‘Obscene’ executive order seen as ‘full-on assault on HE’

United States President Donald J Trump’s 186th Executive Order (EO), Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking (‘Improving Oversight’), replaces the long-established practice of federally funded research grants being decided by a peer review panel by placing the final decision on grants in the hands of “senior appointee(s)” named by the president (or cabinet secretaries, who are themselves named by the president).

These political apparatchiks “shall not ministerially ratify or routinely defer to the recommendations of others in reviewing funding…but shall instead use their independent judgement” to ensure that the research grants “advance the national interest”.

The EO further states that “discretionary foreign assistance awards”, both those made to scholars outside the United States and researchers who are funded through sub-grants (made by a grant holder in the US to researchers outside the country), must also be approved by the senior appointees. The senior appointee will have the power to terminate grants and subgrants if he or she judges them to not be in America’s “national interest”.

Critics of the EO responded angrily to the Trump administration’s deviation from long-established practice, with Zoe Lofgren (California), the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives’ Science, Space and Technology Committee, calling the EO “nothing short of obscene”.

“In what world,” Lofgren asked rhetorically, “does Donald Trump think that Americans want political appointees – who, need I remind the president, are unelected bureaucrats – making decisions on what science gets funded? . . . We must not accept this corruption as our new normal.” (The reference to “unelected bureaucrats” turns the screw against Trump and the Republican party who have, for example, railed against “unelected bureaucrats” in the Department of Education in Washington making decisions about education for the 50 states.)

Casey Dreier, director of space policy for the Pasadena, California-based Planetary Society (PS), an NGO dedicated to advancing space science, took to Bluesky to call Trump’s EO “truly risible. Bordering on the pathological” (The PS was co-founded by the late astronomer, planetary scientist and popular science communicator, Carl Sagan.)

“This is a shocking executive order that undermines the very idea of open inquiry. It turns federal grants into dispensations, subject to arbitrary and capricious withdrawal should the recipient say or believe wrong things,” wrote Dreier.

In an email to University World News, Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, didn’t hold back his invective. “This order further weakens our nation’s ability to conduct and support scientific research across various fields by replacing experts with ideologically driven political stooges who have no expertise and no business making decisions on academic research,” he said.

Even the normally staid American Society for Microbiology (ASM) denounced the EO for putting politics ahead of science. It stated: “Disease knows no politics, and scientific policy must be rooted in unbiased scientific evidence, not in political beliefs.”

“Requiring political appointees to review all new scientific funding opportunities will move us backwards as we seek to address the complex problems we face as a nation,” the ASM warned.

Speaking from Canada, where hundreds of researchers are funded by American grants and sub-grants, David Robinson, the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, characterised the EO as “outrageous”.

Robinson criticised the EO because “it allows political appointees to veto research projects that have gone through the peer review process. It’s a pretty unprecedented [act] of political meddling in scientific research, and it’s unabashedly so the way it reads”.

Referring to the dark period of the Red Scare in the 1950s, Robinson continued: “Some people say that this is like McCartyism. I would go further. I’d say that this is worse, worse than the McCarthy period because the McCarthy period was about targeting individual academics. This is a full-on assault on higher education itself.”

International impact

Writing on the Dakar, Nairobi and Cape Town-based news aggregation site AllAfrica.com, where she is managing editor, Juanita Williams said that the EO “profoundly impacts international research collaboration, particularly African researchers, institutions and communities”.

She pointed to a number of areas that are likely to be red flags for senior appointees in Washington, including: research on malaria; HIV and maternal health and farming; climate change and environmental protection; on government, economics and society; and capacity building in African universities and research centres.

For his part, Frédérick Bouchard, who is both a professor of philosophy and Doyen of Université de Montréal’s Faculté des arts et des sciences, placed the new regimen in an historical and philosophical context.

While recognising that, as does every country, the United States has the right to invest resources in its own interest, he noted: “It’s not a partisan issue. It’s not an ideological issue of how to get the best results from your funding dollars. Peer review is very good. It’s not perfect, but it’s an extremely powerful means of identifying research that has the highest potential.”

He noted, by way of example: “If you look at the history of science, very strong ideological commitments or rectitude almost always hinder scientific development. At the time of Galileo, the Church probably slowed down the development of astronomy for a century.”

What is likely to get funded?

Notwithstanding what ‘Improving Oversight’ says about the senior appointees exercising “independent judgement”, Trump’s EO tightly circumscribes what type of research the president wants funded.

The EO begins by pointing to several examples – culled from the more than 38,000 grants totalling more than US$40 billion made by the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities – that the administration classifies as being an “offensive waste of tax dollars”. These include:

• A drag show in Ecuador;

• Training of doctoral candidates in critical race theory;

• National Science Foundation grants that “went to diversity, equity and inclusion, and other far-left initiatives”;

• Promoting Marxism and spreading “class warfare propaganda and other anti-American ideologies in the classroom”;

• Funding gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab, “the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic”; and

• Providing free legal services to illegal immigrants.

The EO’s fourth section provides the senior appointees with direction about discretionary awards: grants may not “include activities where race or intentional proxies for race will be used as a selection criterion for employment or programme participation”.

The prohibition on taking race into account in employment accords with previous EOs and the administration’s attempts to push the 2023 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that banned affirmative action in university and college admissions into the employment sphere.

The prohibition against using race to determine “programme participation” is different. On the face of it, it forbids research into, for example, health disparities between White, Hispanic and Black Americans.

This restrictive interpretation is supported by the fact that the directive that immediately follows states that the government will not fund grants that deny “sex [is] binary in humans” (or as a previous EO put it: “It is the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

‘Improving Oversight’ orders that senior appointees not approve any “initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values”.

Lest there be any confusion about where Trump wants federal research dollars to go, the EO states baldly that awards must “advance the president’s policy priorities”.

Subordinating federal research dollars to political diktats reverses the 85-year-old practice established by President Harry Truman in 1945, following receipt of Vannevar Bush’s report, “Science: The Endless Frontier”.

Bush, who had been President Franklin D Roosevelt’s science advisor and was part of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, and other wartime science projects, proposed that to spur the post-war American economy, the federal government should fund basic research at universities and that from their findings either the private sector or the military would develop the technology into marketable products or military systems, respectively.

A central tenet, accepted by Truman and, later, Congress, of Bush’s report was the assertion that proposals be vetted through the peer review process.

“What is happening under the Trump administration is the very thing Vannevar Bush, the head of the government’s wartime Office of Scientific Research, feared when, in 1945, he called for the government and universities to work together to accelerate research in ways that would benefit all Americans.

Bush was adamant that funding decisions arising from the newly created NSF remain in the hands of scientists, understanding the consequences for the scientific enterprise, the strength of American higher education, and democracy itself,” Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, wrote in an email to University World News.

“Replacing the judgement of scientific experts with that of political appointees will have a profound and lasting impact on research quality, public trust and innovation,” Pasquerella also wrote.

“Scientific review panels like those at the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies are designed to evaluate proposals based on rigorous, unbiased peer review.

“The shift to political appointees, aimed at fostering conformity and alignment around a specific ideological agenda, threatens to undermine scientific merit and will inevitably slow progress on critical research related to public health and climate science,” said Pasquerella.

As did other experts interviewed for this article, Pasquerella painted a bleak picture of science’s future under the rules Trump has dictated.

“This latest manoeuvre,” she wrote, “is likely to have a chilling effect, especially on early career scientists, who may avoid certain research topics perceived to be politically vulnerable. Further, it will be much more difficult to attract and retain top research scientists to the US and hinder America’s capacity to remain a global leader in science discovery and innovation.”

The view from abroad

Pasquerella’s concerns for American science are echoed by education leaders outside the United States who speak for researchers that either receive direct or sub-grants.

Pointing to the part of the EO that refers to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Robinson recalled the questionnaire that several Canadian academics [as well as academics in Australia and Britain] received earlier this year, “asking whether their research was consistent with American policy or consistent with American interests”.

“American interests” do not include, Robinson resignedly said, gender ideology or critical race theory and other areas that the Trump administration was trying to crack down on.

In Africa, Williams avers, “new rules against racial preferences or equality programmes” would likely mean the end of US-funded health programmes in Africa that “work to reduce health gaps between rich and poor, lower deaths during childbirth, and prevent disease”.

Nor, she writes, is “Gold Standard Science” foregrounded in the EO situationally neutral.

“[R]eproducability,” the central tenet of the standard, “while scientifically sound in principle, may disadvantage African institutions that lack the infrastructure for certain types of research documentarian or data management systems common in well-funded Western institutions.”

She fears they would lead to a “two-tiered system where African researchers struggle to meet administrative requirements that may not account for resource constraints”.

Additionally, Williams warns that restrictions on “anti-American ideologies” mean that studies on the history of colonialism and its effects today – as well as critical examination of international development policies, research into racial and ethnic health differences and studies into why people migrate and immigration patterns – would not be funded.

From his office in Montréal, Bouchard sketched out the consequence for American science of reorienting it towards any president’s priorities.

“It’s fully legitimate for any country to adopt a nationalist lens. But what does that mean [in the practice of science]. How does that translate concretely?

“Actually, it's disrupting your research partnerships; actually, it hurts national interest. Because - and this is true for all countries - if you start disrupting research collaborations with other countries, then they may, and probably will, decide to find other international partners for strategic and non-strategic research projects.

“So, if any country’s research enterprise is destabilised because some discretionary decisions are made [by, for example, the senior appointee cancelling foreign grants and sub-grants], the next time they [the country] are making big investments for a research project, they will look for partners that are more predictable and more stable in how they support research. Lowering or weakening the predictability of international partnerships actually goes against national interest,” say Bouchard, who chaired the committee that wrote the Report of the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System (2023).