Russell Vought Is Trying to Take It All From NIH

By Dave Levitan | July 30, 2025 | 9:00am

Screenshot via CBS/Face the Nation/Youtube

Trump Administration NIH

Russell Vought Is Trying to Take It All From NIH

On Tuesday, the National Institutes of Health temporarily paused all — all — of its grant and contract payments, based on a footnoted directive in an Office of Management and Budget document. That’s $15 billion or so remaining this year in funding for research on everything from Alzheimers to cancer, under threat because of the fanatic running OMB, Russell Vought.

The directive from OMB, literally in a footnote, was interpreted by NIH officials to mean that their remaining budget for the year could only spent internally. The pause, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and later confirmed by other outlets and statements from the Department of Health and Human Services, was supposedly later undone after pressure from both Congress and officials at the White House. But with Vought skulking around, the entire edifice of biomedical research in the US, already limping along after a six-month assault, is at risk.

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“President Trump and his administration have already taken a wrecking ball to our nation’s medical research system—pushing scientists out the door, cutting off lifesaving research, and preventing $5 billion in NIH investments from going out the door to support critical research this year alone,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, in a statement. “Now, as the end of the fiscal year draws near, it appears President Trump and Russ Vought are working to make it official that they do in fact intend to decimate lifesaving research in this country.”

Vought has made no secret of his desire to strip away the country’s scientific research. On Sunday he went on CBS’s Face the Nation to spout his usual vile conspiracy theories about how NIH funding “caused the pandemic;” to list off silly-sounding specific grants (that in essentially every case are far more interesting, important, and worthy than the soundbites suggest) in the grand and intellectually bankrupt tradition dating back through Rand Paul, Tom Coburn, and William Proxmire, and to admit in so many words that he would rather NIH didn’t exist at all.

“We’re going to continue to go to the same process that we have gone through with regard to the Department of Education,” Vought said, comparing the NIH to an agency the administration is literally destroying in whole. “We have an agency that needs dramatic overhaul…. We’re going to have to go line by line to make sure the NIH is funded properly.”

The only sense in which NIH was not “funded properly” before is that it was underfunded. Success rates for the tens of thousands of grant applications it receives every year have stayed stubbornly at or below 20 percent for most of this century, meaning much potentially useful research has gone unfunded. Vought would prefer that rate dropped to zero.

“The chaos and dysfunction of the Trump administration is staggering,” Murray went on. “These people should not be managing a lemonade stand, much less all federal cancer research.”