Fearing that Donald Trump could try to reform the National Institutes of Health (NIH) if he wins the presidential election, the Biden administration is setting up new hurdles for him at the nation's premier health research agency to safeguard against what they consider political interference, Politico reported Monday.
In one such step, NIH has designated an official to identify political interference in the agency's work and will create a scientific integrity council to review those cases.
Although the White House realizes that Trump could scrap those plans if elected, it believes that these steps will make it more difficult.
Lyric Jorgenson, NIH's designated scientific integrity official, said that "interfering and manipulating science to hit a partisan agenda is inappropriate and is what we're working to wall against."
She insisted that the plan to protect the agency's independence is critical, because the public needs to be able to rely on NIH to "generate rigorous, trusted evidence to inform public health."
The NIH, which gives out $40 billion annually to health researchers, has long been able to operate relatively free of politics.
As part of the strategy, the White House also directed other health agencies to strengthen their scientific integrity plans, to ensure that research is rigorous and bias-free and that nonpartisan civil servants are making the research decisions.
Trump's allies, however, view these moves as a way to shield scientists with progressive ideology, as well as protect from scrutiny a corrupt bureaucracy that is too cozy with its grantees.
"NIH is ripe for drastic reform," Roger Severino, who served at the Department of Health and Human Services under Trump and is now at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, told Politico. An agency reorganization and an executive order to make it easier to fire federal workers are on the table, Severino said.
Joel Zinberg, who worked on health policy on the Council of Economic Advisers during Trump's term, insisted that "the NIH is an entrenched political organization. They are a very powerful institution in Washington. The directors there often go directly to Congress to get their funding."
Zinberg thinks it's unlikely that institutes or centers will be abolished altogether, but under a Trump administration, "less scientifically directed" groups, like the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences or the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, might be at risk for cuts, mergers, or rehousing.
"There's going to be a push to decentralize the power there and make it a more democratic process," he said.