Last November, in the days following Donald Trump’s election, leaders at the National Institutes of Health began discussing how to prepare for the coming administration. Any presidential transition comes with uncertainty. But with the conservative policy playbook known as Project 2025 proposing that “the NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken,” rumors had begun to fly.
Could the incoming Trump administration invoke Schedule F and make many more agency employees political appointees? Could it dismiss the directors of the agency’s 27 institutes in one sweeping move? Could it relocate some of those institutes and send them into disarray?
“There were a whole set of possible circumstances that we were being told about,” said Michael Lauer, who was, until February, in charge of the agency’s external research funding. “Impoundment was one of them but … there wasn’t much that was done about it at the time.”
The threat of impoundment, a president intentionally delaying or withholding funds appropriated by Congress, was rarely a concern during Lauer’s 17 years at the NIH. But that changed, said Lauer, as Trump began signaling on the campaign trail his intent to defund federal programs at will and to test in courts the constitutionality of a 1974 law that reinforces Congress’s power of the purse. “Given that there was so much antagonism toward the science agencies and to NIH in particular, and to academia, it seems logical that we would be a testing ground for impoundment,” Lauer told STAT.
In fact, many of those early fears have been realized: Since January, that apparatus of awards and disbursements has been systematically gummed up by the increased involvement of administration appointees, including members of the U.S. DOGE Service, in the NIH’s daily operations.
In addition to directing the termination of thousands of grants that run afoul of the administration’s political agenda, officials have also handed down a string of new policies and inserted layers of political review that seem designed to slow spending to a crawl and usurp career scientists’ traditional autonomy. So much so that when Trump signed an executive order last week funneling the power of grantmaking decisions from panels of experts and career civil servants to political appointees in a dramatic break with decades of precedent, it didn’t set off new alarm bells inside the halls of the NIH’s Bethesda campus. They’d already been ringing for months.
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