A recent article by Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker was aptly titled An O.M.B. Plan to Defund Science—and Anything Trump Doesn’t Like. Most articles about this issue have made it sound like this is about scientific research grants. But in the New Yorker article Kolbert captures the real scale and says it very well:
The list of tactics the Trump White House has used against its perceived enemies is nasty and brutish but certainly not short. It includes indicting them (James Comey, John Bolton), investigating them (Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Gavin Newsom), threatening to investigate them (Chris Christie, Bruce Springsteen), and threatening to prosecute them (top election officials in all fifty states). The Administration has dispatched troops to cities the President doesn’t care for (Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland); sued universities that ticked him off (Harvard, U.C.L.A.); and withheld billions of dollars’ worth of funding from groups and projects that it deems “woke” or wasteful or not in line with Donald Trump’s priorities, whatever those at the moment happen to be.
In What in the Health?! I mostly write about public health-specific things, but as the New Yorker article makes clear, this goes way beyond that. The problem for Trump and his cronies is that what they’ve been trying to do has consistently been found improper and illegal and stopped by the courts.
There was Rhode Island v. Trump, where Judge John McConnell Jr. said the administration’s attempt to pause over $3 trillion in federal spending “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government,” issuing a preliminary injunction in Jan 2025, later upheld by an appeals court. There was American Public Health Association v. NIH, where Judge William G. Young ruled that the Trump Administration’s termination of hundreds of NIH grants related to racial disparities, gender equity or transgender health, and COVID vaccines was illegal, calling the government’s directives “arbitrary and capricious” and stating the terminations reflected racial discrimination and discrimination against the LGBTQ community. The Supreme Court later stayed part of that ruling 5-4, allowing NIH to terminate $783 million in grants on jurisdictional grounds, but in December 2025 there was a settlement in which NIH agreed to reconsider frozen, denied, or withdrawn grant applications. In July 2025, 22 Democratic attorneys general and two Democratic governors sued to force the Trump Administration to release $6.8 billion dollars in education funding that had been frozen, and ultimately the administration backed down and released the funds even before a judge forced their hand.
There are plenty more examples. The law is clear, and the executive branch doesn’t have the power to just withdraw funding for things and people they don’t like.
We all know the Trump Administration doesn’t like it when they don’t get their way. So what are they doing about it? As the New Yorker article stated, “Recently, the White House announced plans to codify its campaign of retribution.” In a 400-page document they announced a proposed massive rule change. If implemented in its current form, OMB-2026-0034 would revise 2 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Subtitles A and B to make decisions on all federal funding to be made by political appointees, and able to be withdrawn legally at any time, just because the executive branch wants to.
As the New Yorker article goes on to explain, “The rules would affect hundreds of billions of dollars in funding disbursed by agencies ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Transportation Department, to pay for everything from local dance performances to massive infrastructure projects.”
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