For more than a dozen years, I served on federal scientific review panels. My colleagues were serious, conscientious, and deeply knowledgeable in their fields. But the process was also far less mechanical, objective, and insulated from judgment than many public defenders of peer review suggest.
That matters now because the Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed having senior political appointees conduct a "pre-issuance review" of every discretionary NIH grant. The proposal indeed raises serious concerns. It would create a standing mechanism for political officials to second-guess scientific awards before they are issued. Once built, such a mechanism would not belong only to this administration. It would be available to every future administration, with whatever priorities, orthodoxies, enemies, or enthusiasms it brings to power.
But opposing political review does not mean we should pretend the current system is pristine. That is where the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), in their recent criticism of the proposal, missed an opportunity. They are right to worry about political control of science. But they leaned on a too-comforting account of how scientific funding works now.
