It was one of those head-snapping, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it weeks in Washington, D.C. Many U.S. science agencies abruptly abandoned normal operations last week to focus on a slew of executive orders from President Donald Trump targeting what he calls “woke gender ideology;” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); foreign aid; the “green new deal;” and support for “nongovernmental organizations that undermine the national interest.”

 

Trump orders cause chaos at science agencies

Wild week of canceled meetings, program changes, and data purges creates high anxiety

BY JEFFREY MERVIS

 

Those orders, which began to flow just hours after Trump’s 20 January inauguration, led agencies to temporarily suspend new awards, review existing grants, block grantee access to funds already allocated, and halt meetings of grant-review panels. They also removed calls for proposals in specific areas, websites, and access to public databases that deal with now off-limits topics. Adding to the chaos: a 27 January White House memo intended to freeze huge chunks of federal spending deemed to violate the executive orders.

The torrent of activity left many researchers bewildered—and fearful of what might come next.

As Science went to press, a few agencies had backed off some of their initial steps. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which had blocked grantee access to its cash management system, lifted the hold on 2 February. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which hadn’t frozen grants but canceled key funding meetings, expected to resume at least some meetings of committees that review proposals. And two federal judges, ruling on different lawsuits, blocked implementation of the memo that froze funding, which the White House soon withdrew.

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Yet many scientists remain in limbo at thousands of academic institutions and nongovernmental agencies that rely on federal research grants. And some lawmakers, especially Democrats, are complaining vociferously that agency attempts to comply with Trump’s executive orders violate laws that govern many science agencies. The laws “are not optional, and they cannot be unilaterally wished away by executive order,” Representative Zoe Lofgren (CA), the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives science committee, warned in a 2 February letter to the heads of five major research agencies, urging them to fight back.

Such warnings suggest turmoil is far from over. Here’s a review of what’s happened so far.

Work and funding pauses

The 27 January White House memo triggered a frenzy among institutions and organizations, which receive most federal research grants and funnel the money to investigators. Some took the unilateral, preemptive step of telling scientists to suspend travel or purchases connected with those grants, in some cases causing immediate hardship. NSF’s payment freeze led some of the postdocs it funds to complain on social media they were unable to pay rent and other bills.

Some agencies reversed course, however, after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the memo’s implementation on 31 January. This week, a second judge extended a similar order blocking the White House memo.

Although the spending memo has been rescinded, the executive orders governing how it would have been applied remain in force. For some agencies, that has meant stopping work already underway or telling scientists that efforts focused on DEI and accessibility (DEIA) are no longer valued.

On 23 January, for example, NASA told all grantees and contractors to “immediately … cease and desist all DEIA activities.” One early casualty was a program pairing NASA mission scientists with college students from underrepresented groups, including training those scientists to be better mentors.

On 27 January, the Department of Energy (DOE) issued similar guidance, and the next day its $8 billion Office of Science withdrew a requirement that researchers include a plan for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) in every research proposal. DOE told reviewers judging proposals already in the pipeline to ignore any PIER plans, saying they wouldn’t affect what DOE decided to fund.

One academic physicist who requested anonymity to protect relations with DOE characterizes the change as a return to business as usual, noting that DOE didn’t provide additional funds to support PIER activities. The Office of Science “didn’t get into DEI with exuberance, and it didn’t get out of DEI with exuberance,” the physicist quips.

Existing grants vetted

NIH says the agency is not reviewing awarded grants—although they are vetting language in some announcements that invite scientists to submit proposals on a particular topic. So far, NSF appears to be the only agency to have created a system for deciding whether an already awarded grant violates the executive order.

NSF officials declined to comment on the intricate, multistep process, which began last week. But people with direct knowledge say it started with NSF senior managers selecting 10,000 grants, from a pool of roughly 50,000 active awards, for review. They then enlisted staff to vet the awards using a list of key words that included “diversity,” “inclusion,” “women,” and “race.” To be sure, a sizable share of those words refers to scientific designations, such as plant diversity, that have nothing to do with DEIA; those awards were dropped from the review.

Some 1200 grants, however, contained two or more potential red flags, the sources said. Most were in NSF’s education directorate, one of the agency’s eight major granting units. Those grants were then subjected to closer scrutiny, with an eye toward identifying those openly designed to broaden the pool of NSF investigators but outside the typical definition of a DEIA project. Among others, grants awarded under NSF’s 44-year-old program to support scientists in rural states that historically get little NSF funding appear to be getting a close look.

The winnowing process is expected to yield a small number of projects that will need to be modified so the investigators can continue the work without violating the executive order. But it’s not clear how many projects will be affected.

“The goal is to try and make sure that every [active] award is fully funded,” says one NSF staffer who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “After all, they were chosen for both scientific merit and broader impacts,” a reference to the two criteria that NSF uses in making every award.

New awards paused

NSF stopped posting notices of new awards the day after Trump took office, apparently preparing for the review of its existing grants. As Science went to press, that pause was still in place, but several NSF sources said they expected it to be lifted this week once the vetting ended.

At NIH, applications for grant renewals or new proposals face scrutiny. If they involve DEIA, NIH sources say, they will be declined, or investigators will have to remove that component before the proposal is considered.

Databases removed

A 29 January memo from the Office of Personnel Management gave agencies 2 days to pull down websites and end projects that “inculcate or promote gender ideology.” At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that purge swept up multiple web pages involving race or containing the term LGBTQ (for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer). Many pages that went dark provided access to CDC data, such as the results of a widely used survey of youth risk behaviors and the agency’s social vulnerability index, which uses metrics such as poverty to rank communities’ vulnerability to natural disasters. Scientists and advocacy groups rushed to download data before the deadline.

“I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan who says she spent half a night trying to download data on influenza surveillance. “It’s like a data apocalypse.”

Solicitations withdrawn

NIH staff have pulled down descriptions of initiatives offering funding of efforts to improve DEIA and have revised requests for proposals that violate the orders. For example, the web pages for Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers, a program that helps postdocs from diverse backgrounds transition to independent research, have disappeared.

The program announcement for NIH’s main science, technology, engineering, and math education program, the NIH Science Education Partnership Award, has also vanished. Several training grant solicitations have been altered so that they now appear to have expired.

“Our country is hobbling ourselves by canceling these programs,” says cell biologist Needhi Bhalla of the University of California, Santa Cruz. These undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs “bring important, unique, and novel insights and breadth to solving challenging, scientific problems,” she adds.

NIH is also revising study descriptions for clinical trials and other studies seeking to recruit diverse cohorts. The changes are intended to make clear that the goal is not to give preference to a minority group, but to ensure that research focuses on all populations afflicted with a disease. But scientists within and outside NIH worry those steps may not be enough to satisfy political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services, NIH’s parent agency.

NSF, too, has taken down online program announcements, including both ongoing solicitations and new calls for proposals to advance work in a specific or field topic. These actions, in some cases erasing any record of the announcement, differ from NSF’s standard practice of retiring, or archiving, a solicitation because it is outdated or NSF decided to reallocate the funds.

Much remains uncertain, as agencies wait for additional guidance from the White House on how to implement Trump’s executive orders. They will then tell grantees what to do to adhere to the terms of their awards. The stakes are high for science. NSF, for one, has already reminded institutions they risk losing their grants if they are not in compliance.

https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-orders-cause-chaos-science-agencies

 

 

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