The U.S. has long led the world in scientific research — a feat that has undergirded the country’s economic and political might. Now researchers are pushing back against a proposed Trump administration rule. Scientists say it would upend the federal funding that drives U.S. science by shifting grantmaking decisions away from independent experts and into the hands of the president’s political allies.
The proposed rule would give President Donald Trump’s appointees “power over hundreds of billions of dollars” in federal grant funding while “diminishing the traditional role of scientific peer reviewers,” said The Washington Post. Projects would be evaluated to ensure they “advance the president’s priorities” while rejecting projects and institutions that promote DEI, affirm transgender identities or support “anti-American” ideas. The new grantmakers would thus have wider latitude to defund “anything Trump doesn’t like,” said Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker. The White House argues the change would “bring much-needed accountability to the grantmaking process,” an administration spokesperson said to the Post.
Shifting responsibility for scientific funding to political operatives would amount to “cancel culture for cancer research,” said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) at The Hill. The proposed rule would allow the White House to reject or cut funds mid-project if an institution “uses the word ‘diversity’ in their mission statement” or if a researcher publicly opposed the Trump administration’s vaccine policies. It would be a system of “arbitrary political control” that is “ripe for abuse.” The Trump administration could deny a grant for “any reason — or no reason at all.”
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The change should be welcomed by Americans who “believe in democracy and democratic accountability,” said Michael S. Kochin at The American Mind. Political appointees who would oversee grantmaking going forward are “accountable to the president and to Congress,” and projects should not advance if their “political masters” do not “believe them to serve the national interest.” The current peer review system, meanwhile, ends up “enforcing consensus rather than discovering truth” by rewarding scientists who play it safe. Federal grants should be directed at research that will “actually make us healthier, richer and freer.”
Peer-reviewed grantmaking is not perfect, but the Trump administration’s proposed solution is “far worse than the disease,” MIT’s Carlo Ratti said at the Financial Times. Researchers are “not immune to herd behavior” and can struggle to challenge their own assumptions. But “ideological pressures” are the wrong way to correct those problems, incentivizing scientists to abandon proposals that “could be cancelled when the political weather turns.”
Opponents say the Trump administration rule will blunt U.S. science supremacy. American researchers are “not going to be able to cure disease, and you’re not going to be able to grow the economy,” Sudip Parikh, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said to STAT. U.S. science is already struggling. The administration “suspended and canceled nearly 8,000 scientific grants” in 2025, said The Atlantic.
What next?
Science and education groups are lobbying lawmakers on Capitol Hill to oppose the rule, staging protests and organizing letter-writing campaigns. Some 300 leading scientific organizations sent a letter to the administration requesting more time to review the proposed regulation, said the Post. Dozens of Democratic members of Congress, along with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), have condemned the proposal. But the public comment period closed last week, and the administration plans to finalize the sweeping rule by Oct. 1.
