Here are our full stories on the Trump administration. Have new story tips, internal Trump administration or science agency emails, or other key documents? Contact us.
NIH councils back on track
Trump administration officials have lifted a freeze on meetings of advisory councils that has held up grantmaking at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The council meetings held three times a year by NIH’s 27 institutes were put on hold after Trump took office on 20 January as part of a communications pause. Now, Trump officials are allowing institutes to post required notices in the Federal Register for these meetings, with the first one—the council of NIH’s complementary medicine center—set for 8 April. The alcoholism institute’s council will meet on 17 April and the National Eye Institute’s council on 21 April. All will meet in closed session to review grants.
The move comes after NIH removed a hold on meetings of NIH study sections, which perform the initial peer review of grant proposals; they will resume next week. Councils provide a second level of review before grants can be awarded. The block on these meetings has created a huge backlog of proposals and delayed well over $1.5 billion in grant funding that normally would have been disbursed at this point in the year. —Jocelyn Kaiser
Some foreign scientists balk at answering U.S. questionnaire
Earlier this month, the Trump administration began demanding that international researchers funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention answer political questions, such as whether they work to “combat Christian persecution” or collaborate with communist governments. Other U.S. agencies are sending such requests to recipients of funding in other countries, according to multiple news reports. At least two scientists at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands got somewhat apologetic-sounding requests from the U.S. Geological Survey to quickly answer the questionnaire. But university officials instructed the scientists not to reply. Scientists in Canada and Australia have also received questions, which apparently originate from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. —Erik Stokstad
Government will pay for completed USAID work—as slowly as possible
In a court filing submitted late last night, the Trump administration set out a timeline for paying nongovernmental organizations and contractors working with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for work completed prior to 13 February. The move complies with a court order issued earlier this week by U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali, who has been overseeing two lawsuits brought by organizations hit by the government’s freeze on nearly $2 billion in foreign aid funding in late January.
According to the filing, the government intends to complete more than 10,000 outstanding payments at a rate of about 300 payments per day. This rate is in line with the court’s requirement, but far short of the thousands of daily payments USAID had been processing before it was dismantled. The government states it cannot move faster because it lacks complete documentation from some funding recipients—a claim that plaintiffs in the case pushed back against in an earlier filing.
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The new timeline means some organizations will have to wait until the end of April before they receive payment for work they’ve already done. For many organizations, that will be too little too late. Many already had to halt projects and furlough or fire staff in early February. Since then, the government has terminated more than 80% of USAID grants, forcing numerous organizations to close down their work entirely. —Catherine Offord
Alternate route for picking U.S. authors for climate report emerges
Earlier this month, the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put out a call for hundreds of nominees to serve as authors on its next major assessment of climate science. This nomination process is typically handled by governments, but for scientists in the United States, there has been little sign that the Department of State would lead that process, as it always has in the past. Rather, the government prevented travel to IPCC’s most recent meeting and terminated a support contract for the report.
Today, a group of universities in coordination with the American Geophysical Union stepped in to fill that void, creating the U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC. The group will accept and forward nominations to serve as an author until 4 April; final author selections are made by the panel itself.
IPCC authors are unpaid, but their travel is typically covered by the U.S. government. The new group is not promising to cover those expenses, and instead encouraged prospective authors to also submit their application to the official State Department channel, on the chance that it will continue to support those travel expenses—hardly a guaranteed outcome. —Paul Voosen
Headlines elsewhere
The Wall Street Journal: Trump Administration Weighing Major Cuts to Funding for Domestic HIV Prevention
NBC News: Columbia University signals it will comply with Trump administration's demands
The Daily Pennsylvanian: Trump administration freezes $175 million in federal funding to Penn
They said it
“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. needs to stop saying vaccines are ‘a personal choice.’ They’re not. Speed limits aren’t a personal choice. Paying taxes isn’t a personal choice. … Sacrifices are what make us a nation instead of 340 million selfish hunter-gatherers. Each of us gives up some personal freedoms so we all stay alive.”
—Former New York Times global health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., in an opinion column in The Washington Post
