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 2024 study by Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX) that concluded over a quarter of new National Science Foundation grants went to projects that “pushed far-left perspectives” on status, social justice, gender, race, and environmental justice.

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.

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.

Under the new 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.

The order would require a political appointee or their designees to review and approve all new grants, grant renewals, and drawdowns 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 checkbox approach, which doesn’t seem to meet this stated aim of better oversight and accountability,” said Carrie Wolinetz, who previously served as senior adviser to the director at the National Institutes of Health.

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.”

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.

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 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,” 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.”