On Friday, The Washington Post reported on a contentious White House meeting in which the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, tried to fend off yet another effort to place funding decisions under political control. The move came from Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has sought to limit and control research funds. The Post suggested that Bhattacharya ended up on the losing side of the fight. This initial leak has been confirmed and expanded on by outlets such as The New York Times and Politico. It now appears that the administration is drafting an executive order that would give Vought veto power over every individual grant awarded by the NIH.

The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, and its $47 billion budget is larger than that of the next 10 research funders combined. But Vought seems to feel that it has funded a lot of “woke” research. Immediately after Trump re-entered the Oval Office, the agency terminated a broad range of grants on topics like pandemic preparedness and health disparities and proposed a budget that would shrink the NIH by nearly half. That cut was rejected by Congress, and the policy behind the NIH grant terminations was also voided by a court. Vought responded to these setbacks by proposing new grant funding rules that would make political considerations key determinants in which grants get funded. Congress put that rule on hold, too.

Apparently dissatisfied with simply blocking funding for entire fields of research and frustrated by Congress, Vought decided to have another go at the NIH’s grants. According to the Politico report, he leveraged one of Trump’s weaknesses: a desire to harm Harvard University. In the White House meeting, Vought reportedly presented OMB control of NIH grants as an alternate means of targeting Harvard. Bhattacharya, to his credit, objected.

That objection was not a foregone conclusion. Bhattacharya remains upset that his ideas regarding the COVID pandemic—let it spread largely unchecked—were sidelined, and he has treated his NIH post as an opportunity to right perceived wrongs. So there were plenty of reasons to think that he might be equally willing to go along with Vought’s ideas. But he appears to have lost, so all NIH grants will now be subject to approval by a committee that includes both Vought and Bhattacharya. Unless that committee agrees unanimously that the grant should go forward, the funding will be rejected. It’s not at all clear how this will work in a practical sense. During the Biden administration, the NIH funded over 64,000 grants a year.