Research that helps drive our economy is on hold and may face new ideological limits.
UPDATE: Numerous sources are reporting that the Office of Management and Budget has rescinded the memo that suspended federal grant funding.
Starting a few days after the Trump inauguration, word spread within the research community that some grant spending might be on hold. On Monday, confirmation came in the form of a memo sent by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB): All grant money from every single agency would be on hold indefinitely. Each agency was given roughly two weeks to evaluate the grants they fund based on a list of ideological concerns; no new grants would be evaluated during this period.
While the freeze itself has been placed on hold, the research community has reacted with a mixture of shock, anger, and horror that might seem excessive to people who have never relied on grant money. To better understand the problems that this policy could create, we talked to a number of people who have had research supported by federal grants, providing them with anonymity to allow them to speak freely. The picture of this policy that they painted was one in which US research leadership could be irreparably harmed, with severe knock-on effects on industry.
Nonsensical standards
The OMB memo (first obtained by Marisa Kabas; there’s a copy at The Washington Post) lays out the logic behind the freeze: Funding by the executive agencies of the federal government should align with the policies of the chief executive. To ensure they do, it calls on all agencies to review the programs they fund based on the policy priorities laid out by Trump’s executive orders.
In the meantime, though, the OMB directs the agencies to fund nothing, saying, “To the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders.”
In other words, since there’s a possibility that we may be funding something that’s politically disfavored, it’s better to not fund anything.
The memo then goes on to list specific areas that are likely to end up being stopped permanently. These include very broad categories of federal activities, namely “financial assistance for foreign aid [and] nongovernmental organizations.” But it continues with a list of disfavored topics: “DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
It’s difficult for this list to provide actual guidance. The Green New Deal was a mix of social programs and environmental efforts that circulated about six years ago and, critically, never even came for a vote in either house of Congress. The major environmental achievement of the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act, didn’t even incorporate any of the proposals in the Green New Deal. So it’s impossible to tell what this part of the memo is even targeting.
The term “woke gender ideology” references an executive order that defines male and female in terms of germ cells: “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell,” and similar for females. Even at conception, however, there are many potential genetic complications that mean an individual will never develop germ cells or may develop germ cells that are inconsistent with other aspects of their biology. Gender ideology is then defined as “the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.” That appears to accurately describe how humanity behaves.
DEI, at least, can be understood as programs that are meant to improve the status of underrepresented groups. But as we’ll see, even that concept is broad enough to leave researchers uncertain about what might be impacted.
One senior researcher we spoke with called these criteria “huge in scope and weak on detail.” That’s left them and everyone else we spoke with worried about what might fall under the scope of the review.
Narrowing participation
There are a number of programs researchers are worried about, foremost among them efforts that funding agencies have made to draw underrepresented groups, including women and minorities, into the STEM fields. Members of these groups are lost at every step of the training pipeline; fewer major in the sciences, fewer of them enter graduate school, and a smaller percentage of those pursue faculty positions. This has led to the conclusion that we’re losing lots of potential scientific talent due to a lack of interest and encouragement. Many agencies have established programs meant to provide more support, and most researchers we spoke with expect those programs to be terminated under the anti-DEI executive order.
Two researchers cited National Institutes of Health (NIH) programs called diversity supplements, which go to people with ongoing research grants and are intended to pay the salaries of minority trainees. One researcher said he had hired a post-doc based on having two years of salary granted under this program. The post-doc started within the last month, and now the money is on hold. The other echoed this worry: “People have lives to live and bills to pay, and if we cannot give people hard dates on which we can hire them, they take other jobs with more reliable sources of funding.”
At the earlier stages of the pipeline, getting rid of these programs could change students’ future education by “eliminating their ability to get research experience that is necessary for either graduate programs or professional programs like nursing, dental, or medical schools.”
One researcher also noted that this isn’t a matter of the agencies exclusively focusing on minorities. Diversity Supplements are part of a suite of programs meant to broaden engagement in publicly funded research. He cited a National Science Foundation (NSF) program that directs funding to states that currently receive fewer research dollars, in part by boosting the scoring of grants submitted by researchers in those states.
Poorly defined
There was also widespread worry about what might fall within the poorly defined categories for rejection. One person we spoke with mentioned that his city had recently received federal money to adjust to the sea level rise being driven by climate change. Sea level rise is a reality that we have measured, but its connection to climate change might lead someone to decide it’s close enough to the Green New Deal to cancel the funding.
Someone who’s involved in medical research noted that medical risk “intersects with sex, aging, socioeconomic status” and thus can’t be considered without touching on issues like equity, gender, and sex. Environmental pollutants also influence risk, and those could cause the research to end up under the “Green New Deal” label. The implication clearly being that if the Trump administration views these topics broadly, it might attempt to end funding for a huge range of medical research.
A few people suggested that if the OMB’s analysis makes its way down to individual grants and extends to everything that’s been opposed by the right in recent years, there’s no telling what might be at risk. One person noted that researchers working on minority health issues may have joint appointments in ethnic studies departments, and those studying women’s health issues sometimes have joint appointments in women’s studies departments. (It’s common for anthropologists to also have joint appointments in ethnic studies departments.) This could lead to their work being targeted under the “anti-DEI” or “anti-gender-ideology” labels.
Two researchers mentioned worries about grants that won’t run afoul of any of the categories mentioned by the OMB but simply used language that conservatives have objected to. “It creates a lot of uncertainty,” one researcher told Ars. “The technology we are developing would be good for everyone, but some of the rationale we’ve made is [that it would] make things more affordable, more accessible—more equitable. Would that be grounds for termination as ‘DEI’ or ‘woke’? “
Lest any of these worries seem extreme, we’ll note that the new administration has labeled the soon-to-be-revoked automotive fuel economy standards as meant to “push a radical Green New Deal agenda.”
Money concerns
For grants that typically run three to five years, a hold that runs a few weeks may not seem like that big a deal. But the money doesn’t come as one lump sum at the start of a grant; instead, it’s paid out in installments that vary depending on the grant type. One senior researcher who has multiple grants said that he expected money to arrive from three of them within the next month, which might mean they get held up by this policy.
Another researcher cited the NIH’s Small Business Innovation Research grants, which help a lot of small biotech startups get off the ground. They noted that the hold will come right before monthly payrolls need to be met, which he worried might be enough to kill some small businesses.
Several people also said that even minor disruptions can be problematic because researchers typically run extremely lean operations and don’t have spare money to cover any shortfalls. “We are already dramatically underfunded in science, with granting mechanisms going over 20 years without cost-of-inflation adjustments,” one told Ars.
Most people we talked with noted that the lack of clarity about the length of the hold and the criteria for allowing future funding is exacerbated by the hold placed on all communications from the NIH. A few also expected that most people at the NIH were in the dark about the ultimate scope of the OMB operation themselves.
The final point that came up repeatedly is that these problems create uncertainty about the future of scientific research in the US. “We have a 50-year history of leading the world in health research,” one scientist told us when describing how the funding uncertainty and ideological litmus tests described above could put that at risk.
And that would have significant consequences for the nation as a whole. The money from grants helps support everyone from university cleaning staff to companies that supply specialized chemicals and equipment. Patents and spinoffs generated by the research help fuel startups in a lot of high-tech fields. As a result, the NIH estimates that every dollar it spends produces about twice that amount in economic activity. “The return on investment for dollars to the NIH and NSF are substantial and drive the economy near- and long-term,” one researcher told us.
It’s difficult to understand how putting all that at risk puts America first.
John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.
