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 homes, schools, and farms. Misti Allison, who lived a mile away, recalls raising her kids under a cloud of uncertainty.
Since then, the community's most persistent question has been: What did this do to our bodies? Presidents, cabinet secretaries, and media crews came and went, but scientists stayed—because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 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 as evidence.
One finding, published in Environmental Science & Technology, is stark: HEMA, a breakdown product linked to vinyl chloride, was found in the urine of 74% of East Palestine residents tested five months after the disaster. In a comparison group from Marietta, Ohio, none tested positive. Nationally, it appears in about 5% 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 (OMB) is drafting an executive order that would create an outside committee empowered to veto NIH grants that don't align with the president's political agenda. The move follows a contentious Oval Office meeting where OMB Director Russell Vought accused NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya of funding work at odds with administration priorities. Bhattacharya has resisted.
For decades, NIH has selected projects through expert peer review, funding the science most likely to yield answers. A political committee would instead ask: Does this meet our agenda? That question should worry every community like East Palestine—a small, conservative, working-class village that is not part of any culture war. But the research that serves this community is exactly the kind that could land on a veto list.
Environmental health studies often produce findings inconvenient for powerful industries, including railroads. Research on how income, geography, and occupation shape health outcomes—disparities research—has already been cut back under recent executive orders. Rural Appalachia, like many marginalized communities, lives inside those statistics. A veto doesn't have to be used often to do damage; its mere existence is enough. Researchers planning their careers will steer away from studies that might look political to OMB, leaving fewer scientists willing to show up after the next chemical disaster.
Disasters keep happening—derailments, industrial fires, wildfires, and chemical spills. Some health effects take decades to appear, so long-term follow-up is essential. A grant that can be yanked midstream is a grant no one can plan around. It also breaks trust. Residents handed over blood and urine reluctantly, many already feeling abandoned by agencies that told them everything was fine. They continued participating because researchers promised to stay and share findings. If Washington can cancel that promise over politics, 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. 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 both parties and all regions.
East Palestine did not choose this disaster, but it chose to help science answer it. Which questions are worth asking is a judgment scientists spend careers learning to make—not one that an OMB committee is qualified to overrule. As Senator Collins has warned, politicizing NIH grants undermines public trust. And as attacks on independent institutions escalate, the stakes extend far beyond one Ohio town.
