I must admit that I’m getting really tired of using the two images of Trofim Lysenko in my posts again, but, unfortunately, this week it can’t be helped…again. I’m also getting tired of reminding our readers who Trofim Lysenko was, in case you happen to be encountering this blog for the first time or, for whatever reason, haven’t read my past posts on Lysenkoism 2.0 and the destruction of US federal science. So, before I launch into discussing how this administration, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his useful idiot NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, and the real powers behind the NIH throne, Office of Management and Deputy NIH Director Matthew Memoli and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought are furiously working to deprioritize rigorous scientific peer review and prioritize the decisions of political operatives when it comes to deciding which scientists receive NIH funding for their research, here we go again. You can skip the next paragraph if you’re all too familiar with Lysenkoism.
Ever since Donald Trump was elected President again, with respect to federal science policy I’ve been referring to his second term as “Lysenkoism 2.0,” based on the administrations immediate and aggressive efforts to alter federal science policy to become dependent on ideology and politics, rather than rigorous science peer-reviewed by more-or-less nonpartisan scientists. Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet-era agricultural scientist whose ideas—which included the denial of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution by natural selection in favor of a version of Lamarckism—Stalin loved not because of how scientific they were, but rather because they aligned with Soviet ideology. Unfortunately, when put into practice Lysenko’s ideas were utterly disastrous for Soviet agriculture (and, in one instance, Chinese agriculture), causing crop yields to plummet and turbocharging famines from the 1930s through the early 1960s, when he was removed from power after his influence had slowly waned in the years after Stalin’s death. Yet, because his ideas were ideologically in sync with the regime, particularly under Josef Stalin, Lysenko yielded ruthless power over Soviet agricultural science for decades, and scientists who dissented in favor of good science risked being ostracized, fired, imprisoned, and in some cases even executed. This history is why the term “Lysenkoism” is now commonly used to refer the domination of science by a pseudoscientific ideology, rather than evidence, experimentation, and data. History also shows that it took Soviet agricultural science decades to recover after Lysenko had fairly been deposed.
Despite being the product of the political process, its priorities and budgets decided by the President and Congress over the last several decades, most federal science has escaped the stain of Lysenkoism, particularly since World War II, when institutes such as the National Institutes of Health (which I tend to discuss the most because I’m most familiar with it) rose to prominence. True, politicians decided funding levels and would dictate priorities (e.g., Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot), but in general this was done in consultation with scientists, and it was career scientists, not political operatives, making final funding decisions for individual research grants. Most recently, earlier this month I described proposed rules from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought that, if allowed to take effect, would basically codify what the administration has been doing already, specifically putting political operatives in charge of granular decision-making over individual grants, with specific policies enabling political appointees to decide on which grants to fund based on whether they “align with administration priorities” or not, all while banning swaths of research that have anything to do with the dreaded DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) or “gender ideology.” Of course, the difference between the original Lysenkoism and Lysenkoism 2.0 is that the original Lysenkoism was (mostly) confined to agriculture and genetics, whereas Lysenkoism 2.0 has metastasized to all federal medicine and science, with our current NIH Director “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya exulting that the NIH would become the “research arm of MAHA” (make America healthy again), RFK Jr.’s pseudoscience- and quackery-laden “health” movement.
What, however, does this mean in practice? I’ve discussed it before, but the features of how this administration plans on exercising ideological control over the science funded by NIH are coming into view, as documented by a recent report in Nature entitled Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants and further described by an excellent post on Substack called 27 UNIHTED by anonymous current and former NIH employees with experience in peer review, The Quiet Attack On Science: Subverting NIH Peer Review. Unsurprisingly, there are some apologists for the administration who are claiming that the changes being ushered in by this administration are no big deal, that there’s nothing to see here, such as Anthony LoSasso, PhD, who wrote a MedPage Today editorial, I Served on Grant Review Panels for 12 Years. Let’s Not Romanticize NIH Peer Review, which, as you will see, boils down to a straw man that says, “Yes, the administration’s proposals are bad for science, but all these scientists crying ‘Lysenko!’ go too far and are romanticizing peer review.” I don’t know who was doing that (certainly not the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine editorial that provoked Dr. LoSasso’s reaction, The OMB and the Politicization of Science, who correctly raised the alarm of Lysenkoism in the very first paragraph, while praising NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya’s proposed “unified strategy” for NIH priorities and accusing critics of the politicization of science by this administration of lacking humility. (Hint: No one, and I mean no one, claims that NIH peer review is perfectly objective and never tainted by ideology, least of all I. What critics are saying is that the proposed “remedy” will make NIH peer review so much less objective and more tainted by ideology.
We’ll get to all that a little later. First, a word about my background. I have served on NIH study sections, but, I admit, never as a standing member. I’ve only ever served as an ad hoc reviewer, namely a reviewer brought in when there aren’t enough standing members of a study section or the study section lacks special expertise. (I might be doing so again, although I’m hesitant, given what’s happening at the NIH.) When last I discussed this topic a month ago, it was in the context of OMB Director Russell Vought’s proposed new rules that would officially codify the the politicization of NIH grant review that’s already happening.
Stalling grant disbursement for political screening
On Friday, Nature published a report, Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants. The reporting is the result of an investigation carried out by Nature based on internal emails and data, as well as interviews with senior NIH scientists. The picture is not pretty:
Hundreds of grant applications to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are being held up at any given time by unprecedented scrutiny after peer review. Some have been flagged by an algorithm for using terms, such as ‘gender’ and ‘climate change’, that have been deemed not to conform with the priorities of the administration of US President Donald Trump.
These new layers of review have delayed delivery of funds to labs and research institutions — and have even resulted in the outright rejection of some applications that had been approved by outside and agency scientists. Before 2025, it was unheard of for grants that had received such approvals to be rejected, says one of six NIH officials who spoke to Nature on condition of anonymity. The extra scrutiny ramped up in early 2026 and is conducted by NIH leaders and officials at the NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Say what you will about the NIH—and I have said plenty over the years—in general, it has traditionally kept its funding decisions as apolitical as humanly possible, dating back to just after World War II. Has it always succeeded? Of course, not, but the intent has always been there, and it tries. It is that drive to identify and fund the most rigorous and promising science possible that has turned the NIH into the crown jewel of US science, the premier funder of biomedical research in this country. Again, no one says that the NIH is completely apolitical. No institution created by politicians—or even human beings in general—is ever completely apolitical. After all, Congress decides on the NIH budget, and the President sets its priorities, usually through the person whom he appoints as NIH Director, although at times Congress can meddle, sometimes with bad results, such as when Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) added provisions to create the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), since renamed the National Center for Complementary an Integrative Health (NCCIH), which has become a federal bastion of quackademic medicine.
I’ve discussed in detail before the review steps that an NIH grant application goes through before it is funded. For purposes of this post, I will note that, once a grant receives a fundable score from the original study section to which it was assigned, the last step is generally review by the Scientific Advisory Council, which generally looks at the pool of grants and their scores and then funds as many of the top scoring grants as funding will allow. True, sometimes a grant that didn’t quite make the cut will be funded and a grant that did will not be, depending on institute priorities, but in general NIH funding decisions have been a meritocracy, if you accept the premise that the priority score determined by the NIH study section is a good estimate of the scientific promise and rigor of a proposed project.
Now here’s what the administration has been doing:
The extra scrutiny has particularly affected researchers waiting for previously approved projects to be renewed. Most applications clear the supplemental review in two weeks, but 10% of the grant-renewal applications that have entered this phase in the 2026 fiscal year have become stuck for more than seven weeks, and some have been held up indefinitely, according to data and internal e-mails that Nature has obtained (see ‘Holding pattern’).
This might not sound that horrendous, but remember that scientists tend to live or die by their funding, and a funding lapse of even 7-8 weeks can endanger a scientist’s ability to keep a laboratory open. I’m also not particularly reassured by the claim made by the NIH that there are no “banned words”:
In response to Nature‘s queries about the grant-screening process, an NIH spokesperson said that “there are no ‘banned word’ lists at NIH, and funding decisions are not based on specific words or phrases.” Internal documents suggest that the agency does not ban these words, but projects that use them are much more likely to be scrutinized by programme officers who use the tool and by NIH and HHS officials reviewing the project.
Oh, well that’s OK then. Of course, if there is a list of words that trigger scrutiny by program officers who will increasingly be political appointees, then obviously scientists will be less likely to use those words or to propose projects for which the use of those words is mandatory or very difficult to avoid. That’s the intent. “Oh, no, we don’t have a list of ‘banned words,'” they say, but those words might as well be banned if the real world effect is that their use triggers political appointees to go over a scientist’s grant application with a fine tooth come to determine whether it “aligns with administration priorities.” That’s the intent, a “soft” de facto ban, with plausible deniability that it’s a ban. (Well, the deniability is only plausible to the general public, not to most scientists.)
You might remember the nightmarish first few months after the Trump administration took over in January 2025, when the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) started canceling NIH grants willy-nilly if some unskilled tech bro didn’t think that it “aligned with administration priorities.” What’s happening now is a less ham-fisted version of the same thing:
As DOGE’s influence in government waned, NIH leaders formalized a screening process by creating an algorithm that checks applications for a list of disfavoured terms (see Supplementary information). As of February, the list included 235 terms, which serve as an “indicator that the grant likely needs, at a minimum, a revision to align its terminology with NIH priorities”, according to one internal document.
The tool checks every application’s title, abstract and other summary sections for terms including ‘racism’, ‘fossil fuel’, ‘queer’ and ‘sexual minorit’ (referring to all forms of the phrase ‘sexual minority’).
This algorithm is applied after applications have passed two rounds of peer review, and after programme officials and the relevant institute director have deemed them worthy of funding and in alignment with institute priorities (see ‘How an NIH grant is processed’).
If the application contains one of the 235 disfavoured terms, it is classified as “not clean”. Programme officers are then instructed to renegotiate the language or scope of the proposed project with the applicant, or to scrap it altogether. Officers must also write a ‘decision memo’ that describes the actions taken.
See what I mean? Then the NIH abuses a longstanding mechanism known as “Section 19.” In brief, Section 19 status in the past referred to grants that have been funded but are not yet active, usually because the contract with the institution receiving the grant hasn’t been finalized yet. This Nature report also notes that in the past the NIH has traditionally also “used this status to give members of the US Congress advance notice of the projects being funded in their districts,” which is a pretty benign thing. Under this administration, however, Section 19 “gives NIH leaders and the “HHS counselor” an opportunity to review all applications, according to internal documents that Nature reviewed.” Some of the feedback was in the internal documents reviewed by Nature, and it is revealing.
For example:
“Does [the institute] really want to fund this study? Seems likely to end up in a Congressional waste report,” reads one comment, referring to analyses that highlight examples of allegedly improper federal spending.
And:
Applications are often sent back because they include disfavoured topics or have foreign collaborators on projects that do not show a “clear benefit” to the United States. Applications are also bounced back to programme officers for alleged “lobbying activities”, a reference to projects that aim to inform policy; or for containing “vague and non-specific language”, such as the phrase ‘social determinants of health’, which is deemed not to include “measurable concepts”, according to e-mails that Nature obtained.
I note that the term “social determinants of health” has a very definite definition in public health that is not too difficult to comprehend. Remember how I’ve long said that MAHA cares nothing for the social determinants of health? This policy suggests that MAHA is downright hostile to such determinants. In any event, this sort of review often results in:
In such cases, the application is sent back to the handling NIH programme officer to remedy the issue, often requiring that they renegotiate the scope of the project with the applicant before resubmitting the grant for subsequent rounds of Status 19 review. Sometimes, e-mails reprimand the people who processed the applications: “There were a lot of problematic [National Institute on Aging] grants in the queue this week”, says one e-mail from NIH leaders in March. “Many of them had significant problems that should have been caught by your staff.”
In some cases, such reviews result in the Section 19 study not being funded. Meanwhile, the NIH program officers, who are now overworked and whose offices are understaffed, become more and more demoralized:
“Just because the topic is something that makes some people uncomfortable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t research it,” says one NIH programme officer, who adds that the studies were deemed scientifically rigorous by multiple panels of scientists before they were shut down.
“It’s demoralizing the number of hours we spend working up a grant that they might kill at the last possible moment”, the officer says. “It’s a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars.”
This morass is also delaying processing of existing grants. What most people don’t understand is that a five-year NIH grant isn’t really one grant. It is five one-year grants, with renewal every year pretty much a given, as long as the yearly progress report is adequate. These one year grants are called non-competing continuations or renewals, because the grant has already been approved and the recipient is not competing with other applications for it. At the end of the five years (or whatever year period covered by a grant), the recipient can submit a competing renewal or continuation, which is competitive and involves the scientist proposing another five years of work based on the results of the previous five years. In any event, noncompeting continuations are getting caught in the ideological dragnet, with intentional and predictable results:
One NIH official analysed non-competing grant-renewal applications (those that have been peer reviewed in the past and are soliciting their next year of funding) that entered Status 19 between the start of the 2026 fiscal year on 1 October 2025 and early June 2026. They found that only 57% were approved within ten days. By comparison, in the same period over the previous three years, more than 95% of non-competing applications were approved within ten days.
Bureaucracy is the tool being used to Lysenkoize the NIH.
But that’s not all. As reported by anonymous NIH workers with experience in peer review, the ideological politicization of NIH peer review and funding decisions goes far beyond what Nature reported. It’s worth reading the whole thing, which is rather long, but I’ll look at the items that most caught my attention. For example, you might not be that bothered by the administration’s attack on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (the dreaded DEI), but it has more of an effect on peer review than you might imagine:
Others have written of the damage that Bhattacharya has done to research on chronic diseases, health equity, and the biomedical workforce. The homogenization of study sections is a less apparent tool to achieve that end. Less diversity on review panels will undercut the appreciation and evaluation of research on health disparities and social determinants of health, as well as overlooking important considerations for underrepresented populations in the workforce. In addition, reducing diversity can indirectly impair the career advancement of women and underrepresented minorities, leading to reduced diversity in the scientific community at large. As has been discussed elsewhere, there is ample evidence that reduced diversity of scientific teams reduces scientific innovation and outcomes.
Another change “necessitated” by the staffing cuts made by DOGE is shorter review meetings for study sections, leaving less time to discuss competitive grants Basically, after the government shutdowns that led to the cancellation of 424 study section meetings in late 2025 that were rescheduled for 2026, the Center for Scientific Review (CSR) faced a “logistical crisis.” Emergency procedures were implemented, and the result will likely be:
The less discussion there is, the easier it is to reduce the importance of reviewers’ evaluations and scientific staff reporting of the deliberations, and the easier it is to obscure funding decisions by political appointees. The less feedback there is, the less improvement there will be to the end product, which is ultimately the science.
Another change being implemented looks custom-made to obscure how much a funding decision was based on scientific merit and how much it was based on ideology and the input of political appointees. In the past, every NIH grant received a priority score from 1-9, in which lower numbers represent better scores, and these scores were included in the study section summary statements returned to the applicants. These scores, as imperfect as they might be, allowed the applicant an idea of how highly the study section thought of the grant application and how close to fundable it is. Also, in general, the NIH would fund grants with the highest percentile priority scores first, working its way down the ranked list until the money ran out. Removing priority scores and percentiles would, according to these NIH scientists, do this:
Removing scores from summary statements reduces transparency in peer review, as it denies applicants the knowledge of how their applications were viewed and ranked by reviewers, and withholds valuable information from program staff who integrate these peer review decisions into their funding recommendations to IC directors. While ICs have used their discretion to fund grants out of score order, they have done so in a limited capacity to address gaps in their scientific portfolios and/or support emerging research areas. Greater influence by political appointees on funding decisions and pressure to circumvent score order elicit concern from reviewers that the value of their efforts and expertise has depreciated. This concern is largely dismissed by middle and upper management at NIH. Although scientists are under greater pressure to obtain funding that is compliant with the administration’s priorities, they also find the time to advise NIH on the best scientific investments for taxpayer dollars. The declining respect for their efforts will likely convince scientists to decline to review for NIH.
I suspect that the reason for this change is more to make it easier for political appointees to put their finger on the scales deciding which grants are and are not funded without leaving an obvious tell that that’s what happened, such as a grant with a priority score of 1.2 and a 1.5 percentile ranking on the social determinants of health not being funded while a grant with a priority score of 4 and a 40th percentile ranking proposing to study RFK Jr.’s latest favorite supplement receiving funding. The demoralization of scientists serving on study sections is just a happy byproduct of the policy to Russell Vought.
Overall, the fruits of Project 2025 are starting to be felt, and NIH funding decisions are becoming less independent, more influenced by political appointees, and, likely, poorer quality. This is all by design, in order to solidify administration control over funding decisions to allow them to reward the loyal and punish critics. After all, the right has long viewed the NIH as a source of patronage, thinking that NIH funding decisions should be like everything else in their realm, transactional. Basically, people like Russell Vought portrayed, for example, Anthony Fauci when he was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) as a mob boss, handing out grant money in return for COVID “orthodoxy” and loyalty to the administration. Now that they are in power, they want to be that false vision of how Anthony Fauci worked.
Lysenkoism 2.0 continues apace.
Enter the sycophants, toadies, and lackeys
Unsurprisingly, there are a number of people who seem to be less troubled by Russell Vought’s attack on DEI, scientific peer review as the primary driver of NIH funding decisions, and on any science that doesn’t “align with administration priorities.” One such person is Anthony LoSasso, PhD, who penned an op-ed for MedPage Today entitled I Served on Grant Review Panels for 12 Years. Let’s Not Romanticize NIH Peer Review. As I said above, LoSasso seems far less troubled by Vought implementing policies to bring NIH peer review under political control than he is by critics calling that policy “Lysenkoism” and not, in his estimation, pointing out the flaws in the current system. Now here’s the hilarious thing. LoSasso writes:
That matters now because the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposedopens in a new tab or window having senior political appointees conduct a “pre-issuance review” of every discretionary NIH grant. The proposal indeed raises serious concerns. It would create a standing mechanism for political officials to second-guess scientific awards before they are issued. Once built, such a mechanism would not belong only to this administration. It would be available to every future administration, with whatever priorities, orthodoxies, enemies, or enthusiasms it brings to power.
Right. This is pretty much what I wrote a month ago. LoSasso even pointed out that political preissuance is a very bad “solution” to any problems with peer review at the NIH that might exist. Fair enough. Too bad he couldn’t resist then bothsidesing it in a big way:
But opposing political review does not mean we should pretend the current system is pristine. That is where the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), in their recent criticismopens in a new tab or window of the proposal, missed an opportunity. They are right to worry about political control of science. But they leaned on a too-comforting account of how scientific funding works now.
The public story of NIH review is familiar. Objective experts, shielded from politics, score each proposal on its scientific merits. The best applications rise to the top. Funding follows the science. That story contains some truth, but it is incomplete.
No one—and I mean no one—claims that the current system is perfect, or even close to it. That is a straw man argument. What we do argue is that a system like the one proposed by Russell Vought would not fix whatever flaws there might be in the current system, but would make the system far more biased, opaque, and capricious than it has ever been and, in the process, Lysenkoize US science. Yes, as LoSasso says, there can be biases in NIH peer review, including reputational bias in which the rich get richer, sometimes wide disparities between review scores for a grant submitted by different peer reviewers, and other issues. Unfortunately, what LoSasso seems most offended by is more the comparison to Lysenko:
The trouble with hyperbole is that it crowds out the argument worth having. By invoking Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist whose state-imposed theories devastated Soviet biology, NEJM avoided the reform case it was especially well positioned to make: that American science already has real problems of hierarchy, risk aversion, incumbent advantage, and opaque decision-making. The choice is not between pristine science and Soviet pseudoscience. It is between repairing a flawed but indispensable system and replacing it with one that is more openly vulnerable to political direction by this administration and the next.
He concludes:
The scandal is not merely that politics may corrupt science. It is that a system already too deferential to insiders may now become too deferential to politicians.
How nice. How seemingly “reasonable.” Of course conflating “insider bias” with deference to politics is just the sort of thing that someone in favor of the administration’s approach might say, his denials and criticisms notwithstanding. In any event, much of what LoSasso said is just another way of saying what I’ve been saying. Moreover, the comparison to Lysenko is not an exaggeration. LoSasso basically completely ignored the various factors discussed above that suggest that the comparison to Lysenko is quite apt, given how the changes being made that Russell Vought is trying to codify permanently in regulations all have the effect of deemphasizing peer review and empowering political appointees. Worse, he accepts at face value the “Unified Strategy” proposed by “Podcast Jay” Bhattcharya last summer, when in fact, as I pointed out when it was released, Bhattacharya’s plan cunningly wraps what are obvious Lysenkoist ideological purity tests disguised as “academic freedom” and “unbiased peer review” in seemingly reasonable proposals. (One wonders if LoSasso likes Bhattacharya so much because they are both health economists.)
That’s why I like the response of Elizabeth Ginexi, PhD, who served as an NIH Program Official. For example, she echoes my complaint about pay lines based on percentile scores, the rationale for which proposed by Bhattacharya LoSasso takes at face value:
The Unified Strategy also eliminated paylines — the objective score thresholds that once determined which grants were funded. Previously, applications scoring above the payline had a strong likelihood of funding based on peer review merit. This structural change removed the objectivity that once helped protect meritorious science from political override.
By characterizing Bhattacharya’s approach as thoughtful reform based on calls for “transparent” weighing of scientific merit alongside other factors, LoSasso accepts Bhattacharya’s language at face value. But he ignores what has actually occurred under his leadership: the systematic elimination of disfavored research behind the language of continued support and scientific rigor. This is not reform. It is redirection through administrative action.
Elsewhere, echoing LoSasso’s own words, Ginexi sarcastically notes that his “characterization of what the Unified Strategy actually is and what has been happening at NIH is incomplete.” (Nicely done.) She also sarcastically refers to LoSasso’s complaint that study section members are never told which grants they reviewed have been funded by pointing out that those “decisions are a matter of public record, available to anyone through NIH Reporter, searchable by study section, institution, or investigator,” adding sarcastically, “Perhaps he just never looked.” She also notes that the NIH has mechanisms to try to decrease the effect of the “luck of the draw,” when an application is assigned to a hostile reviewer or a reviewer who misses the point of the proposal:
Program officials are responsible for reviewing every peer review outcome. We read every summary statement. We listen to the reviews. We know when reviewers have missed the mark, when an assigned reviewer imposed their own methodological preferences, or when a junior investigator got an unlucky panel draw. And when that happens, we advocate. I did this many times, making the case to branch chiefs, division directors, advisory council members, and institute directors that an application with a suboptimal score deserved a second look. The system LoSasso describes as opaque is in fact a layered, accountable process staffed by career scientists, exercising scientific judgment on behalf of the public.
Indeed. As for the comparison to Lysenko, I’ve already said why I think it’s valid. Let’s see what Ginexi says:
LoSasso says the NEJM editors reached for Lysenko as a rhetorical shortcut. But the comparison is not hyperbole. It is a structural description of what is currently happening at NIH. Lysenko replaced legitimate science with a politically acceptable alternative, enforced by the state, and destroyed the careers of scientists who practiced disfavored methods.
That structure is precisely what the data show happening today.
She then lists a number of examples, basically rubbing LoSasso’s face in the receipts. I like it.
The bottom line is that what is happening at the NIH and every federal science institute is Lysenkoism 2.0. Moreover, if Russell Vought’s proposed rule changes that I wrote about four weeks ago are permanently codified into regulations, this Lysenkoization will be very difficult to reverse by a science-friendly future administration, if such an administration is ever elected again. Indeed, what worries me is that, even if a Democrat wins in 2028, he will like the changes, and the Lysenkoization will simply shift politics depending upon who is in office. That’s why I’m going to close by reminding our readers that the proposed rules covering federal scientific grantmaking have been published in the Federal Register under the title Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance. The deadline for public comment is July 13. You know what to do. This might be our last chance to stop Lysenkoism 2.0 from being how US science operates.