A White House proposal would hand political appointees veto power over federally funded research. It arrives after a two-year campaign to strip climate data from public websites, cancel billions in health grants, and drive a generation of American scientists overseas. The bill for what is being lost will come due decades from now — long after the men who signed the orders are gone.
On July 27, ProPublica reporter Lisa Song published a story that should have been the loudest alarm bell of the summer. She described a proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget — the little-known White House office run by Russell Vought — that would place political appointees in control of the federal science grants that built the American century. Buried inside her reporting was a warning from David W. Miller, a University of Chicago physicist who helped discover the Higgs boson. If this rule had existed in the years leading up to 2012, Miller wrote in a public comment to the federal government, the “God particle” would have been discovered without American scientists in the room. “The United States will not just fall behind,” he warned. “It will step aside.”
That is not hyperbole. It is a description of policy as written. And it is the culmination of a two-and-a-half-year effort — the most sustained assault on American scientific institutions in the modern history of the presidency — that has already terminated more than 7,800 research grants, driven roughly 25,000 scientists out of federal agencies, deleted five successive National Climate Assessments from public websites, and set in motion a brain drain that is quietly rewriting the geography of world science. The people making these decisions are not scientists. Many of them are not qualified, by any conventional definition, to review a middle-school science-fair project. And under the OMB’s proposed rule, they would decide which cancer trials continue, which particle physics experiments the United States joins, and which findings the American people are permitted to read.
What we are watching is not budget discipline. It is not “accountability.” It is the deliberate, ideological demolition of the scientific enterprise that made this country wealthy, healthy, and — for eighty years — the country everyone else wanted to move to.
I. The Rule That Ends the Peer Review
The proposed rule, published in the Federal Register on May 29, 2026, is titled — with the bureaucratic blandness that has become the administration’s preferred camouflage — the “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.” Its author, OMB Director Russell Vought, has been described by ProPublica as the “shadow president,” and the description is not partisan hyperbole. Vought has spent the last two years dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, blocking funds Congress had already appropriated, and canceling 284 Department of Energy grants that an agency lawyer later admitted in federal court had been terminated “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state” — meaning, in plain English, that they were canceled because the recipients lived in blue states.
The new rule would formalize what Vought has been doing informally. It would give political appointees across dozens of federal agencies — appointees who, as ProPublica notes, “don’t have to know anything about science or the subjects of the grants they’re reviewing” — the power to award, alter, and terminate research funding at will. It would restrict international collaboration on “covered” countries, though the administration has refused to say which countries those are. And it would apply to hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants: food stamps, housing, small business loans, museums, domestic violence programs, and the entire American basic-research pipeline.
Nearly 500,000 public comments have been filed. The attorneys general of 22 states filed a joint objection. Even Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine sent a letter asking Vought to withdraw the parts of the rule that would “unduly burden scientific and biomedical research” and undermine the awarding of grants “based on scientific merit and value, rather than political ideology.” Vought’s office wants the rule to take effect on October 1.
“This proposed rule dismantles that principle entirely, and it does so in ways that will cause immediate, concrete, and in many cases irreversible harm to American science.”
— David W. Miller, University of Chicago physicist, public comment to OMB
Miller’s phrasing matters. The word he used was irreversible. Federal science does not work like turning off a light. A physics experiment that leaves the United States does not come back the next election cycle. A cancer trial shut down in year three of a five-year grant does not resume where it left off; the patients have moved on, or died. A generation of postdoctoral researchers who watch their advisors get their funding pulled, their labs closed, and their public statements policed does not simply reappear when the political weather changes. Some things, once broken, stay broken.
II. An Anatomy of the Attack
The OMB rule is the capstone of a campaign that began the day Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term. The scale is easier to grasp when the individual actions are laid out beside each other.
Cut from National Institutes of Health research funding in the first three months of 2026 alone, according to a report from Sen. Bernie Sanders’s HELP Committee minority staff. Cancer research funding fell 31% year-over-year. Sanders/HELP Committee report.
Federal research grants wiped out since January 2025, disproportionately targeting research on vaccines, infectious disease, health disparities, and misinformation. Futurism analysis of science policy data.
Federal scientists severed from the government workforce across NIH, EPA, NOAA, USDA, and other agencies in the first eighteen months of the second Trump term. Reported science policy forecasts.
The administration’s FY 2026 budget proposal sought a 22% cut across all federal science agencies — including a 57% cut to the National Science Foundation and roughly a 40% cut to NIH. Congress rebuffed most of it. Brennan Center for Justice.
Department of Energy grants Vought’s OMB canceled last year — terminations that an agency lawyer admitted in court records were “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” ProPublica investigation.
Share of American scientists a Nature poll found were considering leaving the country in early 2026. Nearly 2,000 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have signed a warning letter. Rolling Stone reporting.
Two independent legal firewalls have blunted the worst of it. Federal courts have ordered thousands of terminated grants restored, and Congress — with rare bipartisan agreement — rejected the administration’s proposed 40% NIH cut and instead raised the NIH budget for 2026 by $415 million. But as NPR reported this spring, watchdogs say the administration has simply moved on to withholding, delaying, and slow-walking funds it can no longer legally cancel outright. The proposed OMB rule is the next front: rather than cut the science budget through Congress, the White House would seize the discretion to decide which grants get awarded — and which get killed — one by one.
III. The Vanishing Record
Cuts are only half the story. The other half is disappearance. Since Trump’s second inauguration, federal agencies have been quietly deleting the scientific evidence itself.
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The pattern is not incidental. It is the point. As the Center for Open Science warned when the Gold Standard executive order was signed, the policy has “no standards for non-scientific information” — meaning the administration retains the freedom to act on whatever ideological claim it wishes, while forcing federal scientists to defend every published finding to political appointees who may not have taken a college science course. Public Environmental Data Partners and the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative have spent the last eighteen months in an emergency archiving operation, downloading federal datasets before they vanish. They have become, in effect, the shadow national library of a country that is erasing its own scientific memory.
“It tells every scientist in America: your funding is safe only as long as your work, your institution, or your public statements remain acceptable to the current administration.”
— David W. Miller, on the OMB rule as a “tool for political coercion”
IV. The Brain Drain, and Who Is Waiting
Every country on earth understands what is happening. Some of them are making offers.
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Australia have all launched programs specifically designed to lure American scientists abroad. The Vrije Universiteit Brussel opened a dedicated contact point for U.S. researchers looking to relocate. The Australian government publicly announced it wanted the “smartest minds” being pushed out by American research cuts. Senior scientists have already begun to leave: in April 2025, Yi Shouliang, a senior scientist at the Department of Energy, moved to China. Dozens of researchers relocated from American universities to France after Aix-Marseille University’s high-profile recruiting drive. Faculty from Harvard, Dartmouth, and Cornell have taken positions at Australian universities. The Nature Index — the most authoritative measure of which countries are producing the world’s high-quality research — reported in mid-2025 that the United States is losing ground to China so quickly that Ohio State science-policy researcher Caroline Wagner called it “a national crisis.”
China, meanwhile, has done the obvious thing. It announced a 10% increase in central-government science and technology spending, with a specific focus on basic research — exactly the kind of blue-sky, no-immediate-payoff science that gave the United States the transistor, GPS, the internet, and mRNA vaccines. As MIT’s former president L. Rafael Reif has written, Chinese political leaders — many of them Tsinghua University graduates — understand what U.S. leaders once understood and now appear to have forgotten: that dominance in the world economy is built on universities, on peer review, on immigrants, and on the willingness to spend public money on questions whose answers may not arrive for a generation.
Trump’s response has been to impose a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas — the primary way American tech and research firms hire foreign talent. It is, functionally, a wall around the American scientific enterprise. Except the wall is being built to keep talent out, not to hold it in.
V. What the Ordinary American Loses
The abstraction of “federal science grants” obscures what is actually at stake, so let us be specific.
Cancer research funding fell 31% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Senate HELP Committee minority report. That is not a paper cut. That is thousands of trials — for pancreatic, pediatric, and breast cancers — losing their next round of funding. It is the delay of the drugs your parents, or your children, will need in ten years. It is fewer immunotherapies, fewer diagnostics, fewer breakthroughs that will exist somewhere else in the world, at prices Americans cannot easily reach.
The National Science Foundation, which the administration proposed cutting by 57%, funds the basic physics, chemistry, materials science, and computer science that becomes the manufacturing, the batteries, the semiconductors, and the software that everything else runs on. Federal research is why the United States led the world in mRNA vaccines during COVID-19. It is why American universities produced Google, why American labs produced GPS, why the World Wide Web was born in the laboratory of a physicist collaborating with the Americans at CERN. The engineer who pioneered the touch screen in the 1970s was building particle-physics instrumentation. As David Miller told ProPublica, quoting his own point about basic research: “I guarantee you that Einstein wasn’t thinking about your ability to find Starbucks this morning when he wrote down the special theory of relativity.”
The energy transition — batteries, next-generation grid, small modular reactors, geothermal, solar — is fundamentally a science problem. Vought’s canceled 284 Department of Energy grants were the seed corn. Manufacturing revitalization depends on the exact NSF and DOE programs the administration is starving. And the health of ordinary Americans depends on data — on the National Climate Assessments telling communities which floods to prepare for, on CDC health-disparities pages telling clinicians which populations are dying preventable deaths, on NOAA telling insurance companies where the hurricanes are going. When the data is deleted, the decisions are still made — just without evidence.
This is what “America First” means in practice: an America that arrives second at every discovery that determines who gets rich, who gets healthy, and who gets to write the technical standards of the next century.
VI. The Debt Our Children Will Inherit
Republicans have spent decades talking about the fiscal debt we are leaving to future generations. It is a real concern, and a fair one. But there is another kind of debt being run up on their watch, and it is far less recoverable.
The Congressional Budget Office metric cited by the Brennan Center suggests that the administration’s proposed $44 billion cut in science funding — if it had gone through — would have translated into a reduction of roughly half a trillion dollars in future economic activity. A study from American University estimated that a 25% cut to public research and development would depress American economic output for decades. This is not a philosophical claim. It is the arithmetic of what fundamental research does: every dollar spent on basic science returns multiples in downstream applications, patents, companies, jobs, and tax revenue — but on delays of ten, twenty, sometimes fifty years. The children now in kindergarten will not receive the medical breakthroughs, the manufacturing jobs, or the technological advantages that would have existed if the current administration had simply continued doing what every administration since Truman has done: fund science, and get out of the way.
That is the scientific debt. It is invisible on any balance sheet. It compounds silently. And unlike fiscal debt, it cannot be paid down by taxing the wealthy or reducing spending later. Once a discovery is made in Beijing rather than Chicago, or in Marseille rather than Madison, that fact is permanent. The patent is Chinese. The talent stays in France. The Nobel Prize is awarded in a country whose government took its scientists seriously.
The 25th Amendment and the Test of Presidential Fitness
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967 after the assassination of President Kennedy, provides the constitutional mechanism for removing a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Under Section 4, the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet may declare the president unfit; if the president contests the finding, Congress decides by a two-thirds vote of both chambers. The amendment was drafted with medical incapacity in mind — but its authors were explicit that “inability” was not limited to coma or catastrophic illness. It included the sustained impairment of judgment.
The systematic destruction of the American scientific enterprise now underway is not, in the ordinary sense of the word, a symptom of illness. But it is the exact kind of policy record — reckless in scope, contrary to the plainly stated economic and security interests of the United States, sustained despite bipartisan warnings from within the president’s own party — that the amendment was designed to address when the officers of the executive branch cannot or will not correct it themselves. And it is arriving at a moment when the president’s own physical and cognitive fitness is under formal scrutiny.
The lawmakers already on record
On April 10, 2026, House Judiciary Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) demanded a comprehensive cognitive evaluation of the president, citing statements he called “increasingly volatile, incoherent, and alarming.” Four days earlier, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) had called on Vice President JD Vance and the Cabinet to invoke Section 4 immediately. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), and Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) have all publicly joined the call. On April 30, 2026, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed (both D-R.I.) formally entered into the Congressional Record a letter from thirty-six physicians warning of “rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline.” On April 14, Raskin introduced legislation to establish a bipartisan, independent commission to evaluate presidential fitness under Section 4.
The scientific case, in constitutional terms
The argument advanced by these lawmakers rests on a simple constitutional principle: a president whose decisions systematically and predictably damage the vital interests of the United States — its economy, its national security, its scientific and technological base — has failed the “inability to discharge” test. Deleting the National Climate Assessment does not defend the country. Firing 25,000 federal scientists does not strengthen the economy. Handing peer review to political appointees does not “restore” scientific integrity. Losing the next Higgs boson, the next mRNA vaccine, the next semiconductor breakthrough to Beijing does not advance any conceivable American interest.
The barriers, honestly stated
The path is unquestionably hard. Section 4 requires the participation of Vice President Vance and a majority of Trump’s own Cabinet — officials who owe their positions to the president they would be removing. No president has ever been removed under the 25th Amendment. A February 2026 Reuters-Ipsos poll found that a majority of Americans, including 30% of Republicans, describe the president as having become “erratic,” but public opinion is not the trigger; the Cabinet is.
Those barriers are real. They do not erase the constitutional case. The 25th Amendment does not exist to be used only when it is politically convenient. It exists to be used when the country is being harmed and the machinery of correction has failed. Congress’s role — through Raskin’s proposed independent commission — is to build the institutional infrastructure so that future presidents cannot count on Cabinet loyalty to shield them from the amendment’s plain text. The moral and legal case is being made now, even if the political vote is not yet in reach.
VII. What This Says About Priorities
Every administration reveals its priorities not by what it says, but by what it destroys.
This administration has destroyed the Department of Government Efficiency’s stated purpose by using it to fire the scientists who were saving the government money by preventing disease outbreaks. It has destroyed USAID, which projected soft power at bargain-basement cost. It has destroyed the National Climate Assessment, which insurance companies used to price risk. It has destroyed research grants to the states that voted against it. It has destroyed the peer review process that made every ordinary American healthier, safer, and more prosperous than the ordinary citizen of any other country on earth. What it has built, in return, is a bureaucratic mechanism for one man’s political appointees to control what a nation of scientists is permitted to discover.
The kindest interpretation is that the president does not understand what he is doing. The Raskin letter, and the thirty-six physicians who submitted their warning into the Congressional Record, argue that this kindest interpretation is also a serious constitutional problem. A less kind interpretation is that he understands it perfectly. Either way, the outcome for the country is the same, and the constitutional response — the honest, adult, non-partisan response — is the same.
Editorial Conclusion
The rule proposed by the Office of Management and Budget is not a technical adjustment to the federal grants process. It is a mechanism for the political control of American discovery — the last remaining institutional advantage this country has over its geopolitical rivals. It arrives at the end of a two-year campaign to strip data from public websites, cancel grants for partisan reasons, and drive a generation of American scientists overseas. It is being pushed by an administration whose own president’s fitness is now under formal question from lawmakers in both parties and thirty-six physicians on the Congressional Record.
What is at stake is not one budget cycle, or one election. What is at stake is whether the American century ends in October — quietly, in a Federal Register notice — or whether the Congress, the courts, the Cabinet, and the constitutional mechanisms that exist for exactly this kind of moment are used, at last, for the purpose the framers of the 25th Amendment intended. The scientific debt cannot be paid down later. There is no later. There is only now, and the choice is ours.
Sources & References
- ProPublica — How Trump’s “America First” Administration Could Shut U.S. Scientists Out of the Next Nobel-Worthy Discovery (Lisa Song, July 27, 2026)
- Federal Register — Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance (proposed OMB rule)
- ProPublica — The Shadow President: Russell Vought and the OMB
- Brennan Center for Justice — The Cost of the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Research Funding
- Sen. Bernie Sanders / HELP Committee — Trump administration cut $2.7 billion in NIH research funding through March
- NBC News — Trump tried to gut science research funding. Courts and Congress have rebuffed him.
- STAT News — Survey: NIH cuts push labs to brink, hit early-career scientists hard
- NPR — The Trump administration is finding new ways to withhold federal funding for science
- Nature — US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains
- Nature Index — United States losing ground as China’s lead expands rapidly
- Science (AAAS) — Final funding bill for NIH pushes back against Trump cuts
- Science (AAAS) — What does Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ really mean?
- STAT News — Executive order ‘restoring gold standard science’ threatens research
- National Security Archive — Disappearing Data: Trump Administration Removing Climate Information
- NPR — Far more environmental data is being deleted in Trump’s second term
- E&E News / POLITICO — All the climate info that disappeared under Trump — and how it’s being saved
- Futurism — China Is Rapidly Overtaking the United States as the World’s Scientific Superpower
- L. Rafael Reif / MIT — America’s Coming Brain Drain: Trump’s War on Universities
- Rolling Stone / Yahoo — Brain Drain: Scientists Are Fleeing the U.S. as Trump Cuts Funding
- House Judiciary Democrats — Ranking Member Raskin demands cognitive evaluation of President Trump
- Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi — Krishnamoorthi Calls for President Trump’s Removal Under 25th Amendment
- The Hill — Concerns Grow Over Trump’s Mental Fitness for Presidency
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