Late last month, the Trump administration published a proposed rule that would set up a formal process for political appointees to review federal scientific and other grants. As the rule brings renewed attention to the politicization of our nation’s scientific agencies, we’d like to highlight one critical element of this: a shift to near-complete political control over communication about science.
We are former NIH program officials who resigned this past winter. Alexa served as deputy chief in the Prevention Research Branch at the National Institute on Drug Abuse; Sylvia was program director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute. In this essay, we share insights into the impact of censorship on the science and NIH decision-making processes and offer concrete actions that the academic community can take to defend science, truth and democracy.
We observed firsthand this administration’s ongoing suppression of the voices of scientists while increasing political appointees’ control over language and communication. This takeover includes centralizing staff communications, censorship of language by external researchers and attacks on research on health communication. As a community of academic researchers, we urgently need to stand up and safeguard our fundamental right to free speech.
Centralizing Staff Communications
The most obvious way in which officials have seized control is by restricting communication between NIH staff and the scientific community. On the second day of the administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes NIH, was ordered to halt most external communications—impacting peer-review meetings, conference travel and presentations, staff publications, and routine meetings with research investigators.
While communication eventually resumed, the control of information is now in the hands of political appointees, as the majority of NIH communications staff were laid off in April 2025. By March 2026, the LinkedIn accounts for almost all of the individual centers and institutes became inactive. Official NIH information comes from a few centrally controlled accounts. While these accounts carry the NIH name, functionally they belong to the Trump administration.
Similarly, while scientific staff are now able to give public talks again, any talks that touch on agency “priorities” or may have reporters in attendance are required to go through political review. Before resigning, Sylvia was asked to submit talking points and travel requests for political review to ensure the absence of any references to anything the administration might find objectionable (e.g., gender, “DEI,” misinformation and vaccines). Even if this kind of control gets relaxed in the future, we worry that the fear and conformity among staff will last long beyond this period.
Censoring Researchers Across the Country
Beyond controlling staff communications, the NIH grant funding process has been distorted by political review. Of course, the government doesn’t officially call it censorship—it’s described with more benign labels: “renegotiation” and “alignment with agency priorities.” A text-analysis tool now routinely flags grants that contain words that the administration finds suspicious, such as “health equity” and “structural racism.” Whether the words’ use is “scientifically appropriate” is decided by political appointees and not scientific staff. As a result, when a project’s merit rests in engagement with underserved populations, it may not be funded until the language is brought into conformity with political requirements.
It’s helpful to understand the mechanism by which the administration asserts this type of control. This censorship of researchers was justified through a series of executive orders: EO 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI …”; EO 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination …”; and EO 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth …” Consequently, research on health disparities experienced by sexual, gender, racial and ethnic minorities has been completely upended.
Through the “Defending Women” EO, the very concept of gender has been almost completely excluded from government research. This exclusion ignores the extensive scientific evidence and lived experience that shows us that gender identity is important in understanding health. This erasure is not simply rhetorical, but has deep and disturbing consequences, including limiting access to needed care for anyone transgender or intersex or whose identity does not conform to nonscientific assumptions about “biological truth.”
While the “Defending Women” EO explicitly redefines the concepts of “gender” and “sex,” the other two EOs about “DEI” avoid any definition of what they are talking about. The administration declares “DEI” illegal and de facto discriminatory without any reasoning beyond spelling out the acronym. The vagueness of what actually constitutes “DEI” has allowed the administration to lean on its most potent tool, the self-censorship of the scientific community. When they worry that the administration may take issue with a term or concept, researchers now routinely remove it from grant applications, institutional websites and, ultimately, the scientific record. Many consider self-censorship a necessary adaptation to maintain their projects and livelihoods, but this does not make such censorship any less insidious and consequential for the research enterprise and for democracy.
Attacking, ‘Realigning’ and ‘Renegotiating’ Health Communication Research
Health communication research aims to understand the most effective ways to inform and motivate people in making decisions that support their health and well-being. Access to high-quality health information is increasingly recognized as a critical determinant of health. Unfortunately, the politicization of this area of research started well before 2025. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, MAGA politicians conflated health communication with censorship or propaganda, causing NIH leaders to self-censor and pause an important research program.
As soon as Trump 2.0 took control, health communication quickly became one of the prime targets of terminations under the guise of “ending censorship in science.” Communication researchers had to revise grants by removing terms such as “media literacy,” “misinformation” and “persuasion” from their grants—if they were lucky enough not to have had their grants terminated outright. What’s particularly galling about this so-called renegotiation was that it took place at a time when NIH leadership was claiming to welcome dissent and restore academic freedom.
This administration’s dismantling of research on health communication is particularly noteworthy given the rise of unfounded medical claims. The MAHA movement, led by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is known for its promotion of fake cures and unfounded medical claims—hydroxychloroquine as a COVID cure, vaccines causing autism, therapeutics with no known benefits. Soon after Kennedy’s appointment, more than 40 studies on vaccine hesitancy were terminated. While MAHA associates gain power and money from sowing distrust in science and spreading misinformation, they are also hobbling research efforts to effectively communicate science to the public. The consequence is that falsehoods remain sticky and mistrust grows.
How Do We Fight for Free Speech and Information Access?
Through their control over NIH communication, the Trump administration is resetting norms around allowed scientific discourse and determining whose voices are audible in our democracy. But it goes beyond communication: We are starting to witness a culture of fear in science. While many consider the risk of exercising our right to free speech, it is just as important to consider the risk of not exercising our rights.
We were fortunate to join a group of courageous NIH colleagues who refused to look away. Our organizing work and whistleblowing efforts as part of the NIH Bethesda Declaration have offered a few tangible lessons for how to pursue this fight:
- Use your right to free speech. When you self-censor an idea in your research, favoring vague allusions or simply avoiding critical constructs, you are actively participating in shifting the norms of discourse. This contributes to making the topics you care about into taboos and makes it harder in the long term to support the health of all people and communities. In self-censoring, you also forgo the opportunity to create a record of how the government responds to your speech. Such records can be used by reporters, litigators and Congress to hold the administration to account. If we don’t assert our rights, we are giving them up willingly and allowing the bounds of allowed speech to contract. We understand self-censorship is a way of attempting to preserve critical work, but even when this is true, it does not stop the norm shifting that accompanies it. Everyone must keep their eyes open to this tension.
- Every bit of fighting effort counts. Not all resistance needs to be big and flashy. An important component of resisting the government’s control over language is naming it and questioning it. Asking a question in a team meeting, requesting clarification on a vague directive, honestly expressing a dissenting view to decision-makers and creating written documentation of decisions are all ways to hold truth to power. When we pass up the opportunities to take these actions, both from inside and outside the government, pushing back becomes harder. When we take these opportunities, we signal to ourselves and others that even if we are forced to comply, we know that the directive is wrong. We make our discomfort (or disgust) known. We signal our rejection of the facade of normalcy, and we may make those enforcing the illegal or unethical rules uncomfortable with their actions.
- Grow a community of truth tellers. We are familiar with the despair that comes with feeling that one’s individual actions are too insignificant to push against the tide. The key to overcoming despair is to become part of a community that supports one another and work toward engaging in collective action. Even a coffee meet-up to recognize the discomfort of an endangered scientific enterprise can provide validation for what you are experiencing. That validation can grow into courage to resist in the ways that feel right to you. We are stronger and more effective together. One of the most powerful actions you can take is to invite others into an honest conversation.
Censorship begins with word deletions and alterations, but expands as an increasingly authoritarian government flexes its control over not just the words, but the questions and ideas that citizens can express. We must work together to safeguard our fundamental values and ensure that all Americans have access to credible health information, before propaganda and pseudoscience take over the scientific enterprise.
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