Trump Is Making a Terrifying Power Grab at the NIH

President Donald Trump is looking for a way to veto billions of dollars’ worth of scientific grants from the National Institutes of Health in order to punish elite universities.

Following a contentious meeting Friday, the White House began drafting an executive order that would establish an external committee to oversee NIH grants and keep federal funding away from schools that fail to comply with the president’s agenda.

During the meeting, Trump had repeatedly complained that the NIH hadn’t done more to crack down on Harvard University and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The meeting reportedly brought the simmering conflict between Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, to a head. Vought accused Bhattacharya of funding projects that contradicted the administration’s priorities to gut diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at the expense of scientific research.

In June 2025, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s initial efforts to cut more than $1.81 billion from DEI-related grants constituted illegal racial discrimination. A few months later, another federal judge blocked the White House’s attempt to freeze $2 billion in federal research funding from Harvard University. Earlier this year, the White House wanted to impose a political test on federal grants, but was rebuked by the scientific community and blocked by Congress.

Still, under the second Trump administration, the NIH has already slashed more than half a billion dollars in medical research on some of the leading causes of death in America—and all for political reasons.

During the meeting Friday, Vought also sought to access NIH funds for the year that had not already been spent, but he was denied. This move follows allegations that the Department of Defense has tried to steal cash from the NIH in order to fund Trump’s disastrous war in the Middle East.

South Dakota’s outgoing secretary of state, a Republican, is endorsing a Democrat to replace her.

Monae Johnson, whose job includes administering elections, is supporting Terrence Davis, a former police officer, in November’s upcoming election, The New York Times reports. Johnson lost the Republican Party nomination at the state party’s convention in June to Heather Baxter, a state representative who supports President Trump’s crackdown on voting rights.

“I understand that this decision will disappoint some people in my party and anger others,” Johnson wrote for a political blog, the South Dakota War College, on Saturday.

“South Dakota deserves a Secretary of State who will strengthen confidence through performance rather than provocation; who will support election officials rather than burden them for political effect; who will protect voter access and election security without pretending those goals are enemies; and who will treat the office’s employees, voters, candidates, and business owners with dignity,” Johnson added.

Johnson was elected to the position in 2022 on promises to prevent election fraud and manipulation, including the hand counting of ballots and audits of every precinct in South Dakota. She even refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden was the winner of the 2020 presidential election. But after being elected, she did not institute many of the changes she promised during her campaign.

Though she did end up establishing a process for auditing precincts, Republicans at the state convention decided it wasn’t enough and ultimately decided to withdraw their support and back Baxter.

“In June, Republican delegates considered the record and nominated me over incumbent Secretary of State Monae Johnson, 59 percent to 41 percent,” Baxter said in a statement Sunday. “That was not confusion. That was self-government in action. The letter beside a name is not decoration. It tells voters what governing philosophy they will carry into the office that runs our elections and business services.”

Election denialism and an obsession with nonexistent fraud is now a prerequisite for Republicans holding office, thanks to Trump. Johnson, who worked in the secretary of state’s office for eight years before she ran and won, doesn’t want South Dakota’s election run by someone who will further undermine democracy.

President Donald Trump announced that he wants to build a military complex in a public traffic circle—as part of a strange bid to save his plans for his Triumphal Arch.

Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday that he plans to build a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” in order to store and launch drones that would be guarded by snipers. The president claimed the project came “at the strong request of the United States Military” and was for “National Security purposes.”

It was immediately clear that this was a terrible idea.

Virginia Representative Don Beyer called Trump’s plan “idiotic,” and pointed out that establishing a drone launching site so close to Ronald Reagan National Airport was incredibly dangerous. FWIW, planting snipers in an active traffic circle doesn’t sound like a great idea, either.

The decision to loudly declare the construction of a military storage facility within spitting distance of the Pentagon also doesn’t seem like the best way to safeguard national security—so what exactly is Trump up to?

Trump’s announcement comes after the National Park Service warned that the Triumphal Arch would be harmful to other historical landmarks, including the nearby Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.

Similarly to Trump’s controversial White House ballroom, which he claimed will provide a secure underground facility in case of a national emergency (even though one already exists), it appears that the president believes that tying his frivolous construction projects to national security will help them actually get built.

But Trump’s reason for all these construction projects is much more pathetic: He thinks that no one will honor him after he’s gone.

The entire presidential television press pool has agreed to suspend their coverage in the wake of President Trump’s decision to ban CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House.

The TV press pool specifically is made up of five networks: Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. The networks rotate their coverage, and CNN had been assigned to cover Trump on Monday. But a White House email on Sunday listed neither CNN nor any of the other networks as TV pool. Indeed, all five networks have banded together to protest the ban on CNN.

That means none of the major outlets will broadcast Trump’s visit to New York on Monday ahead of the United Nations General Assembly this week. Conservative outlet Real America’s Voice—host of The Charlie Kirk Show—will be the only station working in the out of town pool and traveling with the president.

”This is to advise that, effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President,” said Fox News’s Bryan Boughton, who serves as television pool chair. “This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place.”

The five networks later released a joint statement.

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government,” it read. “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

CNN, Politico, and MS NOW have already filed a lawsuit against Trump’s ban, writing Monday that “without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”

“This is not a tantrum by three media outlets who are upset because they can’t get into the White House or the Oval Office.... This is a serious concern for the public, because an attack on one outlet is an attack on everyone, no matter where that outlet falls on the political spectrum,” CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang said Sunday on Fox News. “America cannot have state TV.... That’s what makes America America.”

This story has been updated.

Moments before Donald Trump banned three of America’s biggest news organizations from the White House Friday, he was chatting with Natalie Harp.

His beloved executive aide had reportedly shown Trump a compilation of coverage from MS NOW in which several broadcasters flamed Trump’s administration. The president was already irate that his executive decisions (most notably, the financially deleterious and illegal Kennedy Center rebrand) did not have more defenders, but the clips pushed his mounting frustrations to a “fever pitch,” The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Hours later, Trump banned MS NOW from the White House, alongside CNN and Politico.

The unprecedented move caught most of the White House by surprise, according to sources that spoke with the Journal. Nonetheless, they immediately got to work putting Trump’s plan into action. By Saturday, the outlets’ reporters were officially barred.

A White House official noted that senior staffers were with the president when he made the announcement. One senior official was exasperated when they spoke to the Journal, remarking that the ban would do little to improve the tone of Trump’s press coverage.

“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

Trump did not identify specific stories that he felt fell into that category, though earlier in the day, he lamented online that “CNN is so dishonest.”

“Everything they say is slanted against the Republican Party,” Trump wrote. “They are truly FAKE NEWS!”

Trump has floated the idea of banning news entities from the White House several times before, but he never actually went through with it. That was reportedly thanks to his aides, who were previously able to convince him that there were other, less obvious avenues to restricting access to the executive mansion, such as limiting reporters’ participation in the press pool.

But Trump has made it his mission since he first descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to sow public distrust in America’s news institutions. Time and again he has said the less-than-devotional coverage of his political campaigns, his fraudulent business practices, his dubious personal connections, and his presidential administrations are tantamount to “fake news.”

In recent years, Trump has aggressively pursued legal action against several major news entities, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC News, and CBS News (as well as the broadcaster’s parent company, Paramount). He also sued the Des Moines Register, its parent company Gannett, and pollster J. Ann Selzer in December 2024, retroactively claiming that presidential polls the paper had published prior to Election Day were election interference.