Do grants go out: the devious approach to freeze funding in the U.S. Congress is not a constitutional law, or does it apply to advisory committee meetings?
The Trump administration issued an order on 27 January freezing payment on all federal grants and loans, but lawsuits challenging its legality were filed soon afterwards, putting the order on hold. However, payments are still not going out, because Trump’s team has halted grant-review meetings, exploiting a “loophole” in the process, says Aaron Hoskins, an RNA biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who has had to reconsider hiring graduate students because of a frozen grant application. It is really quite devious.
The review panels are suspended due to the Trump administration not allowing them to take a key procedural step. This has caused an indefinite lapse in funding and left scientists facing difficult decisions about the future of their research programmes.
Legal scholars say that this approach to freezing funding is illegal. That’s because the US Constitution gives Congress, not the president or his team, the power to appropriate funds, says David Super, an administrative-law specialist at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC. 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.
The reversal of NIH research-grant submissions: a Trump executive order to end gender-based discrimination in the US
To gain approval, NIH research-grant applications are considered in two steps, by two separate panels. A group of independent scientists meet and score applications in the study section. The second meeting of the agency’s advisory council is a meeting in which scientists and advisers from external and internal sources make a final look at an application before funding is made.
The standard for posting notices before grant-review meetings has been raised, according to an e-mail from the Trump administration. If notices were allowed again from today, there would be a new grant-review meeting scheduled for 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 continuing cancellation of these meetings has had a snowball effect, and there is now an enormous backlog of applications (see ‘Trend reversal’).
The officer who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press says that it will be hard to get peer reviews done in time for the second council meeting.
Acting with unprecedented speed, the administration has laid off thousands of employees at US science agencies and announced reforms to research-grant standards that could drastically reduce federal financial support for science. The cuts are part of a bigger effort to cut spending and downsize the workforce.
The United States pulling out of the 2015 Paris agreement to rein in global climate emissions was one of the anticipated orders. Others had surprising and immediate ripple effects through the scientific community.
The order attempted to define two biological sexes, male and female, and banned federal actions that promoted or otherwise incorporated gender ideology. The US CDC took down data sets from their websites and pulled back manuscript submissions from scientific journals to purge terms like gender and transexuality.
Another executive order banned what Trump called “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)”. An email was sent out to government workers warning them that any federal employee who did not report their colleagues would face adverse consequences. To many scientists’ dismay, agencies began terminating DEI programmes, including environmental-justice efforts, which are programmes aimed at protecting low-income communities vulnerable to pollution and climate change. There were some websites that scrubbed DEI mentions 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.
Principal investigators who lead research teams are suffering in this environment, says a university scientist who requested anonymity because their research is funded by multiple US agencies. “Everything is on you to manage your grants and your team,” they say, adding that “there’s a lot of fear of people not wanting to say or do the wrong thing” and therefore lose financial support for their work. “It’s completely chaotic; I’m losing sleep.”
The partnership between Musk and Trump has flourished. The US Agency for International Development, which funds global disease research, prevention and care is one of the agencies the pair are working to dismantle.
“I can’t even convey how haphazard and cruel the layoffs are,” says an NIH researcher who lost members of their laboratory to the job cuts and requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak with the press. 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. The researcher claims that the government laid off a few of the best and brightest after they joined.