The Biden administration is putting new triggers in place for Donald Trump at America’s top health research agency to guard against political interference in the event of a Trump victory in November.
The White House fears that Trump is trying to advance an ideological agenda within the National Institutes of Health, like those he has suggested on everything from vaccines to diversity policies.
In an effort to protect against Trump, the NIH has appointed an official to identify any political interference in the agency’s work and is charging a soon-to-be-created Scientific Integrity Board to review such cases. The White House knows Trump could still shelve those plans, but it believes doing so would raise alarms with the media, Congress and the public. The Biden administration is likely hoping that Republican lawmakers, even those who think the NIH needs an overhaul, will temper Trump’s moves.
“Interfering and manipulating science to achieve a partisan agenda is inappropriate and that’s what we’re working to combat,” Lyric Jorgenson, NIH’s designated scientific integrity officer, said in an interview. She added: The plan to protect the agency’s independence is essential because the public must be able to rely on NIH to “generate rigorous and reliable evidence to inform public health.”
The NIH distributes more money to health researchers than any other organization in the world – more than $40 billion a year – and, aside from a Senate-confirmed director, has long been able to operate relatively deviation from policy.
As president, Trump threatened to fire a top agency official, Anthony Fauci, and prompted another to resign after Trump touted hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19. Scientific organizations that work with the NIH now fear that Trump’s potential return to the White House, inflamed by Republican Party anger over the public health bureaucracy’s pandemic advice, will lead to more concerted attempts to influence agency decisions.
In addition to naming Jorgenson as the NIH watchdog, the White House has ordered other health agencies that have been caught up in the Covid wars, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, to to strengthen their scientific integrity plans, both to ensure that research is rigorous, impartial, transparent and reliable – and that research decisions are made by impartial officials.
The White House Office of Personnel Management finalized rules last month making it difficult for Trump, or any other president, to strip officials in decision-making positions of their job protections, an idea that Trump has pursued for years. weeks before the 2020 elections.
It’s not certain that it will work. Trump has not revealed his plans for the agency if he wins in November, but he could do without the NIH’s scientific integrity plan. It is not written in the law or in the regulations. Its allies see it as a way to protect from any control scientists infected by a progressive ideology, as well as a corrupt bureaucracy too comfortable with its beneficiaries.
“The NIH is ripe for drastic reform,” Roger Severino, who worked at the Department of Health and Human Services under Trump and is now with the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, told POLITICO. An agency reorganization and an executive order to make it easier to lay off federal workers are both on the table, Severino said.
Elaine Kamarck, who fought with civil servants when she led then-Vice President Al Gore’s effort to make government agencies operate more like businesses and who now leads the Center for Sustainable Management effective public policy at the Brookings Institution think tank, said she thought “soft power” was an apt analogy for Biden’s efforts to protect the agency’s researchers.
“Maybe this is just a warning to everyone: We shouldn’t mix politics and scientific agencies,” Kamarck said. If Trump were to set that principle aside, “there would be some sort of precedent set for intervention — or at least for saying you should intervene.” »
A legal challenge
Former presidents know how difficult it is to change the way government agencies operate.
Gore’s Clinton-era crusade to reinvent government had some success in pushing agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Veterans Affairs to operate more like businesses. But Gore left aside the rules of civil service.
Former President George W. Bush’s attempt to bring government closer to the private sector by limiting the bargaining rights of unions and implementing performance-based pay and discipline systems in the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security has failed.
The unions filed a complaint. The courts intervened. His successor, President Barack Obama, signed legislation repealing Bush’s plans.
Political experts say an attempt by Trump to strip away civil service protections would face another legal challenge.
“I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there were lawsuits from people who had their rights taken away,” said Jacqueline Simon, political director of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union in the country. federal employees across the country.
Trump should have no illusions about what he’s facing, according to Joel Zinberg, who worked on health policy at the Council of Economic Advisers during Trump’s tenure. “The NIH is a well-established political organization. It is a very powerful institution in Washington. The directors often go directly to Congress for their funding.”
According to Zinberg, this independence from the White House allowed the CDC to eliminate non-health concerns in its response to the pandemic, and the NIH to allow the development of overly cozy relationships with outside researchers.
Zinberg, who is now a senior fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute and director of another think tank, the Paragon Health Institute, described the NIH grantmaking process as innate, political and self-reinforcing, with grants concentrated in selected institutions. This structure favors older, established researchers over funding higher-risk research, thereby hindering innovation.
Decentralizing agency power could mean moving institutes and centers — such as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led by Fauci — from one health agency to another. Existing law gives the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to reorganize or eliminate subdivisions of the agency, Zinberg said.
Zinberg thinks it’s unlikely that institutes or centers will be abolished altogether, but under the Trump administration, “less scientifically driven” groups, like the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences or the National Institute on minority health and health disparities, could be at risk. reductions, mergers or relocations.
“There will be pressure to decentralize power there and make it a more democratic process,” he said.
A new mission statement
During Trump’s term, the White House intervened to change the recommendations of public health officials.
Trump officials pressured the CDC to change language in a report on pediatric Covid cases in 2020. As the 2020 election approached, Trump advisers launched a pressure campaign on the FDA to reauthorize hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment against Covid.
At the NIH, Trump repeatedly suggested he wanted to fire Fauci over his handling of the pandemic.
“The previous administration used debunked reports and misleading data to justify policies that endangered the health and well-being of all Americans,” a White House spokesperson told POLITICO in a statement . “The Biden-Harris Administration has prioritized evidence-based decisions and policies, informed by solid research, and free from political interference.”
But Severino said it was hypocritical of Biden to call out anyone for politicizing the bureaucracy. “He is primarily responsible for the politicization that he complains about,” Severino said, citing Covid, gender identity science and abortion as three areas where the Biden administration has mixed science and politics. policy.
The Heritage Foundation, which has worked within conservative administrations for decades, has a sweeping presidential transition plan known as Project 2025, aimed at bringing the bureaucracy into line.
Among Projects 2025’s plans for NIH: limiting the power of agency officials by making it easier to fire them and pushing back against the culture of diversity, equity and inclusion that the group says has infiltrated research scientific and is now anchored in the agency’s mission.
The NIH Scientific Integrity Plan calls for an agency environment that is “safe, equitable, fair, impartial, honest, and inclusive,” and asserts that “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility make an integral part of the entire scientific process.
Severino said the agency should instead focus on an “impartial and objective search for the truth.”
“They want to put their thumb on the scale in favor of preserving the woke tendencies that already exist at the NIH,” he said, adding: “We cannot have an unelected fourth branch that is capable of doing this. what she wants.”
A different NIH plan
The plans outlined by Zinberg and Severino aim to use executive power to overhaul the NIH, but lasting change would require congressional approval.
Democrats, of course, would resist, but even a Republican-led Senate might not agree.
Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican vying to lead the Senate committee that oversees the NIH if the GOP wins control of the Senate this fall, proposed his own strategy for the NIH earlier this month.
This looks more like Kamarck’s plan under Gore than Heritage’s 2025 plan.
Among his suggestions: ensuring that late-stage research does not come at the expense of early-stage research; streamline the peer review process; use the NIH Scientific Management Review Committee to provide feedback on the agency’s structure and operations; and improve transparency to help restore public trust that was damaged during the pandemic.
He declined to comment on how he plans to work with Trump on the issue.
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