Many scientists and scientific organizations, such as Stand Up For Science, are mobilizing to stop the May 29 proposal by Russell Vought and his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for new rules which would cut federal funding and impose restrictions on research programs. These new rules would impact national laboratories, universities, research hospitals, or people collaborating with any of these institutions.
Under the new rules, political appointees—not scientists—would control research programs, and all research would be required to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” Active research projects could be terminated with each shift of the political winds. The OMB would no longer give “guidance” to independent research programs, but instead control the research through new regulations and requirements. Under the revised text, the term “guidance” has been replaced with “regulation” and “requirement.” All foreign collaboration is discouraged, if not forbidden. The prohibition on NASA collaboration with China is reaffirmed. American scientists would not be allowed to collaborate with international projects such as Europe’s CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, because it allows participation from scientists from around the world. Despite the Trump administration’s mantra of “efficiency,” the new rules (411-pages long) will only add to the paperwork needed to apply for a federal research grant.
Some scientists say that instead of funding science, the OMB rule change is designed to create a “political slush fund.” It would dismantle the US science ecosystem, and the OMB is bracing for many legal challenges. Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) program official Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi wrote on Substack that “the United States built the world’s preeminent scientific enterprise on a straightforward principle: federal dollars should fund the best science, as determined by independent experts rather than politicians. Peer review, open competition, and institutional autonomy were the pillars of that system. This proposed rule dismantles all three, simultaneously.”
