Trump’s latest rule on research grants sidelines scientific merit and adds bureaucracy, academic groups warn

A recent executive order from US president Donald Trump will require political appointees to review federal research grant awards and funding opportunities to ensure that they align with the administration’s priorities. The move has received strong backlash from the US academic research community.

The directive also formalises a process to cancel research grants that have already been funded by agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health if the projects are deemed to ‘no longer advance agency priorities or the national interest’.

In the executive order, signed on 7 August, the president asserts that there is ‘a strong need to strengthen oversight’ of agency grant-making.

‘Award decisions will undergo more rigorous evaluation by political appointees and subject matter experts to ensure they benefit the American public, align with administration priorities, and are coordinated across agencies to avoid duplication,’ according to ’fact sheet’ released by the White House.

The Council on Governmental Relations, an association of affiliated medical centres, independent research institutes and research universities, immediately criticised the new rule. ‘This executive order sidelines scientific merit in federal research grant decisions by putting political appointees and partisans in charge of determining which scientific research grants should be funded,’ said the organisation’s president, Matt Owens, who urged the administration to reverse course.

Similar concerns were echoed by Barbara Snyder, who is president of the Association of American Universities. ‘For decades, the United States has been the world’s indisputable leader in science, technology, and innovation. But that leadership now hangs in the balance,’ she said. ‘The administration’s executive order will apparently replace the merit-based system of science-based decision-making for research grant funding in favour of decision making by political appointees.’

Snyder also suggested the directive would ‘add a new and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy’ that will ‘diminish the role of quality and excellence in science’ and simultaneously delay the process of evaluating and awarding research grants.

Joanne Padron Carney, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s chief government relations officer, echoes those comments, saying that the order would ‘add a layer of red tape, creating a bottleneck in the execution of great science’.

‘This executive order is not what we would hope to see at a time when we are in a global competition on almost every scientific front,’ she adds.