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.
