Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, is warning the Trump administration against following through on a proposed executive order that would give the White House political control over grantmaking by the National Institutes of Health.
In a statement issued Monday and a letter today to the heads of President Trump’s budget office and the NIH, Collins argues that the White House Office of Management and Budget should not be involved in agency grant awards.
“Any attempt to politicize grantmaking at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or any other agency, by another means—whether an Executive Order or guidance—is contrary to congressional intent,” Collins said in her statement yesterday. “Imposing a political review on awards that have already been selected through a rigorous scientific and merit-based process undermines the long-standing principle that the government funds awards based on scientific need and merit, rather than political ideology.”
Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democratic appropriator, similarly criticized the Trump administration plan.
“Whether lifesaving medical research gets funded or not should be determined by experts at the NIH—not a panel of lackeys chosen by Donald Trump and Russ Vought,” Murray said in a statement Monday. “Under this scheme, a single political appointee could kill a cancer study or an Alzheimer’s trial with no scientific reason at all. … Breast cancer patients shouldn’t be denied hope of a new lifesaving treatment because Russ Vought thinks women’s health research is woke.”
How we got here: President Trump reportedly instructed White House budget director Russell Vought last week to draft a presidential order creating a board to decide how billions of dollars in grants would be awarded — a move that would put political appointees in charge of federal health research funding that, as Collins indicated, has long been rooted in peer-reviewed assessments of scientific merit, with decisions ultimately made by the heads of the NIH’s 27 divisions.
The new board would include Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and would be required to make grant awards unanimously, Politico reported. That would give Vought extraordinary power over the more than $35 billion in yearly NIH grants, the majority of the agency’s nearly $50 billion in congressionally appropriated funding.
The plan for a new executive order reportedly came after a clash between Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya in which the budget chief accused the NIH, the largest U.S. funder of biomedical research, of providing money for “woke” programs that conflict with the president’s agenda.
Bhattacharya defended the agency’s grantmaking process, which has been revamped under Trump, according to The Washington Post. And he refused Trump’s request to cut grant funding to Harvard specifically, according to Politico.
Vought has long targeted NIH for spending cuts. The president’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 proposed to cut the NIH budget by about 40% compared to 2025 levels. Congress rejected that request. For fiscal year 2027, the White House asked for a roughly 12% budget cut for the NIH, or a reduction of about $5 billion.
In an interview with CBS News’s “Face the Nation” in July 2025, Vought criticized what he described as wasteful spending on specific research programs and argued that the NIH had been “weaponized against the American people” by funding research that he claimed had caused the Covid pandemic.
“We have an agency that needs dramatic overhaul,” Vought said at the time. “Thankfully, we have a great new head of it, but we're going to have to go line by line to make sure the NIH is funded properly.”
More recently, Vought’s White House budget office proposed a rule that would give political appointees oversight over federal health grants. Collins and other lawmakers criticized that plan, and Congress blocked it from being finalized until December as part of the continuing resolution, or CR, enacted to fund agencies past the midterm elections.
In her letter Tuesday, Collins said the nascent executive order appears similar to the plan Congress recently blocked. “I urge you not to move forward with this proposal, which would undermine the intent of the CR provision and more important, the Federal government’s objective of funding biomedical research projects based on scientific merit and value rather than political ideology,” she wrote, echoing her earlier statement.
Collins went on to defend U.S. research and development, citing advances dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, Type 1 diabetes and cancer.
“Every application for NIH funding undergoes a long and demanding review process that includes committees of outside experts who review the applications and evaluate them based on merit,” Collins wrote. “In addition, Director Bhattacharya has worked to prioritize innovation so that NIH is funding meritorious applications focused on cutting-edge science that will ultimately result in cures for rare and chronic diseases as well as better treatments to improve American lives.”
Collins closed her letter by urging Vought and Bhattacharya to bring a legislative proposal to Congress if they want additional reforms at NIH.