White House plan would give OMB chief veto over every NIH grant
Putting a political appointee over NIH awards could reshape how $47 billion in biomedical research gets funded.
The White House is reportedly preparing an executive order that would give Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought veto authority over every individual NIH grant. This follows a contentious meeting in which NIH director Jay Bhattacharya opposed OMB’s effort to exert political control over research funding but appears to have lost. The NIH currently distributes a $47 billion annual budget, mostly as grants to university-based researchers, making it the world’s largest biomedical research funder. Its grants underpin basic biology, clinical trials, and significant portions of the biotechnology industry’s R&D pipeline. Centralizing veto power in OMB would therefore place a politically appointed budget official between investigators and the primary source of US biomedical funding.
Why it matters
If signed, the order would put a politically appointed budget director between scientists and the world’s largest biomedical research funder, which channels $47 billion mainly to university labs for work spanning basic biology, clinical trials and biotechnology. That shift could change which projects are greenlit, alter long-term research priorities, and inject political considerations into decisions that have traditionally been driven by scientific peer review.
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