By Sheeva Azma
Did the Trump administration violate federal law by withholding science grants? A Congressional watchdog report says yes.
I’m all about scientists organizing to make their voices heard. That’s why, on August 12, 2025, I gave a teach-in with Stand Up for Science (SUFS) about the importance of Article I and Congress’s constitutional powers, and how executive actions to defund science may be unconstitutional, according to a recent report. Check out a recap in this post!
SUFS is a political movement founded to restore federal funding for scientific research; I worked with them to organize a Stand Up for Science rally in Oklahoma City in March 2025. It was a great day of solidarity with science and scientists.
The Trump administration’s actions on science started the day President Trump was sworn into office. Right after being sworn into office, President Trump signed a slew of executive orders, which immediately froze federal grant applications and halted all outgoing science communications from the federal government.
“It’s unclear whether this action was purely symbolic … or reflective of a shift in science communication and even science priorities in the second Trump Administration,” I told Simon Spichak of Being Patient back then.
Things got worse after that for US science funding. Here’s a somewhat comprehensive timeline of federal actions on higher education funding, including science funding, in case you feel like reading up on the topic.
As the defunding of science and even select educational institutions such as Harvard and Columbia has progressed, the words of Richard Nixon have echoed in my mind. The former president was quoted in the documentary “MIT: Regressions.” President Nixon had a list of scientists he hated, such as Jerome Wiesner, who was president of MIT; Nixon openly talked about defunding MIT and giving that research funding to universities in states with political environments that were less hostile to him, such as Oklahoma. He also felt that the National Science Foundation was getting too much money and was a source of federal waste, so he started cutting contracts.
It turns out that President Nixon’s talk about defunding science wasn’t just talk — what the did by taking away Congressionally-appropriated funds is called impoundment. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities defines “impoundment” as “a deliberate action by the President to withhold some funding that Congress has enacted in an appropriations bill, so that not all of it would be used during the period for which it is made available.”
In response to President Nixon’s impoundment, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. This act, as explained by the Congressional Research Service, amended existing laws on the books – namely, the Antideficiency Act – to limit impounding and defining the ways funds can be impounded.
According to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, The two categories of legally acceptable impoundments are called deferrals, in which spending is temporarily delayed, and recissions, which provide a way for Congress to take back funds they have already appropriated. That is what happened with the Big, Beautiful Bill Act which was passed by Congress – it was a recissions bill that defunded a variety of programs, including public media and more.
A report published on August 5, 2025 by the independent Congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, finds the Trump administration in violation of federal law by violating the Impoundment Control Act in its cancellation of NIH funds. “Based on publicly available evidence and the lack of any special message pertaining to NIH funds, GAO concludes that NIH violated the ICA by withholding funds from obligation and expenditure,” the report states.
Though not legally binding, the GAO reports are a trusted source of information for Congress, and may influence their future voting behavior. It is also of note that whether or not it was constitutional to terminate some NIH grants is the subject of a legal matter under review by the Supreme Court called APHA v NIH. In this case, the American Public Health Association argues that the cancellation of NIH grants due to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives violates not only federal laws but also separation of powers as defined in the Constitution. (Recall from our earlier discussion of impoundment in this post that Congress has the “power of the purse.”)
The Supreme Court has weighed in on this case, both in favor of and not in favor of the Trump administration. On August 21, as the American Civil Liberties Union writes, the Supreme Court ruled “that the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts likely lacked jurisdiction to review the termination of research grants by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) targeting research on disfavored topics and populations. However, the Supreme Court declined to stay the district court’s conclusion that the NIH’s directives violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).” The APA governs how federal agencies do their work, requiring agencies to provide notice to the public and collect public comment on proposed rules, and above all strives to ensure transparency and procedural uniformity in the administrative process of running a federal agency.
The Massachusetts district court held that the NIH was “breathtakingly arbitrary and capricious” in cancelling the research, and when the government requested a stay on the decision, US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit refused to side with the government. Only time will tell whether this represents a strengthening of the executive branch or if the legislative branch may counter with formal legislation specifying, in greater detail, how NIH funds are appropriated and can be withdrawn.
If this all seems complicated to you, remember the following words from Richard Nixon that I used to open my teach-in. It reminded me so much of the current time that I could not believe it. The clip starts at 1:28:36 and goes until 1:33:10 and you can watch it here.
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