Political Appointees will Review Scientific Grants

A first level of review is carried out by a scientific review group (SRG). It is composed (primarily) of non-federal scientists who have expertise in relevant scientific disciplines and current research areas. Their role is to assess the overall impact a proposed project (or resource, or training, or center, etc.) will likely have on the biomedical research field(s) involved.

The National Advisory Councils or Boards perform the second level of peer review for research grant applications. They offer advice and recommendations on policy and program development, program implementation, evaluation, and other matters of significance to the mission and goals of the respective Institutes or Centers (ICs).

Receiving a favorable review outcome? You may be asked to submit additional information. If you don’t receive a favorable review outcome, reach out to your Program Official to discuss next steps.

Tr__p wishes to use his authority to guide Scientific Grants in a manner he prefers rather than what scientists wish. It is all a matter of power again . . . It is a matter of power to control how the grants are being used. Initially, grants for studies on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), vaccine hesitancy research and LGBTQ health have been canceled in large numbers. Not much of a surprise here. More meaningless political interference.

Trump Admin. Exec. Order Gives Political Appointees Review of Scientific Grants, MedPage Today

A Trump administration executive order requiring political appointee oversight of federal grant-making is raising concerns among some policy experts.

The order, issued on Thursday, states that “each agency head shall promptly designate a senior appointee who shall be responsible for creating a process to review new funding opportunity announcements and to review discretionary grants to ensure that they are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.”

At a minimum, the grant review process “shall incorporate . . . review and approval of agency funding opportunity announcements by one or more senior appointees or their designees; continuation of existing coordination with OMB [the Office of Management and Budget]; and to the extent appropriate to the subject matter of the announcements, review by designated subject-matter experts as identified by the agency head or the agency head’s designee,” the order continued.

Until those actions are implemented, agencies cannot issue any new funding opportunity announcements “without prior approval from the senior appointee,” according to the order. It also instructs the OMB director to make changes that would “require all discretionary grants to permit termination for convenience.”

Order ‘Politicizes’ Research,

Lawrence Gostin, JD, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., called the order an “abomination [that] thoroughly politicizes scientific research.”

“As a matter of law, the president has broad authority to set processes and priorities for federal grant funding,” Gostin said in an email, adding that while the order will be hard to legally challenge, “the president cannot do anything against the intent of Congress, which holds the power of the purse. That means if Congress designated research funds for specific purposes, the executive branch must comply. Additionally, the president or any executive agency must follow an orderly and deliberative process and cannot act in an arbitrary or capricious manner.”

“For decades, decisions about research grants have been made by scientists and not politicians,” he added. “This order assumes political officials can discern the quality and importance of scientific research. They cannot. Those are quintessentially scientific questions to be reviewed by qualified professionals.” And the justification used for the process change given in the order “is so factually incorrect and cherry picked that it shows how ignorant politicians are about science and research,” he said.

Current Employees Concerned

One HHS employee who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation called the executive order “a roadmap to undermine the government’s grant-making process.”

“Political appointees will take on responsibilities currently implemented by career subject matter experts and will have authority over which grant applications are considered meritorious and worth funding,” the employee said in a message. “The most devastating aspect is that it proposes to include terms and conditions in federal grants that specify the government can terminate any grant for convenience — for example in cases where research no longer effectuates the administration’s priorities. It’s an assault on free speech, in addition to politicizing science and degrading the power base of academia.”

Another employee, who works for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and also requested anonymity, said they could see two possible outcomes from the executive order, “neither of which are good.” Either the normal review process, which already takes years, “will have extra layers of [political] review, or if we’re not allowed to have panels of outside experts review anymore, if decisions are purely political, there is a chance that grants will go through that are not based in science,” the person said, adding that they have not heard anything yet about the implementation of the executive order.

The move is the latest in the Trump administration’s increased scrutiny over federal grants, including at the NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF), where grants for studies on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), vaccine hesitancy research, and LGBTQ health have been canceled in large numbers. In the first few months of Trump’s second term alone, nearly 700 NIH grants totalling $1.8 billion were terminated.

Many of those grant terminations have been challenged in court, with one judge calling the administration’s process on DEI grants “arbitrary and capricious.”

And the executive order comes only a few days after the Government Accountability Office issued a report  finding the NIH violated a 1974 law requiring it to allocate funds that have been congressionally appropriated to the agency. “Unless Congress has enacted a law providing otherwise, executive branch officials must take care to ensure that they prudently obligate appropriations during their period of availability,” the report said.

Legal Challenges Likely

Like previous executive orders on education and research, the order is sure to be legally challenged, Steven Balla, PhD, co-director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said in an email to MedPage Today.

“Regardless of the outcome of such challenges, the executive order could have wide-ranging and long-run impacts, as researchers faced with an increasingly uncertain and political research climate will have incentives to change their behavior in a variety of ways. So, while the administration may lose the battle in court, it still might succeed in substantially reshaping the research landscape in the years ahead.”

In justifying the action, Trump took aim at the NSF over its funding of studies containing DEI elements and “social media censorship tools” and repeated his claim the NIH funded gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China.

Other aspects of Trump’s executive order require grant “review by at least one subject matter expert in the field of the application, who may be a member of the grant review panel, the program officer, or an outside expert; and pre-issuance review of discretionary awards to ensure that the awards are consistent with applicable law, agency priorities, and the national interest.”

The order gave a nod to the peer review process, noting that “nothing in this order shall be construed to discourage or prevent the use of peer review methods to evaluate proposals for discretionary awards,” but added that peer review recommendations should be seen as “advisory and [should] not [be] ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding by senior appointees or their designees.”

The order also specifies that grants “must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities” and they also “must not be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate: racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination by the grant recipient; denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic; illegal immigration; or any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.”