A political veto over NIH grants could leave East Palestine in the dark

In February 2023, a Norfolk Southern train carrying vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio . Days later, officials vented and burned the chemicals, sending a black plume over our homes, our schools and our farms. I lived a mile away, raising my kids under a cloud of uncertainty.

Since then, my community has asked one question more than any other: What did this do to our bodies? Presidents and cabinet secretaries came. Cameras came. Most of them left.

The scientists stayed. They stayed because the National Institutes of Health funded them. Through the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences , researchers have spent years collecting blood, urine, air and soil samples from residents who volunteered their own bodies and homes as evidence.

One finding, published in Environmental Science & Technology , should stop anyone in their tracks. Our research team found HEMA, a breakdown product linked to vinyl chloride and related compounds, in the urine of 74 percent of East Palestine residents tested five months after the disaster. In a comparison group from Marietta, Ohio, they found it in none. Nationally, it shows up in about 5 percent of people.

That is what NIH funding buys: answers no one else would find. Now the White House wants to change how those dollars are awarded.

According to The New York Times , the Office of Management and Budget is drafting an executive order that would create an outside committee empowered to veto NIH grants that don’t fit the president’s political agenda. It grew out of a contentious Oval Office meeting where Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought accused NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya of funding work at odds with administration priorities. Bhattacharya has resisted.

For decades, NIH has picked projects the same way. Experts review the science and fund what is most likely to produce answers. A political committee would potentially ask a different question. Not “Is this good science?” but “Does this meet our agenda?”

That question should worry every community like mine. East Palestine is a small, conservative, working-class village. We are not an Ivy League campus, and we are not anyone’s culture war. But the research that serves us is exactly the kind of work that could land on a veto list.

Environmental health studies routinely produce findings inconvenient for powerful industries, including railroads. Research on how income, geography and occupation shape health outcomes is disparities research; a field already cut back under recent executive orders. Rural Appalachia lives inside those statistics as do many other marginalized communities across the nation.

A veto doesn’t have to be used often to do damage. Its existence is enough. Researchers planning the next decade of their careers will steer away from any study that might look political to someone at the Office of Management and Budget. Communities facing the next chemical disaster will find fewer scientists willing to show up.

And disasters keep happening. Derailments, industrial fires, wildfires and chemical spills happen every year, and each one leaves families asking what we asked. Some health effects take decades to appear. Children exposed today will not show certain outcomes until they are adults. Answering those questions requires following the same people for years. A grant that can be yanked midstream is a grant no one can plan around.

It also breaks trust, and trust is the hardest thing to rebuild. My neighbors did not hand over their blood and urine lightly. Many already felt abandoned by agencies that told them everything was fine. They participated, and continued to participate years later, because researchers promised to stay and to share what they found. If Washington can cancel that promise over the politics of a study, participants will stop believing any promise at all.

Congress has already shown it understands this. Lawmakers rejected the administration’s proposed cuts to biomedical research and blocked a rule injecting political review into federal grantmaking. That was the right call. But a temporary block won’t stop a permanent order.

Lawmakers should use this year’s appropriations bills to protect peer review in law, bar federal funds from supporting any body that can overrule expert review of NIH grants and protect awarded grants from political cancellation. This is not a partisan ask. Merit review has served Republican and Democratic administrations alike, and red counties just as well as blue ones.

East Palestine did not choose this disaster. We chose to help science answer it, for ourselves and for whoever is next. Which questions are worth asking is a judgment scientists spend careers learning to make. It is not one that a committee at the Office of Management and Budget is qualified to overrule.

Misti Allison is the Community Advisory Board chair of the East Palestine Train Derailment Health Research Program and founder of Disaster Voices Institute. She lives in East Palestine, Ohio.