This bill prohibits political appointees from managing NIH programs or participating in NIH funding decisions, and prevents the NIH from unilaterally canceling existing research agreements without documented findings of mismanagement or fraud.
Diana DeGette
Representative
CO-1
The Follow the Science Act aims to insulate the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from political influence by prohibiting most political appointees from working on or managing NIH programs. This legislation specifically bars political employees from participating in the review, selection, or awarding of NIH grants and contracts. Furthermore, it restricts the NIH Director from canceling or delaying existing funding agreements unless specific findings of mismanagement or fraud are documented and reported to Congress.
Follow the Science Act: New Rules to Strip Political Appointees from NIH Funding Decisions and Grant Management
The Follow the Science Act is designed to build a firewall between politics and the laboratory by legally barring political appointees from the day-to-day operations and funding decisions at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Under this bill, the people who decide which medical research gets funded—whether it's for cancer, rare diseases, or pandemic preparedness—must be career scientists and civil servants, not political picks. While the top leaders of the NIH and the National Cancer Institute remain presidential appointees, the rest of the agency’s management and its massive grant-making machine would be strictly off-limits to anyone in a 'political employee' role. This includes everything from high-level department heads to 'Schedule C' staffers who typically handle confidential policy work for an administration.
Keeping the Lab Coats in Charge
The bill specifically targets the money trail. Section 4 prohibits political employees from having any say in soliciting, reviewing, or awarding grants and contracts. Think of it like this: if a university researcher is working on a breakthrough for diabetes, their funding shouldn't depend on whether their findings align with a specific administration’s talking points. By removing political staffers from the 'scoring' and 'selection' process, the bill aims to ensure that tax dollars follow the best science rather than the best political optics. However, this broad ban could be a double-edged sword; by defining 'political employee' so widely, the NIH might lose out on experts who have deep policy experience but happen to hold non-career appointments.
No More Mid-Stream Cutoffs
One of the most practical changes for the research community is found in Section 5, which makes it much harder for the government to suddenly pull the plug on active projects. Currently, the government has fairly broad leeway to cancel or suspend contracts. This bill flips the script: the NIH Director can only stop a grant if they issue a written finding of specific 'malfeasance,' 'research fraud,' or 'financial mismanagement.' If you’re a scientist halfway through a five-year study, or a patient participating in a clinical trial, this provision acts as a safety net, ensuring the project isn't derailed by a change in political winds. The trade-off is that it could make the NIH slower to react if a project is simply underperforming but hasn't reached the level of 'fraud.'
Looking Back to Move Forward
To ensure everyone is playing by the new rules, the bill requires a bit of a 'look-back' audit. Within 30 days of the law passing, the NIH Director must hand over a report to Congress detailing every time a political employee was involved in funding decisions between January 2021 and the present. This transparency measure is meant to clear the air about past influence, but it also signals a shift toward much tighter Congressional oversight. For the average person, this means more accountability for how billions of health-research dollars are spent, though it does add a layer of bureaucratic reporting that the NIH administration will have to juggle alongside their actual mission of curing diseases.