The White House Wants Veto Power Over NIH Grants
A pending executive order would let Russell Vought kill individual NIH awards—all 64,000-plus of them—on political grounds.
By The Science Policy Desk
The White House is drafting an executive order that would give Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), veto power over every individual grant awarded by the NIH—the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, with a $47 billion annual budget larger than that of the next ten research funders combined. [1]
The order emerged from a contentious White House meeting reported by The Washington Post, in which NIH director Jay Bhattacharya tried to fend off Vought's push to place funding decisions under political control. Under the proposed structure, all NIH grants would require unanimous approval from a committee that includes both Vought and Bhattacharya; without that unanimity, funding is rejected. [1]
The practical problem is staggering. During the Biden administration, the NIH funded over 64,000 grants a year. As heads of their respective agencies, Vought and Bhattacharya would be hard-pressed to give each proposal a serious evaluation. If rejected grants cannot be redirected to the next-best-scored proposals, the NIH risks being unable to spend the full budget Congress allocates to it—which, Ars Technica notes, may well be Vought's intention. [1]
This is not Vought's first attempt to reshape NIH funding. Immediately after Trump re-entered the Oval Office, the agency terminated a broad range of grants on pandemic preparedness and health disparities, and proposed a budget that would shrink the NIH by nearly half. Congress rejected that cut; a court voided the terminations. Vought then proposed new grant rules making political considerations key determinants in which research gets funded—Congress put that on hold too. [1]
According to the Politico report, Vought pitched OMB control of NIH grants partly as a lever against Harvard University. Vought reportedly framed OMB oversight as an alternate means of targeting the university. [1]
The peer-review system that has historically governed NIH awards—ordering grants by scientific merit scores assigned by expert reviewers—offered a defensible mechanism for redirecting money from rejected proposals to the highest-quality unfunded ones. But Vought has also been attempting to limit peer review in grant evaluation, leaving it unclear whether that safety valve would remain available. [1]
What's at stake is not just the fate of individual grants but the architecture of trust that makes large-scale scientific investment possible. When the criteria for funding shift from scientific merit to political acceptability, researchers and institutions must weigh whether to pursue certain questions at all—a chilling effect that doesn't require a single grant to be formally denied.
But the litigation path requires someone to demonstrate sufficient harm for standing to sue. As with so many other administration actions, the pending order could do considerable damage before any court intervenes. [1]
The NIH's $47 billion portfolio underpins everything from university biology departments to the biotechnology industry. Handing a single political appointee a quiet veto over 64,000-plus annual awards doesn't streamline science—it turns the funding pipeline into a political instrument, one grant at a time. [1]