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

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.

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.