The Creep of Politicization

A new assault on science highlights a broader pattern

OMB Director Russ Vought testifying to the Senate

The White House proposed new policies governing the federal funding of American science. You’ve already heard about the funding cuts, de facto impoundments of funds, funding freezes to disfavored universities, and cancelation of grants that include the long list of the Trump’s forbidden words.

So how much worse can the new policy be? Scientists are using apocalyptic terms, like “the end of American science as we know it.”

I think the level of alarm is appropriate, but I also want to place it into a broader context. Instinctively, scientists know this policy is not a stand-alone, but the ratcheting of the vice-grips of politicization. Trump has assembled five distinct tactics of politicization that are now starting to work in tandem with one another.

As Trump’s politicization tactics operate together, they begin to generate more interactive effects, reinforcing one another. The creep of politicization seeps into every office and decision, choking any views other than those of Trump and his army of loyalists.

Politicization can mean different things. The classic pre-Trump and mostly bipartisan Presidential tactics of politicization are:

Tactic #1: Centralization of policymaking into the White House, moving power from agencies

Tactic #2: Strategic use of political appointees, moving power away from distrusted career employees

Trump has developed new modes of politicization by adding three tactics:

Tactic #3: Building a personalist regime centered on loyalty to a single person.

Tactic #4: Governing by fear via conspiratorial messaging and threat.

Tactic #5: Weakening the protections of civil servants to effectively make them at will employees.

The nature and the scale of these tactics is really without parallel in US history, even in the spoils era. In the spoils era there was real and endemic corruption. That is occurring now, but in a more damaging and extractive way, disproportionately favoring an inner circle looking to get rich(er), not just the loyal partyman looking for a job.

The US government is also doing a lot more now than it was in the spoils era. Science is a good example. The current US scientific empire is the result of the post World War II set of arrangements that Trump and Vought are now seeking to control and corrupt for their own ends.

Whats in the new politicization of science policy?

Elizabeth Ginexi, leveraging her expertise as a former National Institutes of Health official, offers an excellent detailed breakdown of the new policy.

The bottom line is that Russ Vought, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, wants to move scientific decisions away from the scientists and into the hands of political appointees. I don’t mean the big picture, strategic decisions of American science, which should be political, but the micro-decisions about what is and is not good research.

Trump’s attacks on science have been hampered by frequent court losses. Once the new rule is in place, it becomes much harder to challenge the blocking of grants by the administration. Think of the new rule as a giant license justifying the use of arbitrary and political cancellations of grants, a license that makes it easier for the federal government to bring civil society — universities, nonprofits, and local governments — to heel. Think of it also as a two-branch power grab: courts will have less ability to intervene when the administration effectively impounds funds that Congress has appropriated.

Under the new policy, political appointees determine which grants should be funded, and can cancel them whenever they want. Grants cannot “promote anti-American values” and can be terminated if they are not determined to meet “the public interest” — ambiguous and broad standards that Trump and Vought determine. Grants must meet partisan litmus tests like “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities” but political identity can also be used in punitive ways: a scientist’s ties to disfavored groups can be used as a basis for cancelling grants. The policy advertises that OMB “may consider an applicant's history of questionable practices based on publicly available and verifiable information.”

Using federal funding to attend scientific conferences, engage with non-US scientists, or communicate to the public or media is actively discouraged.

The policy extends beyond science and scientific agencies to any any agency providing a grant and to non-scientific grantees like nonprofits and local governments. We’ve already seen this administration impound funds during the shutdown and using fraud allegations in clearly partisan ways, targeting blue states. Expect more of the same if the new rule takes hold.

By discouraging the use of indirect costs (“all else being equal, preference for discretionary awards should be given to institutions with lower indirect cost rate”), Vought not just seeks to backdoor a policy that Congress blocked, he also makes it very difficult for any organization to get federal support for administrative costs. Such costs are real, and ones that other donors also don’t want to cover.

While the new policy discourages asking to cover administrative costs, it is also happy to create such costs, such as compelling that grant recipients participate in the DHS E-verify program “to confirm the employment eligibility of employees and contractors hired in or performing work in the United States.”

The peer review process, the cornerstone of scientific rigor, is not just devalued in federal grants processes. Vought also carves out exceptions to public notice when it is in the “national interest.” This creates the potential for a back-door slush fund for favored universities or companies to receive public dollars for research. At the same time OMB would have a credible lever to punish disfavored individuals or institutions by withholding grants.

Here are three big implications of this new policy:

1. This is the complete politicization of federal science and grantmaking. As Ginexi writes: “What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management. It is a complete political control apparatus layered over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.”

2. This is bad for science, and its bad for America. One thing that actually propelled actual American greatness after World War II was tying large scientific investments into a non-partisan, merit-based process. But that is not the way of Trump, who instead wants to extend tools of control and retribution over science. The new policy is also a tool that further encourages democratic backsliding, by giving Trump one more tool with which he can threaten civil society.

3. This is a proposed rule, so you can offer a comment. I really hope that people beyond the scientific community weigh in. This includes private corporations who benefit from nonpartisan science, such as the flow of PhD talent into their organizations, or breakthroughs they turn into profitable patents. Jeremy Berg provides a template as does Elizabeth Ginexi.

   What We Need to do NEXT: OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule (OMB-2026-0034)

How the creep of politicization operates

What we are seeing with the new science policy illustrates the interactive effect of the different politicization tactics. Vought sitting atop America’s scientific enterprise is a classic example of centralizing authority (tactic #1), away from career scientists and agencies (#2). Demands that science serve one man’s agenda is an example of personalism (tactic #3). Telling scientists that they will lose their grants based on political affiliations fits with the tactic #4 reliance on fear and threats. The career program officers overseeing science (themselves typically PhDs) know from grim experience that pushing back against appointees to defend science will mean being fired or put on administrative leave (tactic #5).

In this context then, dissent within government or the scientific community against not just this policy, but Trump’s government becomes more risky, more costly, and therefore more rare. Science is silenced.

Career leadership expertise across scientific agencies is collapsing

Looking at the bigger picture, Chris Piper of the Partnership for Public Service has been doing incredible real-time research on the creep of politicization across government, especially on the combination of tactics #2 (strategic use of appointees) and #5 (weakening civil service protections to remove them from power). He has documented that Trump is imposing historic numbers of appointees at the same time that he is weakening career leadership in the Senior Executive Service (the most senior officials who by law are not supposed to feature more than 10% appointees).

The data below show the drop in Senior Executive Service in health and science agencies, positions that really require some meaningful understanding of the science underpinning the mission of these agencies.

For example, the threat of a potential pandemic is on the horizon again. Expertise on the spread of deadly diseases is not, contrary to what RFK Jr. might think, something you can pick up from some X posts. I would sleep better at night knowing that there is a layer of competent scientists at CDC that will take the wheel when shit really gets bad. Oh wait, they’ve been purged.

In the meantime, more and more appointees are being placed in scientific agencies. Again, this is a classic pre-Trump form of politicization (tactic #2). But not in these types of positions. Piper points out that between 2009 to 2018, CDC had a single non-Senate confirmed appointee, but now has 12. Does that make you feel more or less confident about our ability to respond to Ebola?

Politicization across the government

This is happening not just in scientific agencies. There are other units where both political parties assumed that expertise and independence was important, and politicization was bad. Such units are also seeing new political appointees added to their ranks. This includes parts of the DOJ, which is being exposed to unprecedented politicization as it becomes the President’s law firm, or IRS, which recently agreed that it was a great idea to give Trump’s most violent supporters $1.8 billion.

The politicization also affects national security, including internal security and the parts of government that oversee our elections. The number of senior career officials has been significantly reduced and the number of appointees has significantly increased.

Increasingly, Trump loyalists control the men with guns across government…

…and the people who decide how legal power is used. Piper notes a 311% increase in the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, which oversees federal prosecutions. Every time a prosecution in the United States happens now, we must first ask ourselves what role these political actors are playing. We simply have less reason to trust that these processes are serving the public interest rather than the interest of one man.

As Piper notes, appointees now control the unglamorous but important machinery of government, such as budget, IT offices, and acquisitions. The core function of these offices is not political. But what DOGE taught the Trump administration is that its a lot easier to bypass legal objections to controversial decisions if you control who presses the buttons in the budget and tech offices of government.

Political loyalists are also being put in offices where loyalty is clearly at odds with the core task. For example, Trump has purged Inspectors General, illegally, and then replaced them with loyalists in some offices. Such appointees are simply not credible when it comes to holding the person who appointed them accountable, even though that is their job.

What you can do?

Lets get back Trump’s new policy to politicize science. American science helped America win the 20th century, a bipartisan bet that if you funded smart people and left them alone, they would cure diseases and build industries. That bet paid off for eighty years. Does anyone really think that Russ Vought and co. will do better?

The creep of politicization did not happen overnight. It tightens one appointee, one purged scientist, one cancelled grant at a time, until the machinery that produced vaccines and semiconductors and GPS is producing loyalty tests instead. And it happens more easily when people don’t realize America’s scientific system is being taken apart, or wrongly believe that this destruction is in their interests.

The comment period is open until midnight, July 13. You can submit comments here. If you benefit from American science — and you most assuredly do — you have a stake in this. If you work in a nonprofit and don’t want to work for Russ Vought, you have a stake in this. If you don’t want your local government to have to bend the knee to Trump to receive tax dollars, you have a stake in this. Share with others in your community who need to get involved.