Ximena Solorzano, Staff Photographer

On Wednesday, the White House budget office pulled back the order that would freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants.

Originally, the order was an attempt to purge the government of what President Donald Trump has called the “woke” ideology. Yesterday, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director for the Office of Management and Budget, stated that the funding freeze had been rescinded. Before the order was pulled back, a federal judge in Washington ordered a temporary halt to the freeze in response to a lawsuit filed by the Democracy Forward activist group.

Despite the pullback on the funding freeze order, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on Wednesday afternoon that “this is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.” 

She explained that the president’s orders on federal funding “remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.” Last week, Trump ordered the review and elimination of spending on “woke” ideologies.

After the initial budget office memo was issued, federal agencies were presented with a series of “yes or no” questions about funding programs to be answered by Feb. 7. The questions are reported to have included “does this program promote gender ideology?” and “does this program promote or support in any way abortion?”

Leavitt added that “in the coming weeks and months, more executive action will continue to end the egregious waste of federal funding.”

Prior to this pullback of the funding freeze order, the acting NIH director, Dr. Matthew Memoli, also issued a preliminary update to NIH staff stating that all NIH and NIH-funded clinical trials may continue.

Memoli emphasized that essential spending and contracting may also continue for research experiments that started before Jan. 20. This was to ensure “that this work can continue, and we do not lose our investment in these studies,” Memoli wrote in the update. 

While communications are still on hold, NIH could soon resume reviewing new grants. 

“This is a short pause to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization,” Memoli wrote.

In fiscal year 2024, Yale received $899 million in federal funding.

ZOE BEKETOVA
Zoe Beketova covers Yale New Haven Hospital for the SciTech desk. From London, UK, she is a graduate student at the School of Medicine studying Developmental Neuroscience.