U.S. President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order on Thursday that will give him and whomever he appoints unprecedented control over who and what projects receive what type of scientific funding from the federal government. (Photo by MEHMET ESER/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
If you are a scientist, are interested in science or benefit in any way from science—which is basically everyone on Earth—you may want to pay close attention to the Executive Order that President Donald Trump just signed on Thursday. This order’s entitled “Improving Oversight Of Federal Grantmaking,” and guess who could have a lot more oversight as a result? The answer rhymes with trump. It will give Trump and whomever he appoints unprecedented control over who and what projects receive what type of scientific funding from the federal government, potentially allowing them to trump what’s been recommended by the scientific peer-review process and federal agencies. And that’s a big deal in more ways than one.
How The Grantmaking Process Has Historically Worked
To understand how much this Executive Order would change things, it’s important to know history and understand how the federal grantmaking process has been conducted for like oh decades over multiple different Presidential administrations. Until this year, the decisions as to which scientific projects and whom will get funded have rested largely within different federal scientific agencies like the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
With the exception of the leaders at the very tippy top of these agencies, these agencies have been comprised mainly of what’s been called career-track federal employees, many of whom have had scientific backgrounds. The label “career” has meant that their hiring and promotions have occurred independent as to who and which political party happens to be occupying the White House at the time. It’s also meant that they could make a “career” out of working for the federal government rather than expecting to update their LinkedIn profile with words like “honored to have served” and look for a new job as soon as the Presidential administration changes hands. This has made career-track federal employees different from the political appointees such as the heads of NIH and CDC who have by definition been a lot more beholden to the President and his (it’s been a “his” so far since there hasn’t been a her yet) administration and interests. After all, if you don’t listen to the boss who can hire and fire you, you can attract that boss’s ire and get the f-word done to you.
Having mainly career tract federal employees run the grantmaking process has helped keep any given individual with political power say like the President from deciding what and who gets funded. The whole job security thing for career track federal employees has been kind of important because it’s allowed them to make decisions more independent of what a given President wants and more towards what might be good for all of society in the long run. But for many that whole job security thing went kind of poof like heavily distressed denims this year, when the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE, abruptly and drastically shrunk the staffs of agencies like NIH and NSF over the course of months. Heck they even “aided” in getting rid of an entire agency that had been around since the Kennedy administration.
These career track federal employees have historically relied rather heavily on the general scientific community to help make key decisions about what grants opportunities to issue and what grants to fund. This has included convening advisory boards of external scientific experts and holding public workshops to discuss what the agency’s priorities for scientific research should be and what notices of funding opportunities, otherwise known as NOFOs, should be issued. A NOFO may sound like a dirty word but keeping the scientific community intimately involved in the preparation of such NOFOs has helped keep the process of determining scientific priorities more transparent and cleaner. These agencies have also routinely sought advice from the likes of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, a non-partisan organization designed to offer scientific guidance in a transparent manner.
The agencies have employed scientific peer-review processes, as well, to review grant applications and determine which merit funding. This has entailed forming grant review panels and committees of external scientific experts, whose backgrounds, qualifications and discussions have been made public. When awarding grants, the agencies have typically followed the resulting recommendations and guidance from this peer-review process.
While these systems and resulting processes have been far from perfect, they have been in place to keep decision-making more about science and scientific priorities and more in the hands of, you know, actual scientists versus politicians and others with the big “A,” meaning political or business agendas. They’re also designed to help prevent the big “C,” meaning corruption. If one particular individual gets even more control of the whole federal grantmaking process, that person could push grants towards particular friends, associates or firms. And here’s another reason why such a change can be a big deal. Any individual who has significant control over the whole grantmaking process can use grants as leverage or bargaining chips to make big deals to serve himself or herself rather than the country.
The Trump Executive Order May Shift Control Of Science To His Political Appointees
People including researchers from Chicago area universities gather on the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) campus to voice concerns about the potential loss of federal funding for medical research. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
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This new Executive Order could throw a big fanny pack of butter pats into all the above-mentioned processes and systems and their checks and balances. The Order indicated that appointees of the President will now decide what funding opportunities are offered or grants are awarded, without “routinely defer to the recommendations of others.” It didn’t specify who these “others” might be but could they be scientists, the scientific community and people who actually can understand and do the science? Could this be a polite way of saying, “Yeah, we’re not going to listen to anyone else.” It also said that grants “must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities,” as opposed to simply advancing scientific or the country’s priorities. So, does this mean that a given grant will or won’t be awarded based mainly on what the President does or doesn’t want? I’m reaching out to contacts at NIH and other parts of the federal government for further clarifications.
The Trump Executive Order May Greatly Weaken The Role Of Scientific Peer Review
The Order does say that “Nothing in this order shall be construed to discourage or prevent the use of peer review methods to evaluate proposals for discretionary awards or otherwise inform agency decision making.” But it does add the kicker, “Provided that peer review recommendations remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding by senior appointees or their designees.” This kicker could be interpreted as kind of kicking down the role and authority of scientists and peer-review in general. Imagine telling the coach of a football team for example, ”Your recommendations for the team will remain advisory and not routinely deferred to or otherwise treated as de facto binding.” Think anyone will listen to the coach then? Does that wording in the Executive Order essentially say that the political appointees can choose to ignore or bypass any recommendations from others?
The Trump Executive Order May Makes It Easier To Terminate Grants
The Executive Order includes language about terminating grants as well. For example, it says, “an award may be terminated by the agency ‘if an award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities’ or, in the case of a partial termination by the recipient, if the agency ‘determines that the remaining portion of the Federal award will not accomplish the purposes for which the Federal award was made.’”
This is kind of important because terminating and withholding federal grants is something that the Trump administration has been doing kind of a lot of lately, as I’ve described before in Forbes. This hasn’t worked out too kindly for many scientific researchers around the country, leading to a lot of job loss and shuttering of scientific projects that could have benefited a lot of people. I wrote in Forbes about how the Trump administration and DOGE have reportedly been searching grants for supposedly controversial terms like “women” to determine which should be on the chopping block. On top of that, the Trump administration has been demanding more control over what’s being done at different universities like Harvard and withholding scientific funding as bargaining chips to force compliance, as I have covered in Forbes. That’s prompted a number of guess what lawsuits against the Trump administration and the various government agencies.
These lawsuits have slowed some of these actions by the Trump administration. U.S. District Judge William Young even used the “ill” word when he ruled in a non-jury trial that the mass termination of over $1 billion in diversity-related grants by the NIH under Trump as being “void and illegal.” He also used the “d” word to describe what the federal government was doing in terminating these grants, arguing that such terminations discriminated against the groups that the scientific projects could benefit. Of course, lawsuits don’t always move quickly and instead can move forward at the speed of fruitcake batter in a wind tunnel, especially with appeals being made. The question then is whether the language of this latest Executive Order will further facilitate what the Trump administration has been doing with federal grants.
Harvard alumni, students and faculty protest the federal administration cuts outside of the Boston Moakley Federal District Courthouse on July 21, 2025. (Photo by Heather Diehl/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Boston Globe via Getty Images
The Trump Executive Order Also References Indirect Costs
Speaking of lawsuits, another thing that’s now being litigated in the courts is the attempt of federal agencies under the Trump administration to reduce the funding rate for indirect costs from historically negotiated rates down to 15% for all universities and other institutions. I described in Forbes this action back when it was first attempted in February. These institutions have argued that indirect cost rates should not be uniform but instead be based on what the institution can offer researchers to support their work. Regardless, such reductions in indirect cost funding rates would greatly reduce the amount of funding that those institutions would be getting. Therefore, it’s not surprising that lawsuits against the Trump administration ensued. In June, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani did rule this indirect cost slashing attempt as “invalid, arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to law” and blocked this from happening.
While this newest Executive Order didn’t specify what indirect cost funding rates would be, it did reference indirect costs by stating, “All else being equal,” federal scientific grant awards would be preferentially awarded to “institutions with lower indirect cost rates.” Could this be a more ”indirect” way of getting indirect cost funding rates down? Might this put researchers who are at institutions with higher negotiated indirect costs rates at a direct disadvantage when applying for grants?
The Rationale Provided For The Trump Executive Order
So what’s the justification for this new Executive Order? Well, the wording of the Executive Order included the following: “Federal grants have funded drag shows in Ecuador, trained doctoral candidates in critical race theory, and developed transgender-sexual-education programs.” The Executive Order also asserted, “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,” without providing the details of and citation for this study. The Executive Order continued by saying, “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 Executive Order made additional claims about scientific grants without providing supporting scientific evidence. One example is calling a lab in Wuhan, China “likely the source of the COVID-19 pandemic,” even though many scientific experts have maintained that the virus could have naturally jumped from other animals to humans. Another example is stating that “The NSF gave millions to develop AI-powered social media censorship tools — a direct assault on free speech” and accusing taxpayer-funded grants of “worsening the border crisis and compromising our safety.”
Certainly, if you were to go through all NIH and NSF grants that have been funded over the years, you will find examples of projects that have not been worthwhile. You will find ones that have not generated adequate scientific insight or useful contributions to society. You will even find some real doozies where many might say, “Why the heck did they fund that?”
But that could be expected when reviewing the history of basically anything in life. Few investors can say, “Yes, everything I put my money into ended up being a brilliant idea.” No one can say, “I’ve never ever made a mistake in my life,” especially if that person has ever worn a mullet or listened to the song “Baby Shark.” Therefore, a handful of examples—even if they were accurate characterizations of those projects—should not be enough to justify the claim that Federal grantmaking has been an “offensive waste of tax dollars,” in the words used by the Executive Order.
Instead, if you want to review and improve the federal scientific grantmaking process, how about using, let’s see, actual science to do so? Show the overall statistics such as what percentage of all the grants awarded has led to true scientific insights, breakthroughs and positive changes in the ways things have been done. You can separate and stratify these projects into different types to do more detailed analyses. You can have independent scientific organizations and experts review and evaluate each step in the grantmaking process in a manner that’s public and transparent. You can even calculate the return on investment of different federal grant programs and compare it to the ROI for other things. For example, a report from the nonprofit United for Medical Research did show that every dollar of research funded by the NIH has yielded $2.56 in economic activity. You’d probably invest in Dogecoin if you could be guaranteed that level of return.
Again the federal grantmaking process to date has been far from perfect and certainly has had its share of problems that probably do merit new processes and perhaps even new systems to be put in place. But any changes should be done with proper oversight and guidance by real scientists who are independent of political or business pressure and, of course, the public. It should be done in a scientific and transparent manner that uses accurate, appropriate, verified and valid data. (Imagine that, using science to determine what to do with science.)
What science ends up getting funded by the federal government will be quite vital to society. Practically everything you use each day has been made available by science in some way. Failing to fund the right science could result in the loss of well-being, lives and truth. Therefore, everyone should have a vested interest in closely following this newest Executive Order from Trump and what happens in order after it.
