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Trump’s grantmaking squeeze keeps turning routine science money into a political loyalty test
The White House’s August 2025 grantmaking push kept landing as a self-inflicted mess: an effort to put political appointees deeper into federal grant decisions, justified as anti-waste housekeeping but criticized as a direct way to choke off independent science and public-interest research. On August 10, the broader rollout was still drawing attention because it signaled that the administration wanted more control over who gets funded, why, and on what ideological terms.