On the dismantling of peer review and the U.S science grant process
The SciSchmooze
Kishore Hari
21 September 2026
Greetings, science fans!
President Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to draft an executive order creating a new board to decide which NIH grants get funded. The proposed board would include OMB Director Russ Vought and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, with unanimous approval required for each award. That means White House political appointees would have direct control over which science gets done with NIH’s $48 billion budget.
The NIH peer review system was built on the idea that scientists outside the government would review grant applications, keeping political priorities from overriding scientific ones. The Public Health Service Act of 1944 put this in law. By 1955, a formal two-tiered review process was in place, with panels of external scientists evaluating applications strictly on scientific merit: how important is the question, how sound is the approach, and how qualified are the investigators. NIH’s first grants director stated the founding principle in 1945, and it hasn’t gotten less true since: the grants program should be a program of scientists and by scientists, preserving the researcher’s independence from control, direction, and outside interference.
The system isn’t perfect. But what it produced is the American biomedical research enterprise, the most productive in the world, with breakthroughs in cancer, infectious disease, neuroscience, and genetics that have saved millions of lives. If political priorities replace scientific judgment in funding decisions, it breaks the system.
This isn’t a new story. Since taking office, the administration has delayed funding, killed grants on politically sensitive topics, and imposed blanket freezes on universities. Nearly 2,500 grants worth $4.9 billion have been terminated, along with at least 150 clinical trials, including trials on HIV vaccines, ovarian cancer, and diabetes. NIH’s workforce shrank by 22% through reductions in force, buyouts, and retirements. Current and former NIH staff have documented a series of changes to peer review that reduce the rigor and fairness of funding decisions in ways that will compound over time. The proposed FY2027 NIH budget cuts a further 12% on top of all of that.
A Science magazine analysis published in January found that more than 10,000 STEM PhD-holders left the federal government in 2025 alone, three times the departure rate of the last year of the Biden administration. Across 14 agencies, departures outpaced new hires 11 to 1, erasing a net 4,224 STEM PhDs and more than 106,000 years of accumulated federal science experience. At NSF, PhDs had made up 40% of the workforce before the administration took over. At NIH alone, more than 1,100 PhD-level scientists resigned in 2025. Most left voluntarily. Three-quarters of scientists surveyed say they’ve considered leaving the country. Universities are pausing hiring and cutting PhD admissions.
The peer review system took eighty years to build. The people leaving now took decades to train. These aren’t abstract losses. They’re the people who would have found the next cancer treatment, caught the next pandemic early, figured out the next climate solution. Staying engaged in science right now, staying curious, showing up and supporting the people and institutions doing this work, matters more than it perhaps ever has.
-Kishore
My picks for the week:
- The Psychology of Decision-Making: Why Choosing Feels So Hard (Monday, September 21, The New Parkway Theater, Oakland)
- Wonderfest: Neural Synchrony (Tuesday, September 22, Hopmonk Tavern, Novato)
- Salt Marsh Walk for National Public Lands Day (Saturday, September 26, Don Edwards Refuge, Fremont)
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