Russel Vought will reportedly be given veto power over all NIH grants

据报道，拉塞尔·沃特（Russel Vought）将被授予对所有美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）拨款的否决权

On Friday, The Washington Post reported on a contentious White House meeting in which the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, tried to fend off yet another effort to place funding decisions under political control. The move came from Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has sought to limit and control research funds. The Post suggested that Bhattacharya ended up on the losing side of the fight. This initial leak has been confirmed and expanded on by outlets such as The New York Times and Politico. It now appears that the administration is drafting an executive order that would give Vought veto power over every individual grant awarded by the NIH.

周五，《华盛顿邮报》报道了一场充满争议的白宫会议。会上，美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）院长杰伊·巴塔查里亚（Jay Bhattacharya）试图抵制又一次将科研经费决策置于政治控制之下的企图。此举来自管理和预算办公室（OMB）负责人拉塞尔·沃特（Russell Vought），该办公室一直试图限制和控制研究资金。《华盛顿邮报》指出，巴塔查里亚最终在这场博弈中落败。这一最初的泄露消息已得到《纽约时报》和《政治报》（Politico）等媒体的证实与补充。目前看来，政府正在起草一项行政命令，将授予沃特对NIH发放的每一笔拨款的否决权。

The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, and its $47 billion budget is larger than that of the next 10 research funders combined. Its funding, distributed largely through grants to academic researchers at universities, supports everything from basic biological research to clinical trials and has helped the biotechnology industry flourish. But Vought seems to feel that it has funded a lot of “woke” research. Immediately after Trump re-entered the Oval Office, the agency terminated a broad range of grants on topics like pandemic preparedness and health disparities and proposed a budget that would shrink the NIH by nearly half. That cut was rejected by Congress, and the policy behind the NIH grant terminations was also voided by a court. Vought responded to these setbacks by proposing new grant funding rules that would make political considerations key determinants in which grants get funded. Congress put that rule on hold, too.

NIH是全球最大的生物医学研究资助机构，其470亿美元的预算超过了排名其后的10家研究资助机构的总和。其资金主要通过拨款形式发放给大学的学术研究人员，支持从基础生物学研究到临床试验的各项工作，并推动了生物技术行业的繁荣。但沃特似乎认为，该机构资助了大量“觉醒”（woke）研究。特朗普重返白宫后，该机构立即终止了涉及大流行病防范和健康差异等主题的广泛拨款，并提议将NIH的预算削减近一半。这一削减方案遭到了国会的否决，而导致NIH终止拨款的相关政策也被法院裁定无效。沃特对这些挫折的回应是提议制定新的拨款规则，将政治考量作为决定拨款发放的关键因素。国会也搁置了这一规则。

Apparently dissatisfied with simply blocking funding for entire fields of research and frustrated by Congress, Vought decided to have another go at the NIH’s grants. According to the Politico report, he leveraged one of Trump’s weaknesses: a desire to harm Harvard University. Early in his second term, Trump suspended all grant funding to a number of universities, seeking large payments from them in exchange for restoring the funding and dropping investigations. Harvard declined to go along and eventually won a lawsuit that restored the funding. But when news reports suggested that Harvard had agreed to a settlement without a payoff, Trump immediately demanded $1 billion from Harvard as part of any settlement. In the White House meeting, Vought reportedly presented OMB control of NIH grants as an alternate means of targeting Harvard. Bhattacharya, to his credit, objected.

显然，沃特对仅仅封锁整个研究领域的资金感到不满，并对国会的阻挠感到沮丧，因此决定再次对NIH的拨款下手。据《政治报》报道，他利用了特朗普的一个弱点：想要打击哈佛大学的欲望。在第二个任期初期，特朗普暂停了对多所大学的所有拨款，试图以此换取巨额赔偿，作为恢复资金和撤销调查的条件。哈佛大学拒绝配合，并最终通过诉讼恢复了资金。但当新闻报道称哈佛大学在没有支付赔偿的情况下达成和解时，特朗普立即要求哈佛大学支付10亿美元作为和解的一部分。在白宫会议上，据报道，沃特提出由OMB控制NIH拨款，作为针对哈佛大学的另一种手段。值得称赞的是，巴塔查里亚对此表示了反对。

That objection was not a foregone conclusion. Bhattacharya remains upset that his ideas regarding the COVID pandemic—let it spread largely unchecked—were sidelined, and he has treated his NIH post as an opportunity to right perceived wrongs. In addition to terminating funding to a wide range of politically sensitive research, Bhattacharya has also underplayed the blatantly unscientific and dangerous ideas of his boss, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. So there were plenty of reasons to think that he might be equally willing to go along with Vought’s ideas. But he appears to have lost, so all NIH grants will now be subject to approval by a committee that includes both Vought and Bhattacharya. Unless that committee agrees unanimously that the grant should go forward, the funding will be rejected.

这种反对并非理所当然。巴塔查里亚对自己关于新冠疫情的观点（即任其自由传播）被边缘化感到不满，并将他的NIH职位视为纠正他所认为的“错误”的机会。除了终止对广泛的政治敏感研究的资助外，巴塔查里亚还淡化了他的上司——卫生与公众服务部部长小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪（Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.）那些公然反科学且危险的观点。因此，有充分的理由认为他可能同样愿意顺从沃特的想法。但他似乎已经落败，因此现在所有的NIH拨款都将由一个包含沃特和巴塔查里亚的委员会进行审批。除非该委员会一致同意发放拨款，否则资金将被拒绝。

It’s not at all clear how this will work in a practical sense. During the Biden administration, the NIH funded over 64,000 grants a year. As heads of their respective agencies, Vought and Bhattacharya presumably have other duties and would be hard-pressed to give each proposal a serious evaluation. The committee would also presumably act only after funding decisions have been made. In the absence of a system for shifting the funding to other grants, though, this runs the risk of leaving the NIH unable to spend all the money Congress allocates to it (which may well be Vought’s intention). In the past, the NIH determined funding by ordering grants based on scientific merit scores assigned by expert peer reviewers. That system provides an obvious way to shift money from rejected grants to the highest-quality unfunded proposals. But Vought has also been attempting to limit the use of peer review in evaluating grants, making it unclear if such a system would still be viable.

目前尚不清楚这在实际操作中将如何运作。在拜登政府期间，NIH每年资助超过64,000个项目。作为各自机构的负责人，沃特和巴塔查里亚想必还有其他职责，很难对每一份提案进行认真的评估。该委员会也可能只会在拨款决定做出后才介入。然而，在缺乏将资金转移到其他项目机制的情况下，这可能会导致NIH无法花掉国会分配的所有资金（这很可能就是沃特的目的）。过去，NIH通过根据专家同行评审给出的科学价值评分对拨款进行排序来决定资助对象。该系统提供了一种将资金从被拒绝的项目转移到未获资助的高质量提案中的明确途径。但沃特也一直试图限制同行评审在评估拨款中的作用，这使得该系统是否仍然可行变得不明朗。

Ultimately, this move will almost certainly be rejected by the courts, as it clearly fits the key standard for illegal administrative actions: arbitrary and capricious. It solves no problems, it’s not required by any law, and it’s difficult to imagine any legal justification for it. “Vought wants to stop the NIH from spending its budget” is not a legal justification. But for the policy to reach the courts, someone will have to first have to prove that they are sufficiently harmed to have standing to sue. As with so many other administration actions, that means the pending executive order could do a lot of damage before the courts can intervene.

最终，这一举措几乎肯定会被法院驳回，因为它显然符合非法行政行为的关键标准：武断且反复无常。它解决不了任何问题，没有任何法律要求这样做，也很难想象有任何法律依据。 “沃特想阻止NIH花掉预算”并不是法律依据。但要让这项政策进入法院，必须先有人证明他们受到了足够的损害，从而具备诉讼资格。正如政府的其他许多行动一样，这意味着在法院介入之前，这项即将出台的行政命令可能会造成巨大的损害。