An August executive order authorizes political appointees to control federal grant-making, shifting decision authority away from nonpartisan experts at agencies like NIH and NSF. The order includes a directive that discretionary awards must demonstrably advance the President's policy priorities. That phrase appears across multiple agencies and documents, from scheduling offices to the Coast Guard. Legal scholars see this as part of an asserted unitary executive power to impose top-down control. Subsequent actions include OMB reviewing independent agencies' obligations for consistency with presidential policies, signaling broader efforts to align agency functions with administration priorities.
This made the nonpartisan experts who have long decided how agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation direct funds subordinate to, well, commissars. Nestled in the order was a phrase that's become increasingly familiar to me over the past seven months as I've read piles of boring documents issuing from the administration, trying to figure out what it's doing. "Discretionary awards must, where applicable," it read, "demonstrably advance the President's policy priorities."
"It's become a sort of all-purpose catchphrase from this administration," says Zachary Price, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, "and they're also particularly assertive about claiming this power of the unitary executive branch to direct how different agencies perform their functions. So it fits into the general style of this administration, of wanting pretty strong top-down control." Examples abound. A February executive order, for instance, said that going forward,
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