The Trump administration continues its deluge of executive orders that directly affect science and research, just days after being sworn in. Following the executive orders (EOs) taking the United States out of the Paris Agreement and World Health Organization and the scientific nonsense in the EO on trans and non-binary people, Trump has now imposed a wide range of restrictions on the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s medical research agency.
According to figures last updated in August 2024 at time of writing, the NIH’s total budget for this financial year was $47.4 billion. The vast majority of it goes into research grants, research centers, or research training. Trump’s White House has ordered the cancellation of meetings, including the critical grant review panels, a freeze on hiring (part of a wider governmentwide restriction), a pause on communication until February 1, and an indefinite stop to travel specific to the Department of Health and Human Services.
This is not good news for a lot of science and scientists, as well as everyone who uses medicine or has health concerns. The move halted the work of the independent review panels that approve grants for health research and impacted an estimated 300,000 people at 2,500 institutions across the United States.
“All NIH study sections canceled indefinitely. This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities,” Jane Liebschutz, an opioid addiction researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, posted on Bluesky.
“The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating,” one senior NIH employee told Science.
During his first term, Trump attacked the NIH following the failure of his administration to tackle the COVID pandemic, which had killed over 400,000 people in the US as Trump left office. There was also the famous scandal when a Trump health appointee, Michael Caputo, tried to restrict a scientific publication during the COVID pandemic in 2020, as its findings went against the messaging from the White House.
The first Trump administration’s efforts in undermining science were compiled in the Silencing Science Tracker (it now also includes documents from the Biden administration) that covers federal, state, and local government efforts to undermine scientific facts.
Previous research has shown that the first Trump presidency changed how science is seen and called for stronger measures by the Biden Administration to protect science from political interference – an opportunity for increased safeguards that many would consider to have been missed.
A similar directive appears to have been targeted towards the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, which respectively protect the US from infectious diseases and safeguard the nation’s food supply.
In a memo first obtained by The Associated Press, acting Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services Dorothy Fink stated that communications that affect “critical health, safety, environmental, financial, or national security functions,” might be released. The same memo asked people in those agencies to, “Refrain from participating in any public speaking engagement until the event and material have been reviewed and approved by a Presidential appointee.”
