Trump Gives Political Appointees Final Say on Grants

Political appointees will soon have ultimate decision-making power over grants and be required to align all awards with presidential priorities, including policies on race and gender, indirect cost rates, and compliance with “gold standard science.” The changes stem from a recent executive order that also blocks agencies from issuing new funding opportunities until they implement grant review processes that meet these requirements.

Critics of the order, including House Science Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), argue that it opens the door to bias in the grant review process and will lead to projects being selected or rejected based on appointees’ personal interests rather than merit. A White House spokesperson said the order “restores merit-based grantmaking” and that the administration is committed to ending “wasteful grants.”

The order states that it aims to root out funding for “anti-American ideologies,” alluding to a study from Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cruz’s study used keyword searches of NSF grants to determine that over 25% of new National Science Foundation grants in 2024 went to projects that “pushed far-left perspectives” on status, social justice, gender, race, and environmental justice. Minority staff on the House Science Committee issued a “rebuttal report” in April criticizing the study’s methodology.

Over 100 NSF staff signed a letter in July that claims “unqualified political appointees” are performing a “covert and ideologically driven secondary review process” of programs and proposals. The agency reportedly began using a keyword search similar to Cruz’s as early as February in order to identify grants not in compliance with President Donald Trump’s early executive orders, including on diversity, equity, and inclusion. NSF and the National Institutes of Health have since terminated thousands of grants, citing their misalignment with agency priorities, and are facing subsequent lawsuits.

The order also requires agency heads and the White House Office of Management and Budget to ensure that all new grants — and existing ones wherever possible — can be terminated for convenience, with a few exceptions.

“I think it’s fair to say that this executive order is in reaction to what is playing out in the judiciary over these current terminations,” said Carrie Wolinetz, who previously served as senior adviser to the director at NIH. “It’s allowing codification of what the administration is currently doing… in a way that is protective against legal action,” she added.

Changing long-established processes

Current grant review processes vary between agencies but largely involve some form of peer review with little official input from political appointees. NIH grant applications undergo two rounds of review from mostly non-federal scientists and receive final approval from the institute or center director — only one of the 26 institute and center directors is a political appointee. At NSF, program officers seek input from external experts who do not have conflicts of interest before giving their recommendation to the division director, who generally makes the final decision. Program officers and division directors are career civil servants.

Under the order, agencies may use peer review methods for grantmaking on an advisory basis, but these recommendations should not be “ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding,” the order states.

NSF’s merit review process has been established by law and built over 75 years, said Jesus Soriano, a program officer at NSF and president of the union that represents the agency, at a press conference held by House Science Committee Democrats. “It ensures that when a scientist, an educator, an engineer submits a proposal, it will be reviewed on the merits without conflict of interest,” Soriano added.

“Now, if a proposal contains the word woman, or Black, or weather, or climate, or anything considered woke... We need to screen the proposals for those words, they are flagged,” Soriano said. “And if that’s the case, there’s several chances that the proposal may never be reviewed, the award may be terminated, or that we have to spend hours and hours... you could call it ‘sanitizing.’ Why do we have to sanitize the word Black, or the word weather, or the word woman?”

It is unclear how the order will affect new funding opportunities at NSF. The agency director is politically appointed, but the position has been vacant since Sethuraman Panchanathan’s resignation in April. Brian Stone, who has served as NSF’s chief of staff for nearly a decade, is currently performing the duties of the director.

Wolinetz said in her personal experience at NIH, the agency director might be consulted on grantmaking for a major presidential effort like the All of Us research initiative launched near the end of the Obama administration. “But in the past, those appointees have been very conscious of not wanting to have any suggestion of politicization of the science. They took that very seriously, and so by and large, were very careful not to interfere in the normal review processes and funding decision making,” Wolinetz added.

Wolinetz also said it is “impossible for one individual to be meaningfully involved in decision making and oversight” of NIH’s 60,000 grant applications. The order would require a political appointee or their designees to review and approve all new grants, grant renewals, and drawdown of funds.

“It feels like you’ll either get a huge bottleneck, which will cause delays and freezing… or you end up with a very cursory check box approach, which doesn’t seem to meet this stated aim of better oversight and accountability,” Wolinetz said.

Ian Banks, the science policy director at the Foundation for American Innovation think tank, said the order “makes explicit what has already been an implicit part of grantmaking processes: if there’s a grant that is dramatically not aligned with agency priorities, it’s not going to get advanced.”

“There’s a desire that we want to get away from political bias, and one of the ways that the administration sees as necessary for that is to have… latent political biases made explicit, so we can actually grapple with them,” Banks added. “There’s merit to that. But it’d be a travesty if our scientific grantmaking priorities end up becoming purely political tools, whether that’s to bully universities or to bully NGOs that might not be politically aligned with the given administration.”

Banks also said an individual who has developed “a taste for what are good, worthwhile scientific investments,” like an NSF program officer, can be much better than a peer review panel and usually uses far fewer resources.

“The peer review committees are notoriously conservative in their awarding. They’re much less likely to give high recommendations to or high scores to proposals that are novel or high-risk,” Banks said. Giving program managers “more unilateral funding authority… seems to have substantial effects on scientific discoveries,” he added.

Lowering indirect costs and other policy priorities

The new processes must align with presidential priorities, including by giving preference to institutions with lower indirect cost rates and simplifying grant applications, the order states. Furthermore, awards cannot support “forms of racial discrimination by the grant recipient,” including the use of race as a selection criterion for employment or program participation, “denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans,” and other initiatives that “promote anti-American values,” the order adds.

An institution’s indirect cost rate is negotiated with federal agencies and can be as low as 15%, while some use rates of more than 60%. Agencies, including NSF, NIH, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense, attempted to cap indirect cost rates at 15% earlier this year, though their efforts have so far been blocked in court.

The order also directs OMB to limit the use of grant funds for indirect costs. “The administration refuses to acknowledge and pay for the true costs of research critical to the security of the nation and the health of its people,” said Matt Owens, president of COGR, a consortium that represents research institutions. Owens also pointed out that OMB already imposes a 26% cap on the administrative portion of F&A costs.

COGR and other higher education associations released a new proposal for calculating indirect costs in July. Members of the initiative said they have presented the proposal to OMB, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and members of Congress.

The order also requires appointees to review funding opportunity announcements to minimize the need for legal or technical expertise in drafting an application. Grants should also be given to “a broad range of recipients rather than to a select group of repeat players,” and “to the extent institutional affiliation is considered in making discretionary awards, agencies should prioritize an institution’s commitment to rigorous, reproducible scholarship over its historical reputation or perceived prestige,” the order adds.

Wolinetz said she agrees with the goal of “better distributing funding across the full spectrum of scientific talent and institutions across this country,” adding, “Before it became anathema, we called that equity.”