There is anxiety over the future of its grants
The ‘Back-door’ of the Trump Administration: How Scientific Research Grants Are Directly Applicable without a Judge’s Order
In his first week in office, Donald Trump froze all federal grants and loans because it needed to review government spending to align it with his executive orders. Chaos erupted as agencies, including the NIH and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) — both major funders of basic science — halted grant payments, cancelled review panels for research-grant funding and paused communications. A federal judge temporarily blocked the order, but disruptions and confusion continue.
These review panels are suspended because the Trump administration has barred the agency from taking a key procedural step necessary to schedule them. This has caused an indefinite lapse in funding and left scientists facing difficult decisions about the future of their research programmes.
Some legal scholars say that this ‘back-door’ approach to freezing funding is illegal. According to David Super, an administrative-law specialist at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC, the power to appropriate funds is not controlled by the president or his team. Blocking “advisory-committee meetings that are legally required to make payments is no different in effect than simply refusing to sign contracts or issue cheques”, he says.
How Do Scientific Research Grants Work in the Trump Era? The Future of Research-Grant Working Groups and the Nature of Gender Inequality
There are two separate panels that look at research-grant applications. A study section is a group of independent scientists who meet to score applications. The agency has an advisory council that is made up of scientists and advisers who act as a final check on an application for funding before a decision is made.
According to the e-mail, the Trump administration will, in future, require that these notices be posted at least 35 days before grant-review meetings, instead of the standard 15 in effect previously. This means that, even if these notices were allowed again from today, the earliest date on which a new grant-review meeting could be scheduled is 28 March.
A small number of study sections have convened since Trump took office, but only because a Federal Register notice was posted to schedule them before his inauguration. The huge amount of applications is a result of the continued cancellation of these meetings.
AnNIH scientific review officer says that there will be a point when it is impossible to do peer review in time for the second council meeting.
Young scientists, scientific academies and researchers at risk around the world must be supported by global scientific organizations. We urge them all to speak up for their US-based colleagues — and the crucial work they do — just as they support researchers at risk elsewhere.
Pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and ending the nation’s Membership in the World Health Organization were anticipated as part of those orders. Others had surprising and immediate ripple effects through the scientific community.
There is an order that tried to define only two genders, male and female, and banned federal actions that promote or otherwise encourage gender ideology. The CDC took down their websites and pulled back manuscript submissions from the scientific journals to purge terms including gender and trans, in response to the legislation.
Another executive order banned what Trump called “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)”. Any federal employee who did not report colleagues defying the DEI orders would face “adverse consequences”, according to an e-mail sent to government workers. The DEI programmes, which are meant to protect low income communities from pollution and climate change, were terminated by agencies. Some scientific societies and private research organizations removed mention of DEI from their websites. In one of Trump’s orders, he called for the investigation of foundations, non-profit organizations and other private entities not in compliance.
A university scientist who requested anonymity because of the funding nature of their research said that the principal investigators were suffering in this environment. They say that if you do not manage your grants and your team, then there’s a lot of fear that people won’t say or do the right thing. “It’s completely chaotic; I’m losing sleep.”
Trump’s unprecedented directives landed as his partnership with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has flourished. The pair are working together to slash federal spending and dismantle agencies such as the US Agency for International Development, which funds global disease research, prevention and care.
An engineer who lost his job at the National Institute of Health due to the layoffs says they are so cruel that they cannot even convey it. E-mails notifying workers that they were being let go reportedly gave a blanket reason of poor performance for the termination — even to those whose performance was rated ‘exceptional’ by their supervisors. “They took some of the best and brightest people who just joined the government and laid them off,” the researcher says.
How, then, should those of us who are part of the global enterprise of education, health, science and engineering respond? One priority must be to denounce these actions, to shout about their negative effects, to support researchers and to defend their ability to work and study without fear for their jobs. If you’re working at a federal agency, you might feel like you can’t say anything, but researchers in other organizations can say anything, even if they can’t speak up.
There are differences of opinion in the scientific field. Discussion and further study is the best way to understand each other. Shutting down scholarship is not a solution.
The American Embassy in Washington: Climate Change Action Plan for the World Health Organization, USAID, and the Global Office of International Development (USAID)
The bulk of the agency’s more than 10,000 members of staff have been put on leave. Its website is currently inaccessible, but most of its buildings are. Although life-saving programmes are technically exempt from any immediate changes, in practice there are few, if any, USAID staff or functioning financial systems available to keep the payments that fund them going. The funding for the prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS is up in the air, despite the fact that over $100 billion has been disbursed.
At least one million women around the world have lost access to contraception because of a 90-day pause on funding from the US Agency for International Development, the largest single-country source for aid. In 2023, the United States disbursed $72 billion in international assistance, some 60% of which was provided through USAID.
10% of annual global public climate finance was affected by the cancellation of US federal funding for international climate change projects. This is a major blow to the fight against climate change and will affect efforts to raise funds for the countries most affected by global warming.
On the international front, the decision to withdraw from or drastically scale back long-standing commitments will have severe consequences. The United States has a big role to play in the global initiatives related to the UN Goals to end poverty and improve the environment. The country also provides around one-fifth of the core budget for the World Health Organization (WHO), which Trump has already notified of his intent to leave. Although the United States will not formally depart until next year, the WHO’s more than 8,000 staff members have already been told by director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to put all but essential travel on hold.
Individuals and organizations are challenging some of the Trump administration’s actions in the courts, and it might be that the White House is forced to moderate or reverse some of its decisions. The direction of travel is clear – there is a desire to eliminate, if not eliminate independent, science-based evidence and expert advice; and there is a rank disregard for international agreements.
The policy developments “cast a shadow across future planning”, especially for international collaborations involving interdisciplinary research, says Scott, whose grant looks at how the brain of the zebrafish (Danio rerio) processes visual and auditory information. He says that the policy of funding researchers overseas is based on a philosophy of expanding knowledge and furthering medical research. “The uncertainty that arises for international researchers is whether the NIH will consider continuing to send money overseas.”
ION grants worth more than three hundred million dollars are available on the website of the National Institute of Health. The nations with the most awards are South Africa, Canada and the United Kingdom. There are grant sizes of a few thousand dollars to $7 million.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has barred federal agencies from awarding any federal funding for scientific research. This comes after the administration froze all federal grants and loans to align it with his Executive Orders. It also cancelled review panels for research-grant funding and halted communications.