By Sam Halpern, M.D.
I have spent my working life in medicine as a clinician and a medical scientist. I have watched with awe as basic and applied medical science placed new and effective tools in the hands of physicians to diagnose and treat diseases that were once a death sentence.
The progress we have made in medical research has only been possible because the American people supported a commitment to long-term funding and scrupulous attention to awarding funds to research judged by the scientific community to be the most promising and well-conceived among competitive proposals. Who a scientist voted for in an election, or whose political priorities they supported, never entered into the question of whether a grant proposal merited funding.
But on July 13, 2026, I was stunned to see a headline in the Los Angeles Times: “WARNING AGAINST POLITICS IN RESEARCH FUNDING,” by Corinne Purtill.
The article states that a new rule, proposed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, has the potential to overhaul the way federal grants are awarded and overseen. One scientific society has said that it would “all but end the use of scientific merit in the selection of grants and programs across the government.”
The new rule will give political appointees control over federal grants for scientific research, education and infrastructure and specifies that government funds can be spent only on projects “aligned with administration policies and priorities.” That shocked me! I had never heard of this proposal, and it has been around since May!
This rule will be devastating for scientific progress. Progress in science is based, above all else, on truth, creativity, persistence, and hard work. It is accomplished by standing on the shoulders of the scientists who have come before any individual researcher. The object of doing science is to continue the process that leads to further knowledge.
Sometimes, the research a scientist does is very basic; that is, it has no specific goal other than furthering knowledge. An example of this would be research that led to the Polymerase Chain Reaction that allows for replication of DNA. This eventually led to remarkable goal-directed studies that advanced our ability to diagnose and treat diseases. In short, non-goal-directed research, while it might not seem worth putting effort into, is critical for future goal-directed studies!
The careful and persistent pursuit of answers to questions that arise in either basic or applied science has led to discoveries that have extended our lives, opened up entirely new fields of commerce, and placed American research institutions and their scientists at the leading edge of scientific discovery among competitors the world over.
But the progress that we have enjoyed as individuals and as a nation from disciplined scientific discovery is already at risk due to the recent rescission, for political reasons, of federal funding at public and private research institutions, forcing the firing of research staffs, the closing of labs, the termination of experiments that were years in the making, and recently, the loss of scientists to other countries who will now make use of their innovation and effort.
It takes money to do scientific research. Money for the research personnel doing the work. Money for the scientific instruments and supplies necessary to do the work. Money that can be counted on for the duration of an experiment. There is a limited supply of money made available by the federal government for public and private institutions to do research. Until now, it has been apportioned by scientists in the various fields. Those doing research must write grants that compete with grants from other scientists for these research funds. Deciding which grant proposals get funded has been determined by “peer review,” a process in which scientific experts in a particular field, closely examine each proposal and assign it a priority score.
I was involved in federally funded research during my career in medicine, and of course, I had to apply for grants. Sometimes I got them, sometimes I didn’t. The one thing I knew for certain was that my grants were adjudicated fairly. When I didn’t get funded, I would receive an explanation of my proposal’s shortcomings. That information allowed me to address the problems with the grant and apply again for support. Meantime, the researchers who did receive an award proceeded with their work, adding to the body of knowledge that ultimately would be shared by all of us in the field.
I was also a member of scientific panels adjudicating research grants for both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Veterans Administration (VA). Selection of the grants to be funded was done with great care. Each proposal was reviewed by multiple researchers (usually three) who gave their view of the proposals to perhaps 15 to 20 other scientists who were gathered to adjudicate the grants. An algorithm was established that allowed the grant submissions to be listed in order of their qualifications for funding. There was only so much money available, and I often felt badly that some very worthy proposals were not funded, but that was the system in which we worked, and we did so as honestly as we possibly could.
The new rule proposing to subject the process of grant allocation to political priorities of the Executive Branch will result in a disaster if it is instituted, not only for the scientists who are attempting to acquire funding, but for all Americans. And, since science is played out on a world stage, it will also be felt by our fellow humans across the globe.
Perhaps Americans have not fully understood what it takes to produce ground-breaking treatments that extend the lives of cancer patients, or ways to make the sun or the wind produce energy, or to restore contaminated water to a potable resource. It takes creative minds, disciplined work, and a willingness to subject one’s creative ideas to the critique of qualified experts in the field.
We could lose the edge that generations of scientists have worked so hard to give us. If you care about stopping this new rule, write your congress persons and tell them to STAND UP FOR SCIENCE!
Sam Halpern, M.D. is a resident of Point Loma.
Thank you for bringing this to the public’s attention, Sam.
As a research scientist at UCSD who has been on and submitted many NIH-funded grants, the OMB rule change will, as you point out, be devastating for the scientific enterprise in the US. I’d also add that it will prevent us from presenting our research findings at biomedical conferences, publishing our work in peer-reviewed journals, or collaborating with overseas colleagues. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former NIH program officer, has written extensively about the OMB rule on her Substack.
However, beyond US science, it will also permit the government to rescind other federal grants (e.g., infrastructure, education, housing assistance) to communities, such as ours, because a political appointee determines that it doesn’t “serve the national interest,” which is never defined in the new rule. The rule will allow this to happen mid-grant, so in theory (and likely soon, in practice), if a Trump appointee decides that a San Diego/OB/Point Loma project to improve, say, our water/sewer infrastructure or to develop an early childhood education program is not of “national interest,” they can simply cut funding, no questions asked.
There are many things that have “made America great,” and to me, our national commitment to supporting biomedical research and improving public health is one of them, so it is very sad to see the “own goal” that we’re making here.