to believe “the governing by E.O.” may be what saves the country. What’s made to happen by Executive Order (and not through legislation) can be undone by Executive Order. The damage will be great in the interim and it’s no way to govern an advanced country, but the idea of simply reversing all that is hated about Trumpism would be pretty easy to sell.
@Scott F.: I have been meaning to write about this. The short version is that, yes, much of what is done by EO can be undone by EO, but not everything. Destruction by EO is easier than construction by EO.
Worse, if what we end up doing is elected a president for four years who can do more or less what they want via EO, we will have definitely moved away from a representative democracy ever further than we have.
More on this at some point.
I expect there will be political officers appointed to deal with any confusions.
@Mimai: Amazing how one lousy narcissistic personality can reshape an entire society of 300 million people in a matter of months. We gotta figure this aggregation of power vis a vis personality disorders thing out.
@Scott F.:
@Steven L. Taylor:
What do you do when a Democratic president in 2029 issues EOs to undo El Taco’s EOs, and the fixer court declares them unconstitutional?
@Mimai:
How can the funding IC determine if something is DEI without investigating DEI, which should itself violate the policies of this administration.
@Rob1: tragically, with the cancellation of USAID and economic terrorism by tariffs plus all the other wacko whims by the Big Ugly, the whole world is writhing in pain or anger.
It’s like we all know a nuclear bomb has gone off and we’re just waiting for the fallout to take its toll.
Yesterday I took the tour of NCAR’s supercomputer center in Cheyenne, WY. A good share of the operational funding — not all, though — is an NSF grant. The facility provides free access to supercomputing resources for hundreds of (mostly university) researchers each year. To be approved, research projects have to be in some area of earth sciences. Most of the ones that need access to a supercomputer are related to climate. It seems like an obvious target for Trump and his minions.
The scientific community has been tracking terminated, paused, and reinstated grants from the beginning of this nightmare. It started with shared google docs and excel spreadsheets. And now has expanded to the comprehensive Grant Witness. They are doing incredible work.
There’s lots to explore at the site, but the map of NIH/NSF grant cuts is particularly striking. You can use the NIH data and NSF data tabs at the top to search for the types of grants that have been targeted. It’s dismaying, to be sure, but we must not allow ourselves to feel helpless. Check that, we can feel helpless, but we must not act as if we are helpless. Because we are not.
@Kathy: This is a real possibility.
There is a legal principle against selective enforcement. This is because one way to persecute people you don’t like, even though a bill of attainder is forbidden, is to make a very broad law that almost everyone will violate at some point, and then only prosecute the people you don’t like.
I expect this initiative to work a bit like this. It also marks as “dead in the water’ any research having to do with gender identity, racial identity, and women’s studies.
I was imagining that most researchers can be pretty imaginative and will cook up ways to present their research as supporting administration goals. However, this policy is similar to the overly vague law in the scenario above. It lets them cut off anybody who might bother them. All they need to do is badmouth the research as undermining administration policy goals, and boom, the faucet is off.
Which means I think that in the long run, researchers will do better to just walk away in the first place.
We are in such a terrible, terrible place right now. We aren’t going to get out of it without getting hurt, or suffering loss.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think it’s extremely likely. See your own link about union bargaining in today’s tabs post. Then look at this one about contempt related to the deportations to the Salvadoran gulag.
In common, two of the 3 panel judges in the appeals court were appointed by El Taco.
As to the contempt case, from the link: “The District Court’s order raises troubling questions about judicial control over core executive functions like the conduct of foreign policy and the prosecution of criminal offenses,”
That’s El Taco’s own rhetoric: his so-called administration doesn’t have to conform to the law. The law cannot bind the president, or El Taco, in foreign policy or “the prosecution of criminal offenses”? Keep this in mind when citizens begin to be deported, detained indefinitely, sent to overseas prisons, or plain executed.
I would note the refrence in Professor Taylor’s post to
“Why a NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose.”
(Actually two satellites)
Which appears to be simply because they provide data that links to confirmation of anthropogenic climate change.
Whic is, of course, verboten.
I use verboten quite deliberately.
This sort of silliness did not end well for the the Nazis.
And did considerable harm to biology in the Soviet Union for that matter.
Come to Europe, ye scientists!
Seriously, if the European states and the EU play their cards right, this could be of massive benefit for us.
Next step for Trump, perhaps: “2000% tariffs on any country that dares to research carbon dioxide related climate science, or mitigation”?
This is a very reasl possibility: Europe has mooted “carbon intensity” levies on imports.
Given the MAGA screeching over proposed taxes and regulation of US tech oligopolies, imagine the likely levels of rage.
The sooner Europe can move to full strategic autonomy and end the necessity of coddling the toddler, the better.
Vive de Gaulle! lol
@Steven L. Taylor:
Not to mention eradicating all history of discrimination and abuse. Can’t have our precious white kids fee fees bruised by awareness of how the current situation came about; can’t have our daughters thinking that they could get jobs too; can’t have America at large learn the truth about just how criminal undocumented aliens aren’t.
@Joe:
They know it when they see it.
@Mimai:
21st century samizdat. How appropriate.
@Steven L. Taylor:
@Kathy:
“Further than we have” seems a slippery slope argument when we are already at the bottom for all practical purposes.
Maybe, just maybe, recovering from Trumpism will require an equal measure of strong man abuse from the Dems to provide to all parties (including SCOTUS) the necessary reminder that bipartisan representative democracy is better for the country than tit for tat authoritarianism. I don’t see the US returning to the governance I’d prefer through conventional politics. Trump has already crossed the Rubicon on that count.
@Scott F.:
I keep thinking back to the 1860s. A minority held unpopular views, kept winning in the courts, and when they had to face serious opposition with Lincoln’s election they opted to go to war.
But history doesn’t quite repeat itself, and some popel are capable of learning lessons from it. One strong possibility is they’ll outright steal or suspend elections to stay in power, and force the majority to accept their will.
@Scott F.:
Keeping in my mind that I am in a pessimistic mood, there is a lot farther we could go.
MAGA America has motored straight past authoritarianism without even slowing down, and is now barrelling towards becoming a totalitarian state at a brisk pace.
Trump has put an original spin on totalitarianism. His “special goal” is to extract tribute and obedience from everyone in his “department store” and everyone who wants to shop there. There is no goal beyond that.