Alarm bells were sounded by America’s research community when, four days into Donald Trump’s second term as president, he issued executive orders that led to the indefinite suspension of peer review at the country’s largest funder of biomedical and health research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There was a sense that this was just the tip of the iceberg. It was.
What happened at the NIH?
Upon his inauguration on 20 January, Trump released a slew of executive orders, including one that established a regulatory freeze at funding agencies. And a few days later, his acting director of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) – the NIH’s parent agency – delivered a separate directive prohibiting health agencies, such as the NIH, from releasing any public communication until they had been vetted by a Trump administration official.
These edicts appear to have led to the suspension of panels known as study sections that review NIH research grant applications. This sparked serious concern among scientists that important work would be halted and that there would be a massive backlog of research projects to be vetted when these research review panels recommenced their meetings. Grant award notices also appeared to fall under the category of official communications that were stopped, prompting fear that funding for NIH-supported researchers and universities would cease as well.
On his first day in office, Trump also instituted a hiring freeze at all federal agencies, including those that fund research. The order was to last 90 days, or until a plan to reduce the size of the federal government’s workforce is developed and approved at the executive level. The NIH apparently rescinded all job offers that were to start after 8 February.
What about the NSF?
Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) – the principal funder of chemistry grants in the US – cancelled dozens of panels slated to review research grant applications following an immediate freeze on federal aid announced by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which apparently applied to research grants. ‘The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,’ read the memo by Matthew Vaeth, acting director of OMB.
Overall, federal agencies were directed to submit detailed lists of projects suspended under the new order by 10 February, after which a senior political appointee would ensure that it ‘conforms to administration priorities’. They were asked to pause new awards and disbursement of federal funds under all open awards until the OMB could review them and provide guidance. Further, the memo stated that already awarded grants can be cancelled if they ‘are in conflict with administration priorities’.
The result was widespread panic among NSF grantees about how they would keep the lights on and pay salaries. There were reports that the agency was unilaterally rejecting salary requests by postdoctoral fellows.
After a judge temporarily blocked the directive until it could be considered more closely, the administration almost immediately rescinded it. But, later that same day, the White House appeared to at least partially walk back that withdrawal when press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X: ‘This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.’ She warned that Trump’s executive orders ‘on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented’.
Where do things now stand at the NIH?
After a two-week lapse, NIH study sections began meeting again this week to review grant proposals and meetings of some of the agency’s advisory committees appear to be back on. But for now, it seems that NIH advisory councils – which are made up of independent experts who advise the agency’s director on grant funding –have not restarted. Apparently, some exceptions have been carved out for meetings with ongoing collaborators.
Jeremy Berg, a chemist by training who formerly directed the NIH’s National Institute for General Medical Sciences and is currently associate senior vice chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school, understands that some of the agency’s advisory council meetings are being rescheduled for March or April.
In the meantime, the HHS-wide communications embargo remains in place and continues to halt most communications out of the department’s other agencies like the NIH, although this was supposed to be lifted on 1 February. The HHS website remains down after over a week. And the department’s travel ban, which the Trump administration established on 22 January, also persists.
How about the NSF?
The NSF resumed making grant payments on 2 February, after the same judge issued a second temporary restraining order to block the administration’s attempted federal aid freeze. Nevertheless, the NSF is in the process of reviewing its grants to determine if they are subject to Trump’s executive orders, including the ban on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
In terms of whether it can cancel an active award that might be affected by the executive orders, the NSF recently stated that it ‘can not take action to delay or stop payment for active awards based solely on actual or potential non-compliance with the executive orders’, but suggested that the judge’s temporary restraining order allowed the agency to take action for unrelated reasons, including a violation of ‘current NSF grant terms and conditions’.
Meanwhile, new reports are surfacing about the agency’s plans to lay off between a quarter and a half of its staff within two months, which could include program officers – the experts who guide grant proposals through the NSF merit review process. ‘The NSF is the US engine of basic science discovery and technology innovation. This decision is a gift to our overseas competitors,’ Carolyn Bertozzi, who shared the 2022 Nobel prize in chemistry, warned on Bluesky.
How is DEI involved?
One goal of these executive orders appears to be closer vetting of the research being supported by US science agencies to, for example, cut out studies with a focus on DEI, something that Trump and his allies have repeatedly railed against.
The administration has already issued several executive orders that target such programmes, including one that bans DEI initiatives across the federal government.
A list of dozens of keywords or phrases that can reportedly lead to an NSF grant being pulled was apparently leaked by a program officer at the agency. The list includes ‘biases’, ‘female’, ‘women’ and ‘disabilities’.
What are people saying?
‘The research community is very confused and worried, and in many cases is actually already suffering,’ says Neal Lane, a physicist who served as science adviser to President Bill Clinton and previously as director of the NSF. ‘The agencies are also confused and they don’t know how to respond,’ he adds. ‘So far, the courts have been responsive in trying to halt the damage … we’ve never had a situation like this and the outcome is going to be enormously negative – damaging – to science and technology.’
Lane, who is currently an emeritus professor at Rice University in Texas, predicts that research in certain areas will be stopped and not restarted, possibly until the next administration. ‘My sense is anything having to do with DEI will just simply not be funded – the current activities will be shut off, the money will be stopped, and no new proposals will be reviewed.’ He calls on professional scientific societies in areas like chemistry and physics to speak out collectively and urges researchers to press on with their work and keep submitting grant proposals.
‘I would be prudent and not unnecessarily sprinkle words in my proposal that are just going to invite problems for the reviewers of the agency,’ Lane states. Christine Todd Whitman, who led the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under former President George W Bush, agrees. ‘Keep on doing what you are doing without raising any red flags, just don’t stop the critical research,’ she states.
Whitman describes the situation as ‘chaotic’ and says the US research community is ‘in turmoil’. ‘In research, you don’t just turn the lights off one day and turn them back on the next day – policies need to be rolled out in a systematic and thoughtful way,’ she adds.
In the meantime, several research universities, including The Ohio State University, Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, have issued guidance and continue to release updates. They have said that grant applications should continue to be submitted but also anticipate delays in proposal review timelines.
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