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“Key senators reject White House proposal on NIH grants”

PBS (Sep 21)

"Sens. Susan Collins and Patty Murray are rejecting efforts by the Trump administration to give the White House control of National Institutes of Health grant funding."

Senator Murray on Trump’s Latest Plan to Politicize Lifesaving NIH Research

Minority News Releases, United States Senate Committee on Appropriations (Sep 21)

“Whether lifesaving medical research gets funded or not should be determined by experts at the NIH—not a panel of lackeys chosen by Donald Trump and Russ Vought. Under this scheme, a single political appointee could kill a cancer study or an Alzheimer’s trial with no scientific reason at all."

“White House Moves to Take Control of N.I.H. Grants”

New York Times (Sep 20, subscription)

"Federal officials are drafting an executive order that would place grants under review by an outside panel, the latest effort to redirect billions of dollars in research spending."

“Trump seeks to bring health-research funding under his control, Politico reports”

Reuters (Sep 19)

"U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to bring ​a major part of national funding for health ‌research under the control of his political appointees, Politico reported on Saturday. Trump has directed his budget director, Russ Vought, to draft ​an executive order to create a board that ​would decide which grants would be funded by the National Institutes ⁠of Health (NIH), the news outlet said, citing two ​administration officials familiar with the meeting."

Researchers Challenge NIH Screening of Grants for Disfavored Viewpoints

ACLU of Northern California (Sep 16)

"Today, researchers filed a class action lawsuit challenging the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) policy of blocking grants in order to censor views it disagrees with, on everything from DEI to gender identity to climate change. The lawsuit alleges that NIH, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, is unconstitutionally censoring research and allowing political ideology to override scientific expertise in determining which projects receive federal funding, contrary to congressional mandates. ...

"NIH is using a troubling list of 235 keywords as proxies to identify grants or researchers likely to express or support perspectives this administration does not like. The forbidden terms include “equity,” “advancing diversity,” “racist,” “gender,” “Latinx,” “climate change,” and “pregnant individual,” among others. This list is being used to review grant applications as well. Some grants and applications are summarily terminated or denied, while NIH has sought to renegotiate others, requiring researchers to scrub their grant materials of flagged words. If the researcher refuses, NIH terminates the grant or stops the application from advancing."

See also a previous DCSS news item, "Revealed: inside the US military's plan to tap huge sums from the NIH" (Sep 11)