"The Trump administration has given notice that political appointees, rather than scientists, will ultimately decide who gets grant money from the world's largest biomedical research funder - the federal government's National Institutes of Health. In an Aug. 7 executive order, President Donald Trump announced that political officers would have the power to summarily cancel any federal grant, including for scientific work, that is not "consistent with agency priorities.""
"NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya reinforced the message in an Aug. 15 internal memorandum stating that political priorities may override the scoring system provided by outside experts appointed to hundreds of review panels. "While the score and critiques an application receives in peer review are important factors in determining the scientific merit of a proposal," his memo stated, NIH institutes and centers should not rely on the scientific merit rankings "in developing their final pay plans.""
Political appointees will be empowered to cancel federal grants deemed inconsistent with agency priorities, diminishing the influence of scientific reviewers. An executive order and NIH memorandum instruct senior officials not to routinely defer to peer-review recommendations and permit political priorities to override peer-review scores. The NIH is the federal government's largest biomedical research funder, and peer reviewers have constituted the backbone of federal science funding for decades. Scientists warn that downgrading the peer-review process undermines agency expertise, could disrupt biomedical research funding, and may shift funding priorities away from investigator-initiated science.
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