President Donald Trump directed budget chief Russ Vought to draft an executive order creating a board of political appointees to oversee National Institutes of Health grant awards. The proposed board would require unanimous decisions to award $48 billion in research funding and would include officials such as Vought and Bhattacharya. This shift follows an Oval Office meeting last Friday where the NIH Director rejected a request to cut funding to Harvard University.

A separate Politico report detailed an overhaul of White House AI strategy over an 85 day period during the spring and summer. Treasury Secretary Bessent and Sean Cairncross pressured Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to close access to the Fable AI model after the administration questioned the company's self-certification of risks. Bessent described Amodei's refusal to shut down the model as a "bad decision."