THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION appears to be preparing yet another audacious power grab.

This time, the plan calls for tightening control over the National Institutes of Health—the massive research agency that has played a role in almost every major biomedical breakthrough of the last half century and, in the process, has made America’s innovation ecosystem the envy of the world.

Evidently that’s not good enough for the president and his lieutenants.

According to a report in the Washington Post, confirmed and expanded upon by Politico and the New York Times, officials are preparing an executive order that would change the way NIH awards grants to outside researchers at universities and other institutions.¹ Instead of a process that relies heavily on the judgment of scientists, applications would require additional approval from a committee that includes political officials.

That’s a huge deal, because outside research accounts for roughly four out of every five dollars in the agency’s annual budget, which for this year is about $50 billion.

The administration has not commented on the proposal, or even acknowledged that it’s in the works. The media reports made clear that nothing is final. But it’s no secret that some high-ranking members of the Trump administration have long had it in for NIH—and that one official in particular has been pushing for something like this.

That official is Russell Vought, the policy analyst who helped put together the right-wing Project 2025 agenda between Trump’s terms and who has become Trump’s “Shadow President” since reassuming control of the Office of Management and Budget. One of Vought’s top priorities has been smashing what he imagines is a deeply entrenched cabal of left-wing scientists who control federal research funding.

This crusade has included suspension or cancellation of already-approved grants because they don’t align with administration priorities, especially when it comes to a prohibition on anything that sounds like DEI. The crusade has also included calls to reduce the NIH budget by as much as 40 percent, plus a series of bureaucratic moves—like changing the timing of grants and laying off key staff—that have undermined the agency’s ability to operate as it has before.

The latter changes have proven unpopular even with many Republicans, who joined Democrats in spurning Trump’s budget proposal in order to keep NIH funding stable for this year. GOP lawmakers also voted with Democrats to push back on a separate Vought initiative that would subject all federal grants (not just those from NIH) to some kind of review by political officials. The stopgap spending bill that Congress passed last month to keep the government operating through year’s end prohibits the administration from implementing that change, at least for now.

This latest proposal—the one that appeared in those media accounts over the past few days—would reportedly target NIH directly. And it has provoked opposition from NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who squared off with Vought in an intense Oval Office debate. But Vought’s proposal has reportedly found support from the only administration figure whose opinion ultimately matters: Trump.

The president has had it in for federal science agencies and their career officials ever since the end of his first term, when he accused them of undermining him during the pandemic. And more recently, Trump has made clear he’s angry at the universities defying his administration’s efforts to exert control over them, with a particular animus toward Harvard, the university that has resisted most publicly. Like most major research institutions, Harvard relies heavily on the NIH research grants that Vought’s proposal would put under the president’s political control.

At any other time, in any other presidency, it would be nuts to suggest that the entire foundation of America’s biomedical research enterprise could be in jeopardy because the budget director obsesses over supposed denizens of the Deep State in lab coats or because the president has a grudge against certain Ivy League schools. But this sort of behavior is entirely in character for the Trump administration—and, as it happens, a vivid example of the very kind of interference that the architects of agencies like NIH were desperate to avoid in the first place.

THE MODERN ERA OF RESEARCH FUNDING dates to World War II, when the federal government financed research that led to the development of key military instruments like sophisticated radar and the atomic bomb, as well as better antibiotics and blood products that helped to keep the troops alive.

Vannevar Bush, Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime science adviser, saw an opportunity to keep that relationship going—partly because he knew science would be essential for addressing the emerging Soviet threat, partly because he could see all the possibilities for advances in fields like medicine and physics that would benefit all of humanity. His now-famous 1945 report, Science: The Endless Frontier, called for the federal government to take the lead in sponsoring research through the creation of new agencies (like the National Science Foundation) and dramatically greater funding for existing ones (like NIH) that would partner with investigators at outside institutions.

A key principle for the lawmakers following Bush’s advice was independence for the scientific enterprise. “For, in order to be fruitful, scientific research must be free—free from the influence of pressure groups, free from the necessity of producing immediate practical results, free from dictation by any central board,” Bush had written. And in order to guarantee that independence, lawmakers made sure NIH adopted the peer-review model already in place at the National Cancer Institute (which had been established in 1937, and in 1944 would become part of NIH).

That basic structure still exists today. NIH or one of its divisions will announce that grant money is available, through a temporary or ongoing program. Once researchers apply, applications go through reviews by study sections composed of external scientists who work for token payments—and then through a stage of sifting by scientists who are career staff at HHS. That, in turn, is followed by another round of peer review by advisory councils of outside scientists and public representatives.

The process often has other steps, too, with the directors of the 27 specialized “centers” and “institutes” within NIH playing a key role in both deliberations and eventual decisions. But historically, those directors have mostly been career scientists. The process is highly competitive, with roughly