Who Gets NIH Money May Soon Depend on a New White House Board

The NIH is the world's largest public funder of biomedical research, and researchers are already suing the Trump administration over federal grant decisions. A reported executive order could add another review step. It would create a board able to block biomedical awards that senior officials believe conflict with Trump's priorities.

According to the Washington Post and Politico, the idea came up during a Friday meeting. Senior administration officials criticized NIH-funded projects they called woke and said the work did not fit the president's agenda. Russell Vought, who leads the White House Office of Management and Budget, and other officials proposed an outside committee with power to reject research awards that do not match Trump's goals.

Politico reported that Vought and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya would serve on the board. Its grant decisions would need unanimous approval. This would move the process away from the NIH's traditional focus on scientific merit and toward political priorities. Bhattacharya has resisted federal research cuts and defended the NIH grant process, while Vought has pushed for a broader reshaping of federal spending. That raises a basic question: should research funding follow scientific quality or political alignment?

The reported plan comes as NIH faces a class-action lawsuit from researchers. They say the administration is obstructing or ending grants to censor viewpoints that oppose the president's agenda, and they argue that this violates the First Amendment. The lawsuit says the government cannot use funding to target or silence disfavored ideas in biomedical research. Since Trump began his second term, billions in federal grants for health, nutrition, the environment and disaster relief have been cut or frozen. Research involving words such as equity, racist, gender and climate change has been flagged, making support harder to secure.