Pharma CEO silence is complicity in the destruction of U.S. science

Why leaders of the U.S.’s biggest drug companies should use their influence to stop a ruinous proposal

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has poured gas on the foundations of science. Pharma CEOs should demand that President Donald Trump take away the matches. 

For more than a year, the Trump administration has been weakening the institutions that made the United States the global leader in biomedical innovation. This week, Vought revealed that the objective is not merely to shrink the federal research enterprise, but to make it subservient to political and ideological objectives.

Vought’s proposed rule would require senior political appointees to review and approve every discretionary federal grant before it is awarded, explicitly barring them from deferring to peer reviewers, and would mandate that all grant programs align with the president’s policy priorities, rather than scientific need or expert consensus. It seeks to introduce ideological tests on applicants and institutions that receive grants, bar most international scientific collaboration, and allow political appointees to cancel grants at any time without providing an explanation. The proposal also would allow agencies to make grants that haven’t been publicly announced, opening the process to corruption and favoritism.

If implemented, the proposal would represent the most serious assault on U.S. science since World War II. Even those who agree with the Trump administration’s views on social and political issues should be alarmed. Future administrations with very different views may not abandon the temptation to wield control over scientific funding to advance ideological agendas.

The danger is obvious. So is the list of people who may be able to stop it.

The CEOs of some of the largest pharmaceutical companies have spent the past year negotiating with the White House on tariffs, drug pricing and manufacturing policy. They have secured private meetings with Trump. Many of them have his cellphone number and have used it to secure concessions, demonstrating that they possess influence when they choose to use it.

As the administration moves from cutting budgets and attacking elite universities to dismantling the foundations of the U.S. research enterprise, pharma CEOs have remained silent.

Their silence is a choice.

The argument, advanced privately by some industry leaders, that intervention would be futile is not credible. Technology executives recently persuaded the administration to abandon a proposed executive order on artificial intelligence. Agricultural interests successfully rolled back one of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s signature initiatives, banning the herbicide glyphosate. There are other similar examples.

Trump changes course when confronted by powerful constituencies.

Pharmaceutical executives are one of those constituencies.

The question is not whether David Ricks, Joaquin Duato, Robert Michael, Robert Davis, Robert Bradway, Daniel O’Day, Albert Bourla, Christopher Boerner and Leonard Schleifer can get Donald Trump's attention.

The question is whether they are willing to use their influence to defend the scientific enterprise that made their companies possible.

Pharma CEOs can’t shift responsibility to less influential industry leaders.

Eloquent letters signed by a thousand biotech CEOs and investors who Trump has never heard of will not convince him to change policy advocated by Vought, the Heritage Foundation, and Silicon Valley techno-libertarians.

A year and a half of destruction

Vought’s proposal is not emerging in isolation. It is the culmination of 16 months of attacks on the institutions that sustain biomedical research.

NIH has terminated about 2,300 active research grants, withdrawing $2.45 billion of grant funding and disrupting thousands of projects, including at least 160 clinical trials in cancer, HIV/AIDS and chronic diseases.

NIH published only 14 new funding opportunity announcements through mid-March 2026, compared with 756 in all of 2024, and a new policy requiring multi-year grants to be funded with a single upfront lump sum has caused grant success rates at some institutes to fall from 1-in-10 to 1-in-25.

Early career investigators were disproportionately affected by terminations.

Despite courts reversing some terminations, only 35% of researchers whose grants were cut or delayed reported their funding had been fully restored by the end of 2025.

The White House’s proposed FY26 budget would cut NIH funding by about 40%, to an inflation-adjusted level lower than at any point in the past 25 years, though Congress has proposed more modest reductions.

New rules have made international scientific collaboration impossible or imprudent for NIH-funded researchers.

This is just a sampling of the damage.

Arguments that NIH was far from perfect prior to 2025 are both correct and irrelevant. Pointing out that my roof has a leak does not justify burning down my house.

Just getting started

The damage inflicted over the past 16 months is prologue.

The OMB’s proposal for overhauling U.S. government grantmaking would explicitly subordinate expert peer review to political gatekeepers and make ideological alignment with the administration a prerequisite for funding.

It would be illegal for NIH to award a grant without the assent of a senior political appointee who is required to apply political and ideological filters to the decision. Grant programs will be required to focus on the administration’s agenda, not scientific merit or expert consensus about social needs.

In addition to giving political appointees power to veto any grant with no accountability, the proposal seeks to bar awarding grants to individuals who are affiliated with organizations that are deemed to threaten public safety or national security. There would be no accountability built into the system, no requirement for the government to say why it denied a grant, and no mechanism for appealing rejections based on an individual’s affiliations.

The Trump administration has taken a broad view of what constitutes threats to safety and national security.

The proposal goes further than seeking to bar individuals affiliated with disfavored organizations. It would apply to entire institutions: if a university hosts a gender studies department, employs faculty working on prohibited topics, or has signed climate commitment pledges, it could face termination of its entire grant portfolio.

Organizations that few would consider radical have crossed the Trump administration’s redlines. BIO advocates “diversity, equity & inclusion.” BIO and PhRMA promote clinical trials diversity.

Both PhRMA and BIO have formally endorsed climate action as a policy priority.

These positions mean that researchers affiliated with either organization, or funded through programs those organizations support, could be characterized under the OMB proposal’s affiliation disqualification as connected to entities that promote “issue advocacy” on a “social or political position” at odds with administration priorities.

The Sierra Club, American Association for the Advancement of Science, NAACP, American Medical Association have all advocated policies the Trump administration labels ideologically divisive, “woke” or worse. 

As Elizabeth Ginexi, a former NIH program officer, has written, the OMB proposal would dismantle the pillars that have held up U.S. science funding since World War II: peer review, open competition and institutional autonomy.

Vought’s proposal would closely align the U.S. grantmaking system with policies in countries the U.S. government criticizes for stifling academic freedom.

Some of the elements go further than China’s policies, at least on paper. For example, Vought wants to make peer review of grants advisory and non-binding. While China imposes broad policies intended to ensure grants fund projects aligned with government policies, it formally requires expert peer review to serve as the primary selection mechanism for individual grants.

While Vought wants to prevent U.S. scientists from working with colleagues in other countries, China encourages international collaboration.

The pharmaceutical industry owes an enormous debt to the U.S. research enterprise. Every major drug company has built on discoveries that originated in federally funded research.

The deadline for submitting comments to OMB ends July 13. Industry stakeholders should take advantage of the opportunity, but a pressure campaign directed to Trump and the White House is far more likely to be effective than arguments submitted to the docket. 

It is also possible that the proposal, if finalized, will be fought in the courts. Litigation, however, is uncertain. 

The leaders of the industry’s largest companies understand exactly what is at stake. They understand the consequences of replacing peer review with political review. They understand the damage that would result if universities lose funding because of ideology rather than scientific performance. And they understand that once the foundations of the system are dismantled, rebuilding them could take decades.

They will be judged not by what they understood, but by what they did. 

Signed commentaries do not necessarily reflect the views of BioCentury.