Science2 publishers3 min readPublished
A letter from Senate Appropriations precedes the apparent death of an NIH grant veto plan
The order was never published, so the record is a sequence: Vought pushed it at a Friday meeting, the Senate Appropriations chair wrote against it on Tuesday, and by Wednesday one person familiar with the decision called it dead.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Vought pushed at a reportedly contentious White House meeting on Friday for an order creating a commission to review all NIH grants, after Trump was reportedly angry that Bhattacharya had refused to cut funding for Harvard researchers.
- Politico reported that Vought and Bhattacharya would both serve on the proposed board, and that the board would be required to reach unanimous decisions on grants.
- Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs Senate Appropriations, wrote to Vought and Bhattacharya on Tuesday decrying a commission of political appointees holding veto power over grant awards.
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Why it matters
- constraint The congressional block on the OMB regulations is temporary, so the protection on grant review expires with the spending vehicle that carries it and has to be renewed.
- exposure Politico's account ties Trump's interest in the order to targeting Harvard's research funding. Named institutions, not just disfavoured research topics, then sit inside the scope of a funding decision.
- precedent Each OMB attempt has arrived in a different instrument, so the next one is likely to use a vehicle that no current spending-bill language reaches.
- contradiction The NIH director whose refusal reportedly prompted the order was also slated to sit on the board it created. The sources support a reading in which agency leadership resisted and one in which it was absorbed.
Peer review at NIH is a screen with stages. Researchers submit a lengthy proposal, then pass through multiple rounds of screening and review by independent experts. Arthur Caplan calls that the agency's "gold-standard" approach to federal grants [15]. Caplan is an emeritus professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine and has served on NIH advisory committees. The commission would have sat downstream of all of it, and Politico reported that its decisions had to be unanimous [20]. Unanimity is not a tie-breaking rule. It means a single member's objection stops an award, so the OMB director would have held a personal veto over grants that had already cleared scientific review [21].
"I don't think peer review at the NIH is broken, so what are we fixing, unless it's imposing a political agenda?" Caplan said [16].
NIH's budget is more than $40 billion, and the panel would have signed off on grants issued by the agency [14]. How many awards a year would have needed the panel's signature was not reported.
The earlier attempts to move this money were curbed by spending bills. Last year Vought required NIH to fund grants in their entirety up front instead of year by year. That left the agency with less cash on hand for new awards [9]. The 2026 appropriations bill curbed that practice and slightly increased the NIH budget after OMB had proposed a massive cut [10]. In May, OMB proposed rewriting the bedrock guidance for all federal contracts in a way that deemphasized peer review and empowered political appointees. The proposal drew tens of thousands of opposing comments, and Congress's stopgap spending bill blocked its implementation [11]. Both rollbacks came in spending legislation [22]. OMB has also delayed signing off on NIH spending in its 2026 budget, and last year it briefly stopped the agency from spending any money at all [23].
The evidence that this order is finished is thinner than the evidence that it was drafted. Nothing has been released [17]. STAT's account rests on one person familiar with the decision who was not authorized to speak with the media, plus Sen. Susan Collins's own confirmation [1]. Semafor first reported that the order had been tempered [13]. Collins had been pressing officials to drop the matter before she wrote. Her Tuesday letter to Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya urged them "not to move forward with this proposal, which would undermine ... the Federal government's objective of funding biomedical research projects based on scientific merit and value rather than political ideology" [1][3]. The order of events is what the record shows; a draft can also stall because the president's attention moved.
Objections came from both parties and both chambers [12]. Sen. Patty Murray is vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. In a statement she said that "it shouldn't take public outcry to prevent President Trump and Russ Vought from laying waste to the NIH and defunding lifesaving research because they think it's 'woke' or want to extort a university" [5]. The White House did not respond to STAT's request for comment [6]. An NIH spokesperson told Scientific American that "NIH remains committed to its mission of funding biomedical research to benefit the health of the American people" [18].
What to watch
- Whether the next appropriations bill goes beyond funding mechanics and writes language specifically against political sign-off on individual awards.
- Whether OMB re-notices the federal contracts guidance rewrite once the stopgap that blocked it lapses.
- Whether any text of the order is published. Semafor reported only that it had been tempered.