Billions of dollars of federal grants support everything from medical research to community services. Now, the Trump administration wants to tie that money to the president’s political priorities.

Guests

Jacob “Jack” Lew, former director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton and Obama administrations. He is currently a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits.

Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals. Professor of chemistry at George Washington University.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I      

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Federal grant-making is usually a rather staid process. Applications come into various federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Education, et cetera. These requests are to fund everything from cutting-edge scientific research to school curriculum initiatives, to local disaster recovery following a hurricane.

So that alone should grab your attention because we’re talking about essential funds that support attempts to improve life all the way down to your local level. And those funds, by the way, total more than a trillion dollars annually. Now, here’s the staid or usually uncontroversial part of this process.

The grant applications are normally evaluated based on merit, peer review in the case of scientific grant requests, and expert review in other agencies. The Trump administration wants to turn that merit-based process into a political one. Here’s Russell Vought, head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, back in June.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: When we find something that’s problematic that our policy officials would not have caught, we need to be able to turn it off.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, OMB doesn’t award the money, but it writes the rules that other agencies like the Transportation Department or the NIH must follow. And now, OMB is proposing sweeping changes to those rules.

The Trump administration wants federal grants awarded based on whether they, quote, “advance the president’s policy priorities,” end quote. So when Vought says problematic, he’s talking about things President Trump and the president’s political supporters simply do not like. Anything associated with, quote, “diversity, equity, or inclusion,” for example.

Here’s Vought at a Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington, D.C. in June.

VOUGHT: We were largely funding liberalism and largely funding the left, and this administration has come on. The president gave us the instruction in an executive order last year, a direction to all the agency heads, “You have to be personally in charge of making sure this funding goes out for causes that are consistent with the agenda that I ran on.”

Vought insists that for scientific research grants, peer review and merit won’t be eliminated from the process entirely. He says agencies will be making decisions based on a, quote, “well-thought-out basis.” But OMB hasn’t been forthcoming about what the new thought-out basis would be, beyond adhering to the president’s political priorities.

For example, would a research grant focused on sickle cell anemia be rejected because the disease affects diverse patients, namely Black Americans? Thus far, it’s unclear. Also unclear what happens to the grants once they are awarded, because the OMB proposal could also destabilize some $900 billion in state and local block grants. Because it would allow federal agencies to change, quote, “The terms and conditions of a grant after work has begun if the president and his administration’s priorities shift.”

The Office of Management and Budget says the changes are necessary to ensure, quote, “The basic American principles of equality and equal opportunity are upheld through the grant-making process.” And it says the new rules would prevent unlawful discrimination. Critics say funneling a trillion dollars through the political priorities of the president would have exactly the opposite effect.

So let’s take a look at what’s really going on here, and we’ll begin with Jack Lew. He was the director of the Office of Management and Budget during both the Clinton and Obama administrations. He also served as U.S. ambassador to Israel and the United States Secretary of the Treasury and White House Chief of Staff.

Secretary Lew, welcome to On Point.

JACK LEW: Good to be with you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: So tell me, first of all, and I’m not afraid to hear the sort of rather dry and procedural language of federal grant making, but what is ostensibly the normal process that the federal government goes through to decide how to apportion out a trillion dollars a year to state and local agencies or groups?

LEW: So listening to your introduction, you actually put your finger on the real purpose of OMB’s involvement in the grant process in the past. It’s been to ensure regularity, to make sure that there isn’t fraud or mismanagement, and to set guidelines so that if there’s bad behavior by someone or some agency, there’s a process that would suss that out and give you the ability to take action.

This proposed rule change turns that on its head. If you don’t agree with the president you could be singled out at any point to have your funding either denied or cut off. We’ve seen in the last couple of years actions taken to cut off whole states, for example, because they voted against the president.

We’ve seen programs that deal with problems like drug and alcohol abuse eliminated administratively. That was reversed when the public outcry was so great that even in red states like West Virginia people didn’t want to cut off those kinds of programs. So it could be used for pernicious purposes like saying “You don’t support me, I won’t support you.”

We have a name for that in government. It’s called pay to play. This would give you the tool to enforce that kind of rule. That’s the opposite of what OMB’s role in the grant-making process is supposed to be. It is OMB’s job to look across the government and see what is the president’s policy, is it being implemented according to the laws.

It’s not OMB’s job to make those decisions on this kind of a basis, and certainly not if it reverses decisions that were properly made by Congress in statutes or appropriations.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, I was just about to ask you about exactly that, because you said it is OMB’s job to see if agencies are operating in alignment with the president’s priorities, but we’re talking about federal funding here, Congress is the branch of government that’s supposed to hold the purse strings here. So is this an end run around congressional appropriations? Or because the fact of, that these trillion dollars are really, they’re granted out through the executive branch through these agencies, is it not in fact cutting Congress out of the process?

LEW: I think that the way this rule is designed it gives OMB the ability to take actions that are far beyond what OMB has traditionally or to my knowledge ever done in terms of micromanaging the commitment of federal dollars at an agency level. There are decisions made to apportion funds to an agency for a purpose.

That’s where you exercise policy guidelines to make sure that consistent with the statute you’re spending the money the way that the executive branch has designed the policy to be. Now, if what the White House through OMB does is to say, “We’re going to spend the money for things we like. We’re not going to spend the money for things we don’t like. Or we’re going to take the money and move it somewhere else,” which we’ve seen this administration do on a number of occasions, that is crossing the line. And it’s going to be up to the courts to decide how to express where the balance between Congress and the executive branch are.

But really since the 1970s, since the impoundment issues in the 1970s it’s been taken as law that the White House doesn’t get to spend money on things that Congress didn’t appropriate it for, and it can’t not spend money that Congress appropriates.

CHAKRABARTI: I think you absolutely put your finger on yet another example of how there was the normal practice of governance in the United States at the federal level.

It seemed as if it were a matter of law, but in truth, it was a matter of norms. And here’s yet another example in which President Trump has been unafraid to smash those norms. I’m looking back at the August 7th, 2025, executive order from which this OMB proposal emerges, and it says right here that “award decisions,” this is of course an EO from President Trump, “Award decisions will undergo more rigorous evaluation by political appointees and subject matter experts to ensure they benefit the American public, align with administration priorities, and are coordinated across agencies to avoid duplication.”

Now, at the risk of getting too procedural, Secretary Lew, let me ask you how that actually, does it truly differentiate from what the process already is if, when you’re talking about political appointees, if the heads of the various agencies are appointed by the president?

I guess what I’m wondering is many people might say, how is this actually different if we just kind of presume certain norms that are not norms anymore?

LEW: So let’s use an example of grants for law enforcement. Local police. Where it’s totally within OMB’s purview to have views as to how the funds should be distributed across the states to different kinds of jurisdictions with different kinds of characteristics.

That is one thing. It’s a totally different thing if you have a political figure saying, “What municipality is getting the funding? Did the mayor or county executive in that county support or oppose me on X, Y, and Z? And we will give the money where we were supported, not where we were opposed.” That is a wholly different kind of exercise, I think abuse of power, and it gets right up to the point of stepping, I think crossing the point of stepping on First Amendment rights.

You have a right in this country to disagree with the government. It’s in the Constitution that you have the right to petition for redress of grievances. It’s in the First Amendment that you have the right to free speech. Congress can’t make laws that take that away. You can’t have the White House or OMB take away your right to free speech by threatening to cut off your funding or change the terms of your funding in the middle of a grant.

It’s a terribly chilling effect. And it’s consistent with other actions that have been taken, just on a much more sophisticated and broad scale. I think that’s one of the reasons you’ve seen Congress this weekend put a provision in its short-term continuing resolution to put this rule on hold until the short-term spending bill runs its course on December 11th.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: You were talking about Congress putting a hold on the activation of this rule, which originally was scheduled, a final version of the rule was scheduled to be published on October 1st.

But continue, go ahead with your thought.

LEW: Thanks. Yeah, no, I was saying that in the continuing resolution, the short-term funding bill that Congress will be voting on in a few days, they’ve delayed implementation of this rule until the end of the period that short-term stopgap funding is in place.

So that will be December 11th. It’s really important to recognize that is just a short-term measure. If this is going to be blocked, it would take permanent legislation that says the rule can’t take effect. So this is not a once-and-for-all dealing with it. One of the things that Congress has said in that provision is that they have to continue to process all of the many comments that are coming in, which have been overwhelmingly negative.

So that means there will be a little bit more transparency, and I can’t say a lot of transparency because they don’t necessarily have to say very much about each of the comments. But it’s a reason that those who are affected by this have a window where they can at least register their concerns.

And who has an interest in it? State and local governments do. Tribes do. If you’re a municipal entity, any sovereign entity, your credit rating could be affected by whether or not your federal grant funding is considered stable or unstable. If you’re a business that does technology research through grants, the same thing.

Research can’t just stop and start. It actually has an impact on the substance as well as the process and the finances. So this is a pretty important issue. It’s in the weeds for most people. But it actually affects daily life in America because it gets down to programs that support families and daycare and nutrition.

And it would put constraints on grant recipients that if they do anything that displeases the administration, their funding could be cut off or changed at any time.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more that sometimes even though it might seem to be in the weeds, these kinds of discussions, they end up being, end up having such critical and concrete impact on people. So let me just go through some numbers here. There’s a whole bucket of competitive or discretionary grants that total some $200 billion, and the OMB’s proposed rule would require review of those grants by political appointees.

But then I think perhaps more impactful on everyday Americans is this $900 billion in federal block grants for state and local governments. Because according to one analysis, about a third of the money that states spend on local initiatives comes from grants like this at the federal level.

A whole third of it, which is quite remarkable. And in fact, it’s because of Russell Vought, the president, and other members of his administration are taking a special, they’re paying special attention to these federal dollars. Because as, Secretary Lew, they have long criticized federal funding, in their view, as a kind of boondoggle by the left, if I can put it that way.

For example, let me just play a couple of pieces of tape here from a recent Senate hearing. You’re about to hear Hal Duncan, and he is currently seeking Senate confirmation to serve as deputy director of Office, of the Office of Management and Budget, and here he is in the Senate confirmation hearing in June.

HAL DUNCAN: We also want to ensure that these grants aren’t going out in a way that advances divisive DEI ideologies woke gender ideologies, illegal immigration, as we saw in the past administration, and want to ensure that there are additional steps to ensure accountability so the folks that the president appoints and puts in power when he is elected by the American people are able to review grant issuance decisions.

And then he went on in that hearing, again, this is Hal Duncan saying that the new rule, the new proposed rule is essential to reign in what he called a, quote, “trillion-dollar grant enterprise.”

HAL DUNCAN: It’s ensuring that some of these outrageous spending that we have seen in the past is not going out the door by adding an additional layer of accountability by having a political appointee, someone that is directly responsible to the president, saying, “Hey, this is a good use of these funds. We believe this,” or asking some additional questions before it goes out, or saying no.

By the way, you heard Duncan there saying that it would be better to have political appointees directly beholden to the president in charge of the grant-making process. But the president himself has also in the past railed against what he called unelected bureaucrats who were previously in charge of the process.

But anyway, to get a little bit more detail on exactly what kinds of grants could be approved or rejected, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin questioned Hal Duncan at this June hearing.

SLOTKIN: If a domestic violence shelter receives a federal grant, but they also post complaints about this administration’s cutting of domestic violence funding, will that put them at risk of being labeled anti-American or threatening the reputation of this administration?

DUNCAN: Senator, again, you’re asking hypothetical questions. The ultimate deciders of these grants will be the political employees at the agencies. I would imagine in this situation, it would likely be HHS.

SLOTKIN: Political employees? The political appointees like yourself?

DUNCAN: The political appointees.

OMB does not issue grants. We issue guidance.

CHAKRABARTI: Secretary Lew, I’m wondering if you want to respond to that.

LEW: Look, I think Senator Slotkin put her finger on the problem, and yeah, it’s true, grants are issued by the agencies, but if OMB has the power to tell an agency what to do, that’s really a small difference between OMB making the decision and the agency making the decision. As a practical matter OMB doesn’t even have 500 employees.

I don’t know what the current headcount is. It’s ranged between 400 and 500 for the last 25 years, and it is just not possible to give substantive review. So what it means is there will be a process of selecting where to interfere, and that process will be driven by factors like did someone criticize the president and do you go into the agency on the basis of that?

Did the policy of the administration, if not the president directly. If you go back to the history of block grants, they weren’t created for the most part by left-wing administrations. It was Richard Nixon who was one of the big promoters of block grants and things like revenue sharing and community development block grants to shift the center of power back to the communities where it should be and to limit federal encroachment.

This is a reversal of that to the extreme. And I think the question of tying something like supporting a domestic violence grant to do, you criticize the president on some unrelated issue, exactly the risk of an approach like this.

CHAKRABARTI: Jacob Lew, Jack Lew, is the former director of the Office of Management and Budget.

He served in that position during the Clinton and Obama administrations. Also held a lot of other positions in the federal government, including as Secretary of the Treasury and former U.S. ambassador to Israel. Secretary Lew, thank you so much for joining us today.

LEW: Pleasure to be with you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let’s get a sense from people who are in the world of applying for and receiving grants in terms of what impact this proposed change could have on them.

So I wanna turn now to Diane Yentel. She’s president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits. Diane, welcome to On Point.

DIANE YENTEL: Hi, thanks so much for having me, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Before I go any further, I should note that we actually made several requests to the current Office of Management and Budget under the Trump administration for, we made requests for interviews.

They did not respond to our requests. So tell me in the big picture of nonprofits in the United States, are federal grants the primary source or a primary source of funding for all the activities that nonprofits do in this country?

YENTEL: They’re a primary source. Nonprofits receive about 30% of the funding for their work from the federal government, and probably a bit more if we also include the funding that first goes to state and local governments, which also provide funding for the work of nonprofits.

And I just want to say in response to some of those clips that you shared earlier, just a reminder that nonprofits are nonpartisan, by law and in practice. And nonprofits do work in communities, with communities, to meet the priorities that communities set. And they do work like some of what you and Secretary Lew described, things like providing disaster assistance, supportive housing, crisis hotlines, food banks, arts and culture, and much more, and they do it all completely nonpartisan as a way to work in and with communities to meet the needs that those communities prioritize.

CHAKRABARTI: But I imagine that the Office of Management and Budget would say, and in fact has said in a roundabout way, that exactly the kinds of services that you just described, Diane, in terms of disaster relief domestic violence support for survivors, things like that, that those aren’t the kinds of programs that the administration is concerned about.

That, of course, those are nonpartisan. They go to support Americans from all walks of life. But it’s rather nonprofit grant requests that go to things, again, the administration places it under the broad category of DEI initiatives that they find wasteful, that those are the ones that deserve greater scrutiny and political review.

What would be your response to that?

YENTEL: I think it’s important to set this latest effort by the administration to cut federal funding for the work of nonprofits in the context of what they’ve been doing throughout the administration. So in January of 2025, just one week after inauguration, the administration attempted to freeze all federal funding overnight with no end date given, and they were supposedly doing so in order to review all grants with this same political lens.

And the impacts of that attempt to freeze federal funding would have been catastrophic for nonprofit organizations across the country, and even more importantly, for the communities that they serve. So at that time, the National Council of Nonprofits and some of our partners sued the administration to stop the funding freeze.

We won a universal preliminary injunction that remains in place, keeps the administration from attempting that type of broad funding freeze again. Later, a couple months later, they tried to freeze specific pots of funding, going to certain types of organizations doing important work in communities. So NCN sued and won again.

Those funds were required by the courts to keep funding, keep flowing to the communities. So the administration is appealing both of those rulings, and then at the same time, they’ve now put out this 400-page proposal that in a slightly different but very related way, would completely upend the federal grant-making process and squeeze out many of the same nonprofits that they’ve been continuously trying to squeeze out of federal funding and out of other federal programs, like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which was another example of where they attempted to carve out certain types of nonprofits from a program that they are legally entitled to benefit from.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So you know what? It suddenly occurred to me that people who aren’t familiar with the grant writing or grant-making process might just understandably presume that you put in a request, the federal government says yes or no, and then a check is written, and the money goes out the door, and there’s no accountability thereafter, right?

But that is not exactly how it works. Can you just describe to me briefly, Diane, what kind of checks and balances are actually already in place, such that nonprofits have to, do they have to continuously prove that the money they’re spending and how they’re spending it is in line with the grant that was approved by the government?

YENTEL: Yes. There are many layers of oversight and required reviews of how nonprofits spend their money, and especially with federal funding, but really with all areas of money that nonprofits receive and spend for their important programs and communities. So there are layers and layers of reviews during the grant review process in determining that this particular nonprofit organization is best equipped to be able to carry out the program.

There are reports due. Depending on the type of program, there are sometimes site visits by members of the federal government to see up close what these programs look like, and there are reports due at the end of the grant process as well, reporting in on how those funds were spent. So there’s very significant and rigorous oversight throughout the process that ensure that the funding that nonprofits are utilizing from the federal government are being utilized for its intended purposes and for what Congress appropriated those funds for.

CHAKRABARTI: So there’s another aspect of this I wanna just quickly ask you about, and that is the OMB rule seems to seems to say that, well, not even seems to, it does say that after a grant has been issued, that if the administration’s priorities change, that grant could then come under at the very least review, or it could just be, like, what, ceased if I understand it correctly.

How different is that from, again, this current, the process that’s currently in place that you mentioned? Because as nonprofits have to submit the evidence of how they’ve been using the money, already, can the federal government say you’re not using it in the way that it was intended, so the grant is going to come to an end or not be renewed?

YENTEL: Not only based on if the administration changes its priorities or if there’s a new administration that comes in. No, this proposal would be a complete upending of the federal grant process for non-profits. So non-profits really depend on federal grants that are predictable, transparent, and grounded in the rule of law in order for them to do their important work in our communities, and this regulation would do the opposite.

It would, as you’ve already discussed, it would allow political appointees to approve grant applications based on ideology, right? And not the merits of the application or the importance of the work. So it would allow administrations to reshape programs that were already established by Congress and instead award, condition, or terminate grants based on changing political priorities.

But the rule would also allow an administration to change the rules or the requirements mid-grant. And this would just create tremendous uncertainty and risk that would make it very difficult for non-profits to keep doing the work the communities rely on, and that the federal government partners with non-profits to do.

So now, according to these new proposals, under these rules, non-profits would have to worry if the funding or the program rules would change mid-grant or when political leadership changes.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Today we’re talking about a particular procedural change that could happen in the federal government. And before your eyes glaze over when you hear me say the words procedural change, stick with us. And you’ve been sticking with us so far because this is quite important.

It has to do with how the federal government would apportion out a trillion dollars, more than a trillion dollars every year, in federal grants. And why does this matter?

Because almost a third or about a third of every dollar that states spend locally comes from federal grants like this, and it’s from everything for community projects to transportation to disaster relief, and then of course, there’s a great deal of money spent on basic scientific research in this country.

The Office of Management and Budget wants to change the way those grants are awarded and funnel them all through what it calls the president’s political priorities. So many state and local officials are quite concerned about this because it’s not clear exactly how those decisions would be made.

Here’s March Gallagher, the comptroller of Ulster County, New York, in an interview with Radio Catskill last month.

MARCH GALLAGHER: What if somebody is riding the bus system and protesting Trump, or using the bus system to get to a protest, or standing over the New York State Thruway with signage opposing the administration, which has been happening in Ulster County, and they’re going over a road that’s a state highway or a county road?

Are we at risk of losing money?

CHAKRABARTI: So that was a state official, March Gallagher, comptroller of Ulster County, New York. I’d like to bring Holden Thorp into the conversation now. Holden is editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals and a professor of chemistry at George Washington University.

Professor Thorp, welcome to On Point.

HOLDEN THORP: Hi, great to be on with you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so give me, first of all, just your bottom line in terms of how this proposed rules change, if it goes through, could have an impact on the vast amounts of federal funding that goes to supporting scientific research in this country.

THORP: Yeah, I think it would have an enormous effect, and it would be many dimensions. The first would be that it would make it that much harder for grants to be dispersed once you’ve been through the arduous process of getting them approved by the agency. And the uncertainty that would add would make it very difficult to complete a lot of research projects, including things like clinical trials and biomedical research.

And that uncertainty, I think, would also make it less likely that the best researchers would want to stay in the United States and do their research. Because there are plenty of other places they could go where they wouldn’t have to deal with this. And then finally, I think one thing that the administration is not thinking about is that it’s not just Republican presidents that might enjoy this kind of power.

It’s a Democratic president in the future sometime, might really like to have the power to enforce their political agenda, which could cause a massive whiplash effect on the whole enterprise.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s interesting that you say that because Russell Vought and other members of the Trump administration have said repeatedly that they see this new OMB proposal as a correction to what they believe was essentially wasteful spending by, they call them unelected bureaucrats, but they’re saying essentially the left wing of the United States.

And in fact, scientific research under this administration has been a key target of that criticism. Basically, you’ve heard the president and others say that just millions if not tens of millions of dollars have gone to wasteful or frivolous or even discriminatory scientific research that’s not in the interest of all Americans, but a tiny sliver, for example, of Americans.

That this is where the DEI criticism keeps coming in.

THORP: Yeah. I think that they already, and I to me this is unfortunate, but they already have the ability by appointing the heads of the agencies to influence dramatically what grants get funded, and we’ve seen lots of grants canceled, not by the White House, but by the agencies that have been in areas of mostly important research that should be done, but which doesn’t fit with the ideology of the administration.

What this would do is go even further, which is yet another layer of political review beyond the political appointees that are at the agencies, and very importantly, the ability to cancel a grant in midstream, which is something that requires a lot of procedure within the agencies. And so the ability that OMB would have to cancel a grant in the middle would not only be quite wasteful because you’d lose the latter part of that research, but it would also be yet another way for the White House to control the ideology of grant-making.

CHAKRABARTI: Would you say, though, that the administration’s criticism of what it calls wasteful spending on again, what it believes is frivolous scientific research, is that a criticism without basis?

THORP: There are plenty of humans involved who make mistakes on various things, and so you can always find examples where there have been inappropriate use of the funds or things like that, and you can always find things that are politically maybe pretty far out there from what the center of America and certainly the administration would see.

But those are isolated examples. And what you give up by using sort of a hammer to, sledgehammer to stop that is the principle that has defined American progress for 80 years, which is that investing in basic research that you might not know the immediate payoff of is really important, because you never know what the innovators of the future are going to need.

And if you cut that off, then eventually you cut off the kinds of innovations that I think the administration really wants, and frankly, the ones that we’re enjoying now. There wouldn’t be any AI if basic scientists hadn’t been trying to understand things like large language models and machine learning in universities in a very speculative way for decades and decades before we got to this point.

CHAKRABARTI: Because when it comes to fundamental research, you can’t know what its utility might be in the future. That’s why it’s fundamental research. But, to be fair, you said that there are always bad decisions made by certain individuals.

Maybe certain grants shouldn’t have been approved. Your point is well taken, but I do wanna say that this concern that has been held by Republicans and conservatives in the United States about those bad, quote-unquote, “bad decisions,” it’s a long-standing concern. Like for example, I was just looking back at a report put out by Senator Tom Cotton’s office more than a decade ago that identified certain scientific grants in this wasteful category.

These might sound ridiculous, but these were real, that the NIH made grants for more than half a million dollars, this was, again, more than a decade ago, to study, quote, “the effects of meditation from reading Buddhist texts,” a $1.5 million grant to develop a smartphone game that would help parents of children with picky eating habits, $300,000 to provide Swedish massages to rabbits, and a $371,000 grant to study whether moms love dogs or their own children more.

And as both a mother of children and dogs, I can say my dog is my favorite very often, given the behavior of my children. But I’m not, I don’t wanna make light of this, but the point is that these examples do exist. And I would say, Professor Thorp, that in recent years, there has been a lot more perhaps justified criticism of even the peer review process as being politicized, fundamentally flawed, and allowing too many bad papers through.

So why not carry that same criticism over to peer review for scientific grants?

THORP: Yeah, I, again, I think that first of all, the examples you listed, some of those might be important research because we certainly know that things around your state of mind can affect your health. But of course, you can always pull out more.

And we’ve been we’ve been hearing these criticisms long before Tom Cotton’s criticism. This has been around for decades, as long as there’s been federal funding associated with grants. And there certainly are flaws in the peer review system. Because lots of papers that we have to correct or retract after the fact get through. But these are things that we manage on a case-by-case basis.

And to take the small number of examples of that and eradicate the whole system is a gross overreaction. And I think that it will, if it went through, it would cause multiple ripple effects, not just in terms of whether enough basic science gets done to feed the innovation machines of the future, but also who wants to participate in science when they could, for example, sign up for a project, think they have the funding to do it, and then a year or two into it, have the federal government say, “Oh, sorry, we didn’t really mean to fund this,” and that’s gone.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me a little bit more, again, from your perspective as the editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, so these are some of the most important journals in the global scientific world, about how are you already seeing sort of a shift in where researchers want to go or where new research is being done away from the United States due to these quite significant political battles going on over scientific research in this country?

THORP: Yes, we certainly are seeing a lot of people who can go to other countries. The investments being made by China are enormous, and they’re all going in a positive direction while we’re going backwards in the United States. So there are some high-profile folks who have made that move. Omar Yaghi, who’s a Nobel laureate at Berkeley, just decided to go to Tsinghua, for example.

And there are other people taking great offers to go do research elsewhere, and you can understand why. Because in the U.S., universities, because of these challenges, are sensibly cutting the size of their graduate programs. And the graduate students are the most important element of most research labs at universities in America.

And we’ve also now seen the dramatic limits on the people who can come here from other countries to study. It’s always been the case that perhaps the most important aspect of doing science in America is that we’ve always welcomed the best talent from everywhere. And when that starts to go in the wrong direction that means that it might be advantageous to build your group somewhere else.

And what worries me about that one is that even if some of these things get reversed in two and a half years or some other time in the future, once people have gotten out of the habit of starting with the idea of, I want to go to the U.S. to do my research, then that is going to be a very hard thing to reverse.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m seeing this quote here in Roll Call magazine from Jonathan Butcher, who’s at The Heritage Foundation. Of course, Russell Vought was also at The Heritage Foundation, and Project 2025 comes out of The Heritage Foundation. This is all of a giant piece in terms of a real political movement here.

But Jonathan Butcher is quoted as saying that he welcomes this overhaul of how grants are awarded in the United States for this specific reason. He says, quote, “I think the peer review process is deeply in need of reform, and I think steps to improve it and make it consistent with the priorities of the administration are valid.”

CHAKRABARTI: Now, I already asked you about peer review specifically, Professor Thorp, but this scrutiny is not going to go away. And I wonder it’s not entirely unjustified that the federal grant-making process, as any endeavor that’s as large as it is, can use some improvement. But what improvements would you make to it?

What reforms would you make to it that would continue to support fundamental scientific research in this country as it has been for the pas, 100 years?

THORP: Yeah, I think more political oversight is going to send it in the wrong direction because you’re not relying on people who have the scientific background to evaluate the scholarship to do that.

What I think we do need, and what we’re trying to do at Science, and I hope other people will do, is to take much greater responsibility for challenges and problems that emerge in the scientific literature after they have occurred. And there are a lot of incentives that have worked against this.

One is peer reviewers as you’re pointing out not doing a complete job, although we don’t really ask them to find misconduct when they’re doing their reviews, but the journals are missing these things. And there’s so much pressure for people to publish that they’re not doing as thorough a job as they should before they submit it.

But then after the fact, both the authors sometimes, the institutions quite frequently, and the journals sometimes yes, sometimes no, haven’t taken enough responsibility for the mistakes and errors that have gotten through. And I think it is legit to put pressure on the system to take greater ownership and responsibility for challenges and errors and even misconduct when it comes along.

And we’re paying the price for that now because that is part of the fuel that is being used by, in this case, this administration to make these, to try to make these changes. But again, I’d go back to if these rules are put in place and there’s an administration of a different ideology in place that wants to push even further to the left then that could happen just as well, and then when it swings again, we’d have to go through this whole thing all over again.

And so I just don’t see sort of political payback as the right solution. Because all it’s gonna do is swing back and forth over the course of history.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.