This post was originally published on Can We Still Govern?, and is reposted (edited with updates) with permission.

I recently attended a conference in which a Bosnian politician, Sabina Ćudić, described a problem she faces that also affects scientists. She said, “I think [many professionals] are… somewhat embarrassed that they’re in politics. And there is this kind of distance: I could be somewhere else, doing something smarter, I could be paid better. There is almost a resentment towards politics.”

We see that often in science, too. Politics is sometimes perceived by scientists as something for others to do, or something to avoid. But politics is how our society is run. Politics is peoples’ lives.

For many of us watching National Institutes of Health (NIH), we are seeing clearly how the decisions made by the Trump administration affect basic science, and how changes to science agencies affect our society and people’s lives.

Attacks on NIH began on day one

Starting Jan 21, 2025, the day after Inauguration Day, the National Institutes of Health was barred by the White House from posting notices to the Federal Register. It is hard to exaggerate the massive implications of this seemingly minor change: it blocked new grants from being awarded by preventing peer review panels from being scheduled.

This block was only one part of a larger effort to slow funds at NIH going out the door, as I described in another essay in April 2025. The White House plan seemed to be to use rescission to cut the NIH budget, bypassing the Congressional appropriations process. More actions that hampered the grant-making process followed, from reviews of banned words, mass firings, new paperwork justifications for many processes, and upfront funding requirements. The spending slowdown came to a head in July when OMB, led by Russell Vought, the Project 2025 co-lead, issued a memo that stopped NIH from making new grants. Vought then declined to deny plans to include NIH money in a future rescission package, seemingly confirming the goal to cut the NIH budget this way.

In the end, though, the rescission gambit failed. A bipartisan group of Senators urged the White House to allow NIH to spend its full budget, and OMB backed down. That highlights how powerful science can be to the public, and how applying pressure to our lawmakers can yield results. Congress has been unwilling or unable to restrain the Trump administration on many issues this year. But on science, especially on NIH and biomedical science, Congress has occasionally acted in a bipartisan way to push back.

Congress, not the President, should set scientific priorities

But the ban on postings to the Federal Register also reflects a new and more ominous trend. For 80 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. Major agency priorities were set in law, by Congress. From there, as the NIH scholar Natalie Aviles has described, the work of biomedical science support has been run largely by non-partisan civil servants working with external scientists.

For example, when Richard Nixon launched his War on Cancer in the early 1970’s, he announced this in a State of the Union address, and worked with Congress to pass this new priority into law. The same was true for Barack Obama and the BRAIN Initiative at NIH: it was announced in a State of the Union, then passed into law by Congress. Presidents can certainly weigh in, but a multi-year research agenda works best if priorities are set by broad bipartisan support and statute.

Now, things are different. NIH has been politicized and “presidentialized:” its operation and priorities have been increasingly dictated by the president and White House. As just one example, the Trump administration has decreed grant awards must be approved by presidential political appointees. White House or HHS review steps have been added throughout the agency, from review of contracts, review of formerly-perfunctory employee term renewals, review of travel, and even review of weekly money disbursements to grantees, a process that has always been handled by civil servants without presidential interference. Before 2025 there were only two political appointees at NIH, and even these, the NIH and National Cancer Institute directors, were accomplished, respected scientists, not political commissars.

Another critical part of NIH’s operation is the way the scientific community serves in an advisory role. External scientists fill rotating positions on committees: peer review panels, councils, and other advisory committees, which together have had enormous influence over the direction of NIH. This is as it should be. Doing top-notch science is extraordinarily hard—e.g., curing cancer or dementia is difficult. The people in the best position to choose innovative projects for funding, or how programs should be designed for maximum scientific impact, are trained scientists. The US has this scientific talent, and it has been deployed to help run NIH.

This system of governing NIH has worked exceptionally well. Having NIH run by civil servants informed by practicing, expert scientists has created over the past eight decades a “golden goose” of technological innovation. That’s now being wrecked, as independent scientific decision-making is subordinated to the political desires of the president.

NIH must return to independent scientific decision-making

The shift at NIH, from a system where Congress and statutory law set priorities to one where the president does, is a terrible thing for US science.

Most scientific projects are long-term efforts where people must be hired, equipment designed or purchased, and experiments done over several years. It’s not just science projects that take a long time to develop: talent does too. Individual scientists plan years ahead, as students choose whether to pursue PhDs and take on academic positions. Under this new presidential governance scheme, science priorities will swing back and forth with each new president. That instability is a sure way to break a scientific industry.

Fixing NIH will require returning the agency to its former, successful governance scheme, where Congress sets priorities, the agency carries them out, and political appointees of the president stay out of the way. This is also more democratic than presidential control. Congress, as the most democratic branch, represents the public’s priorities, and the US scientific community is engaged as advisors.

Reforms can be done within that framework, but an NIH governance scheme that preserves scientific independence is vital to US scientific success.

The new NIH budget bill is only partial comfort

In FY26 appropriations, Congress has slightly increased the NIH budget, in nominal dollars. That is good news compared to the proposed massive cuts in the President’s budget request. Some other budget bill provisions are also positive, for example avoiding cuts to research buildings and support (indirect costs).

However, all is not saved—in fact, there remain many reasons to worry. First, the bill does little to restrain the presidential transformation that is breaking NIH. The new NIH budget report contains non-binding language to restrain some of the Trump administration’s worst political moves. But what we have seen from this Project 2025 White House is a willingness to move right up to the line of what is written in law—and sometimes step over into brazen illegality. They may just ignore the report language. Indeed, it has already been reported that the White House is ignoring report language instructing NIH to use the longstanding institute director search committee process, including external expert advisors.

Meanwhile, one of the few provisions written in the law to restrain Trump, the multi-year funding provision, allows it at last year’s level—which saw success rates drop by 50%, a devastating cut for many labs. Reports are that this was important to the White House, suggesting they plan to intervene inside NIH further in future.

Finally, there is a reason to worry about even the rejection of budget cuts, which could be a political shield: a way for some Republicans to seem to avoid cutting biomedical research and cures, while allowing Vought and Trump to gut the agency from the inside via presidential control. We will need to be vigilant this year, and push back as hard as possible on the increasing politicization of science agencies.

Why haven’t more scientists acted in the last year?

There are two longstanding norms about the way scientists interact with the public that have hurt our ability to react in the Trump era.

The first norm is that scientists should not be engaged in politics at all. The science community has for decades embraced what some historians call the “social contract for science”—scientists would focus on producing knowledge while remaining relatively apolitical as an institution. The idea was that science’s authority and public trust depended on its perceived objectivity and distance from partisan concerns. This framing dates at least to Vannevar Bush’s ideas for building a US science ecosystem, which heavily inspired the structure of US science after World War II.

But staying out of politics and the public sphere is untenable in the current moment, and not because of what scientists have done.

Despite loud voices on the right claiming that scientists have politicized science, the opposite is true. As with climate change and asbestos before it, powerful and wealthy interests found biomedical science, during COVID, opposed to their partisan agenda. So they ran the so-called “Merchants of Doubt” strategy: they found scientists who would criticize biomedical science and NIH, and elevated them. Such junk scientists, from Scott Atlas to Jay Bhattacharta, were given high-profile platforms on billionaire-owned news networks, and given awards from billionaire-funded think tanks.

It was primarily billionaires, acting through merchants of doubt they boosted, that “politicized” science and NIH.

Biomedical scientists should have learned from the assault on climate science. But given where we are now, we cannot return to the old way of trying to ignore power and politics—if we do that, scientists will just be run over and US science will continue to collapse. We have to find ways to fight for science. When people who know the most about a segment of society disengage from politics, that simply gives an opportunity for the wealthy to remake that part of society in their image.

The second norm is that biomedical scientists and NIH should not speak to the public. This is related to the idea that political advocacy should only be done in the halls of Congress, if it is to be done at all. Mary Lasker, a powerful advocate for NIH and biomedical research for nearly 30 years, was the clearest leader of this explicitly elite-to-elite advocacy model. Lasker “built a powerful lobby that won large research appropriations” through direct relationships with key members of Congress.

This advocacy model, acting primarily inside the halls of Congress, too, must change. Scientists must speak to the public about what is at stake—not just about their own science, but about the value of publicly-funded science to all, and why politics affects science.

Some of NIH’s low profile in the public sphere is because of Congress’ desire to discourage agency public relations efforts. But scientists should urge our institutions to talk up the role of government. I was at an event a year or two ago held by a major NIH grant recipient known to have received hundreds of millions from NIH. The event had a professionally-produced PR presentation, celebrating all the major scientific advances made and the amazing work done, but I heard NIH mentioned exactly zero times.

Too many people I talk to know about wonderful university research in biology, but associate that with the university: e.g., they know about Harvard research but don’t know that it’s NIH money, public money, behind it. We can speak up and change that: tell people how important the government is to science and disease cures.

Billionaires won’t replace public funding for science

As NIH and US science this year has been devastated, some have looked to billionaire philanthropy to fill the gaps. That’s a dangerous source of funding to depend on. NIH funding is a democratic way to support science. Public funding through agencies relies on direct democratic accountability through Congress, and spreads money to many different investigators.

Applying for NIH funds is a competition where great ideas win. The peer review system is not perfect, but it has done a good job allocating funds for basic research. The worst schmoozer in the room at a cocktail party might write the best grant. We don’t want to rely only on funding models that reward those who are good at flashy sales pitches; we want a stable funding system supporting a broad workforce of many scientists with many ideas. Sustained, strong science, as with all public goods, requires government investment if it is to deliver long-term societal benefit.

Democratic systems of allocating public money have created a robust scientific research system in America. Shifting to a system where a few rich people choose the science they want seems destined to end in disaster.

Fixing science means we all must fight together

The lesson for scientists, as with other attacks on science, is to confront the challenge, not back down. A fight is needed. Institutions must be strengthened. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the American Medical Association’s Department of Investigation published information to protect the public from health fraud and quackery. Similar initiatives to identify junk science can come out of scientific and medical groups today: scientists and doctors will have to continue to organize with each other and stand up for the public benefit.

We will also need to find ways to support journalism that stands explicitly for public health. Media and social media groups like The Evidence Collective are doing heroic work reaching the public, but have had trouble finding sustainable business models.

The collapse of the US journalism industry in the past 25 years has been part of the collapse in social trust which has undermined trust in science. It is an urgent need for us to figure out how to boost and sustain real journalism that stands up for science and evidence. There has been progress, but Trump administration policies defunding public media have made the problems worse. In the past in America, journalism outlets have been funded by political parties, unions, and even public dollars. Today social media changes the landscape, but not our core needs for trust and truth. Scientists need to join the fight to improve news and information too.

Although most existing institutions have done relatively little to push back, there are many reasons to hope. At NIH, a group of federal workers issued the Bethesda Declaration, working together to share their concerns about what was happening inside the agency. Recently, several brain medical research groups, from the American College of Psychopharmacology to the American Academy of Neurology, issued strong statements in support of the Trump administration’s removal of NINDS Director Walter Koroshetz. Stand Up For Science and Defending Public Health are leading scientists and allies in new kinds of fight.

Also, scientists are beginning to get organized on a person-to-person basis. Groups of scientists are working on better communication and sharing information about politics and policy. But much more will need to be done. Just as realtors and car dealers invest time and money in influencing politics, scientists will need to get involved in politics—that is, the core and important issues of how societies function—at least until a stable liberal democracy returns to the United States.

The value of free speech is in its use

One thing I hear from scientists across the country is that they are afraid to speak out. They are afraid of the Trump administration retaliating against them or their university, weaponizing the grant system to punish their speech.

That is a horrible development. One of the most important principles of the American constitutional order is freedom of speech. The Trump administration has launched an unprecedented war on free speech, and we must defend it. In a democracy, people should be free to criticize their government and speak about matters of importance without fear of retaliation. We should work hard to protect scientists and universities that are speaking out for liberal democracy and academic freedom.

What has not been widely discussed in recent years is that government employees are protected by the First Amendment when they speak on matters of public concern. In the landmark 1968 case Pickering v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 majority decision that a public school teacher could not be fired for writing a letter to a newspaper criticizing how his school allocated funds.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing for the Court, declared that “the public interest in having free and unhindered debate on matters of public importance [is] the core value of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment,” and that speech by public servants is protected. Public servants are “the members of a community most likely to have informed opinions” on the operation of government and “accordingly, it is essential that they be able to speak out freely on such questions without fear of retaliatory dismissal.”

That means that government employees, subject to some conditions, have the right to speak about matters of public concern, and that their deep knowledge of those programs has special value to inform public opinion.

But it is not just public employees who should be able to speak out about matters of public concern without fear of retaliation. Too many American citizens and institutions—law firms, university faculty, scientists, even news outlets—this year have been afraid to talk about what is going on with the collapse of American democracy. Let’s find ways to speak out together: the more people who speak out together, the stronger we all are.

What can scientists and the public do?

Science and academia help to define what constitutes credible evidence in a society. This is one reason why authoritarians come after both science and academia.

Public funding has built in the US the greatest science superpower the world has ever known. Freedom of speech, pluralism, freedom of and from religion, integration of talent from around the world, separation of church and state, equality, rule of law: these are all principles that are part of the recipe for successful science. Scientists should not be political partisans, but they should be partisans for liberal democratic principles. And if political parties sort themselves based on those values, that shouldn’t stop us from describing the situation accurately.

Harnessing the power that scientists have is going to require working together and engaging. Find like-minded people near you, meet with them regularly, talk about these issues. Take actions, first small, then larger. Stand up for science and for democracy. We will win if we do that.

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