Trump's War on Science Targets Grants, Visas, Universities
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Russell Vought, OMB director and Project 2025 architect, initiated a rule change making federal science grants — historically allocated through peer review by 'first-rate fellow scientists' — subject to review by political appointees, creating leverage to pressure universities over 'alignment with the president's priorities.'
- Michael Kratsios, Trump's science adviser and a former Peter Thiel employee with no research experience, proposed shifting decision-making from university experts to private corporations aided by AI, framing it as a 'golden age of science'; critics say it redirects money from universities to tech allies.
- Linda McMahon, the education secretary, is now asking university presidents to post website pledges on 'intellectual pluralism,' policing campus protest, and orienting curricula toward immediate employability — after last year's failed 'compact' offering preferential federal treatment.
- PhD student visas are now capped at four years — 'an unrealistic time frame for many academic subjects' — with extensions only available by appealing to the Department of Homeland Security rather than conducting research.
- The Senate funding deal reached this week appears to block Vought's OMB grant-review rule, though Müller notes Congress has quietly resisted cuts only because science funding flows to Republican districts; no Republican, he writes, has offered a 'principled defense' of the postwar basic-research model.
- The administration is also targeting international donors and collaboration broadly, undermining a historical pipeline in which foreign PhD graduates either stayed in the US contributing to national wealth or returned home 'with good feelings to the US.'
Why it matters: The push dismantles the postwar US model of taxpayer-funded, peer-reviewed basic research that drove decades of breakthroughs and attracted global scientific talent; foreign researchers and universities absorb immediate costs, and even a blocked OMB rule exposes that no Republican has articulated a principled defense, leaving the coalition's structural damage unchecked.
