‘Complete shock and dismay’: scientists unite against Trump’s $1tn grant attack

It was a late Friday afternoon in Boston when Harvard School of Public Health professor Nancy Krieger, a social epidemiologist, received an email that would reshape the next year of her life.

It was from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – her nearly $1m grant to study how discrimination affects population health was canceled.

“I’m like, what? What does this mean? I don’t understand? My grant has another year in it. I immediately reached out to the office that helps with grants to find out what was going on, and it led to a flurry of emails over the weekend – just trying to even find out what was happening.

“It was complete shock and dismay.”

From that moment, she had three jobs. First, to continue her work as a professor. Second, to deal with the litigation that suddenly engulfed her work. Third, to patch up the tumult, crushed morale and chaos that weighed on the people whose careers depended on this funding.

Krieger’s was one of the first R-01 grant cancellations in the country – one example of the chaos sown by the billionaire Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” as the group ripped apart federal grant-making infrastructure under the banner of ending “woke” research on gender, race, equity and a slate of other keywords the administration found objectionable. It would not be the last – and the list of delayed and canceled grants could, and probably will, fill books.

Now Krieger is at the vanguard of scientists speaking out about a new proposal from the office of management and budget (OMB) that attempts to ensnare nearly the entire federal grant-making apparatus in this same tumult.

This May, Trump’s OMB quietly proposed a more than 400-page overhaul of the federal grant-making process which would, if formalized, institutionalize much of the upheaval seen in federal funding scientists have experienced over the past nearly two years. The proposal would put nearly $1tn in grant-making into the hands of political appointees by October.

“It’s the entirety of the federal grant-making process,” said Sara Rosenbaum, professor emerita of health law and policy at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. “Healthcare, education, social services, environmental protections – it’s way, way beyond just research.”

The proposal has sparked outrage and consternation among a wide array of organizations, with a dramatic increase in support from individual scientists and scientific organizations, who have come together to oppose a rule that could affect an almost unimaginably vast swath of federal funding.

Groups studying “the farthest reaches of the galaxy to the deepest depths of the sea to everything in between, including those of us who wander around predominantly on plants”, have come together, Krieger said. “That’s because, yes, we have experienced censorship. We have experience with blunt use of power to put forward the ideological agenda.”

The proposal, now informally referred to as “the OMB rule”, has attracted almost half a million public comments – analyses show as much as 95% in opposition – and bipartisan criticism.

“President Trump and [OMB director] Russell Vought are not only breaking the law, but they are also once again endangering the health and safety of Americans,” Tammy Baldwin, a Democratic senator of Wisconsin, said in a statement to the Guardian.

“Americans expect their taxpayer dollars to be put to research that has the best chance at delivering a breakthrough or cure for a disease, not wielded like a cudgel to punish the president’s perceived enemies and score political points.”

Of the potential $1tn affected, $150bn is typically invested in science and technology. To conceptualize the scope, consider the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH): at $47bn, the NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and behavioral research.

“In the normal course of events, an administration faced with 500,000 comments – virtually all of which will be in opposition to the rule … would withdraw the rule,” said Rosenbaum. “I would say there’s a relatively low level of expectation that the administration will do the reasonable thing.”

The proposal criticizes “woke” policies, would ban “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion programs), and prohibit undefined “anti-American values”. It would also discourage international collaboration between scientists, require demonstration of presidential “priorities”, and allow the government to consider, “an applicant’s affiliations with organizations engaged in activities that violate federal law, undermine public safety or national security, or advocate for the overthrow of the United States government”.

It would also allow the federal government to cancel awards that are no longer in the federal government’s “interest”, a consideration that many researchers experienced first-hand in spring 2025, when federal research grants on disparate impacts and gender were summarily canceled.

Already, 22 state attorneys general have come together to oppose the rule, and almost certainly are expecting to bring a suit.

“The Trump administration is once again attempting to weaponize essential federal funding to advance its policy priorities. Except this time, it’s not just one agency, it’s almost all of them,” said California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, in a statement this week urging the OMB to withdraw the proposal. “This proposal aims to undermine practically every industry and public service supported by federal funding.”

On social media, Vought, the OMB director, specifically targeted criticism of the rule from non-profits as a “freakout by those on the left”. The White House “fraud taskforce”, meanwhile, said the rule would ensure “American taxpayers will no longer be forced to fund woke NGOs with partisan agendas”. The rule is supported by the Heritage Foundation, the Washington DC thinktank that authored Project 2025.

The administration allowed only 45 days for public comments, relatively brief in the scope of federal rule-making – which is typically 60 to 90 days. The public comment period closed this week.

“Basically, in my mind, the notice and comment is just a subterfuge for moving ahead when they’re really not interested in what the comments say,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global public health at Georgetown Law.

Since the beginning of the second Trump term, funding fights have played out across the sciences – disrupting clinical trials, long-term research, laboratories and cutting short the careers of young scientists.

If the proposal is enacted, as expected, how quickly the fight would move to the courts is an open question. Gostin argued that a grant may need to be denied before a plaintiff could find standing. Once that happens, he expects state attorneys general, institutions and perhaps even individual plaintiffs to initiate suits.

“[It] seems to me one of the big questions is: would a lawsuit actually succeed?” said Gostin. “It’s not a 100% slam-dunk, although I do think there will be some trial judges, district court judges who will enjoin it.”

Gostin said: “But as it goes though highly conservative courts of appeal and the conservative supreme court, the outcome is less certain. Whether the government attempts to mount an emergency appeal and get, ultimately, the supreme court moving forward is anybody’s guess.”