President Donald Trump on Friday directed White House Budget Director Russ Vought to draft an executive order creating a board that would decide which research grants the National Institutes of Health funds — a move that could hand political appointees a veto over billions of dollars in federal health research money.

Two administration officials familiar with the Oval Office meeting, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it, described the directive to POLITICO. The request came after NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya refused Trump's demand to cut Harvard University's grants during the same meeting.

For research administrators at universities, institutes and independent labs, the stakes are direct: if the order is signed and survives legal and congressional challenge, grant approval authority would shift from NIH's peer-review apparatus to a politically appointed board. That would insert a new decision layer between a submitted application and an award notice, with implications for grant timelines, portfolio risk and multi-year budget planning.

Why is Trump targeting NIH grants now?

Cutting Harvard's funding is a major priority for the president, according to the two officials, and the proposed board is a workaround. Bhattacharya's refusal to carry out the Harvard cuts in the Oval Office left the administration searching for another lever. Routing award decisions through a new board staffed by political appointees would remove the NIH director from the decision chain on individual grants.

Vought, who heads the Office of Management and Budget and is a longtime critic of academia, would be positioned to shape the board's composition and mandate. The scope of the draft order — whether it would cover new awards only, or also renewals and continuing increments of existing multi-year grants — remains undefined. Most NIH funding arrives as competing renewals, so even a narrow mandate could reach a large share of the agency's portfolio over a typical four-year award cycle.

What has Congress already done about it?

Lawmakers have already moved once to block this approach. Congress this month included a provision in a stopgap funding bill (H.R. 6500) that temporarily bars the administration from implementing an earlier Vought plan to give political appointees control of federal health grants.

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) personally rejected that earlier plan — a notable rebuke from a member of the president's own party, and a signal that congressional appropriators view grant-award authority as turf worth defending. The stopgap's prohibition is temporary, which means the new draft order would test whether lawmakers extend or strengthen the ban in the next funding measure.

The Friday directive arrives while that congressional block is still in force, setting up a direct confrontation over whether an executive order can accomplish what a funding-bill provision has forbidden.

What do we know — and not know — about the plan?

The confirmed facts are few and specific:

• Trump directed Vought on Friday, in an Oval Office meeting, to draft an executive order creating a board to decide NIH grant funding.
• Bhattacharya refused Trump's request to cut Harvard grants in that meeting.
• Congress this month passed a stopgap provision temporarily blocking an earlier Vought plan to hand political appointees control of federal health grants.
• Collins personally rejected the earlier plan.

The open questions are equally concrete. The order has not been drafted, reviewed by the Office of Legal Counsel or signed, according to the reporting. Its language is unknown. Whether it would survive the temporary congressional prohibition — or a court challenge under administrative-law precedents governing delegation and agency independence — is unresolved. And the officials' account of the president's motives comes from two unnamed sources with a stake in the internal dispute, not from a document.

How should R&D managers read the risk?

For now, nothing has changed operationally. NIH grants continue to move through existing review channels, and the congressional prohibition on the earlier Vought plan remains in effect for the duration of the stopgap.

The planning risk is real nonetheless. Institutions with large NIH portfolios — Harvard foremost, given the president's stated priority — face a scenario where individual awards become subject to explicit political review. Research officers at affected institutions should treat pending renewals and competing applications as exposed until either the draft order surfaces or the next funding bill clarifies Congress's position.

The sequence to watch: whether Vought's draft order is completed and signed, whether the administration asserts it can operate around the stopgap provision, and whether Collins's Appropriations Committee attaches a permanent prohibition to the next appropriations vehicle.