Trump seeks to further tighten grip on biomedical research

President Donald Trump is seeking to take control of American health research funding as part of his war against “woke” programmes and institutions, US media reported over the weekend.

Since returning to power in early 2025, Trump has drastically cut federal funding for research, particularly in biomedicine.

White House officials have discussed the idea of creating an external commission capable of vetoing grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US agency responsible for medical research, according to anonymous sources cited by media outlets including Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The White House budget director Russell Vought, a rightwing Trump loyalist, led the criticism, accusing the NIH of funding “woke” research, according to the Post.

In response to the reports, the president of non-profit alliance Research!America, Russ Paulsen, said in a statement Sunday that “adding more bureaucrats would slow medical progress to a grinding halt.”

“American patients and their families waiting for the next lifesaving treatment or medical breakthrough should not have to wait even longer,” he said.

Such a measure would allow the White House to further tighten its grip on scientific research, even as many critics have denounced the administration’s attacks on academic and research freedoms.

Harvard University and other top institutions, where much of the research takes place, are at the heart of Trump’s wider bid to impose his right-wing vision on US research and education.

Last week, American researchers filed a lawsuit against the NIH, accusing it of blocking grants in order to censor views it disagrees with, on everything from diversity and gender identity to climate change.

Among them was Ann Cohen, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh, whose research funding was cut.

“Our study on Alzheimer’s disease was designed to better understand how to identify and reduce the risk of dementia in communities who are at high risk of developing the disease, who have been historically understudied,” Cohen said in a recent statement.

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