Thursday dropped a 412-page bomb. The White House released draft regulations. If they pass, political appointees get the final say. On every federal research grant. Everywhere.
The rules go live Friday. They land in the Federal Register. Control shifts to the Office of Management and Budget. Russell Vought runs the show there. He wrote Project 2025 for the Heritage Foundation. The plan designed this administration’s structure from the ground up.
The document admits things were messy before. The “Background” section complains. It cites a “’woke’ policy agenda that deliberately favored certain identitygroups over others.” The blame? Biden. The fix? Presidential priorities. Now a politician has to sign off. Even on science. Especially on race and gender issues.
Peer review is dead. Well, barely alive.
For years, experts judged the work. At NIH. At NSF. Unbiased committees decided who got money. No more. The proposal calls senior appointees’ reviews mandatory. Experts are just advisors now. The text is blunt.
Peer review … “remains advisory and doesnot replace agency discretion”
Colette Delawalla warned us a year ago. She founded Stand Up for Science. She sees the damage. “We warned of this exact formof government overreach in science.” She says it decouples the U.S. globally. It guts the system. She’s probably right.
Trump’s executive order sparked this mess last year. Courts slapped it down. Thousands of grants got terminated illegally. The courts said stop. So the White House changed tactics. They gave appointees discretion now. “Termination based on thediscretion of the agency,” the paper says. It’s the same power. Just different paperwork.
Did they fix the overhead caps?
No. Congress killed the 15 percent cap attempt earlier. That stays gone. But the new rules nudge schools with low indirect costs. Cheap labs win. Expensive ones lose. It’s a soft pressure tactic.
The clock is ticking. Hard.
Forty-five days to comment. Matt Owens from the Council on Government Relations says it’s too fast. He represents 150 universities. You don’t rewrite a national research engine in six weeks. You certainly shouldn’t.
But who are they listening to? Maybe nobody. Maybe just the OMB. We’ll see what Friday brings. Probably more confusion.
