This is a tiny bit of good news it what has been a horrific story for American science over the last almost two years. Trump has backtracked on his attempts to politicize science funding at the NIH, and throughout the federal government. He did this apparently in reaction to bipartisan pushback from Congress. This, however, does not mean that there hasn’t already been profound damage and that further meddling will not happen.

To put all this into context, it is important to understand the infrastructure of scientific research that has been developed in the US, largely since WWII. The federal government created a number of institutions, the biggest of which is the NIH with an annual budget of $48 billion, to fund scientific research. This money largely went to universities through specific grants. This grant money is the life-blood of many research institutions – it pays for the research itself but also the infrastructure that allows the research to happen. Grants are awarded by merit, determined by panels of relevant experts. In exchange the funding organizations can impose many quality control rules on grant receiving institutions, labs, and researchers. You have to maintain a suite of certifications, and the results of your research have to serve some definable purpose and be accessible to the taxpayers who ultimately fund the research.

The NIH and other granting institutions are creatures of Congress – they were created by Congress, who determines their mission and provide their funding. Generally Congress determines their general goals, and then allows appointed experts to execute those goals by determining things like which grants get funded. This system has worked fabulously well over the last 70 years or so, allowing America to lead the world in scientific development. It is arguably one of the main reasons the US today is the superpower that it is. Here is a good discussion by Neil deGrasse Tyson on the power of this research infrastructure and the damage that has resulted from tampering with it.

As a general rule this arrangement, of politicians and funders determining broad goals and experts determining how to best execute those goals, works well. Historically whenever politicians try to meddle in those details, to “micromanage” what experts should be doing, the results range from bad to catastrophic. The classic historical example is Lynsenkoism in the former Soviet Union. Briefly (read the linked Wikipedia entry for more info) Trofim Lysenko did not believe in Mendelian genetics or natural selection, but favored what is now called a more Lamarkian approach. His science was favored by Stalin because it aligned better with Soviet ideology, and so he was elevated in power and those scientists who disagreed with him vanished. The result was mass starvation and a hollowing out of the science of genetics in Russia, something that they have still not fully recovered from. For this reason, whenever political ideology inappropriately meddles in the conduction of science, it is referred to as Lysenkoism. Arguably, that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing. 

I have been critical in the past of governments micromanaging what should be scientific decisions. For example, when my home state, CT, decided to exempt the treatment of chronic lyme disease from the standard of care, that was inappropriate political meddling in science. I also think that the formation of the NIH department of alternative medicine (by whichever name it is currently using) is also putting a political thumb on the scale of science. It is prioritizing ideology over merit.

Trump’s proposed directive was to create a commission that would review all NIH grants to ensure that they align with Trump’s political agenda. The commission would have the power to veto any grants the president did not like. This is naked Lysenkoism. It isn’t even hiding behind any thin veil of justification. At first this was done through the lens of banning any research into DEI. That was Dr. Bhattacharya’s plan. This was bad enough, canceling some grants that had already been awarded (most of which were reversed after lawsuits), and interfering with the ability to research differential medical outcomes for different demographic groups. It was clumsy, draconian, disruptive, and counterproductive. But Trump did not feel it went far enough, so he proposed the commission to simply give him the power through his lackeys to politically kill any research he did not like.

This is all also part of his attempt to exert control on universities. Because universities are so reliant on federal grant funding for their research, controlling that funding is a way of controlling universities. This is all part of MAGA’s plan to not just change the federal government, but to change Americn culture and institutions more broadly.

The end result of all of this, however, is simply a hollowing out of the infrastructure of scientific research that has been America’s greatest strength. Not only have more than 10,000 PhDs left federal employment in 2025, but many scientists have moved their research overseas or are considering doing so. While to some extent the science will still get done, just elsewhere, there will still be a massive net negative effect. This has all been highly disruptive, infrastructures cannot be instantly recreated elsewhere, and few countries have the resources of the US to take up research at this scale. This is generational damage that is being done, like the kind that was done by Lysenkoism.

It is good, at least, that there appears to be some understanding of this in Congress, and at least the will to privately push back against the Trump administration. But it is also likely that Trump will just seek other ways to exert his political will on any federal funding, across all agencies. This is his stated goal.

But it is also critical for the public to understand that much of what we take for granted in our modern word did not just happen as a matter of course, but was the result of a specific arrangement of generous funding of scientific research, with scientists largely allowed to determine which scientific questions deserve funding through a transparent merit-based process. Of course, it is not perfect, but it was massively effective and successful. It should not be casually dismantled for some political agenda.