Laughably, unhappy scientists complain proposed grant system overhaul could politicize research funding — as if that weren’t already happening.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is proposing major changes to the rules that govern how federal grants, cooperative agreements, and other financial assistance are managed across the government. The goals are to increase oversight of how taxpayer money is used, align awards with current law and administration policy, and reduce what OMB views as unnecessary burdens on recipients.
These changes apply to all federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The 412-page behemoth certainly has the potential to shake up the science-industrial complex that has gutted American trust in science to a meager 36%.
“OMB has proposed revising the rules that govern how federal dollars are spent. The changes would inevitably lead to unlegislated reductions in funding and damage US leadership in science, both in academia and industry.” via @ScienceMagazine https://t.co/sJx1eIVF7h pic.twitter.com/RSHWTAcW8w
— RealClearScience (@RCScience) June 3, 2026
Among the action items embedded in this OMB plan, the new rules would allow agencies to terminate awards if they conclude that a grant “does not effectuate program goals, federal agency priorities, or the national interest as they exist at the time of the termination,” and also under any additional termination provisions written into award terms. This substantially widens discretion beyond classic noncompliance or performance failures.
Given the grants that continued to fund Wuhan bat virus research, the ability to slash funds for dangerous research should be viewed as a positive.
The proposed rules would also forbid spending federal funds on publication costs (e.g., journal publication fees), which is a significant departure from longstanding practice and directly affects the dissemination of research funded by federal grants.
OMB is revising the section to make publication costs unallowable unless such costs are expressly required by statute or approved in advance by the Federal agency on a case-by-case basis. This change reflects OMB’s objective to strengthen stewardship of Federal funds and ensure that Federal financial assistance is directed toward achieving the programmatic objectives of the award. Publication costs are not inherently necessary to carry out the core programmatic objectives of most Federal awards. In many cases, such activities are discretionary, vary widely in scope and costs, and may serve institutional, professional, or reputational interests rather than the specific objectives of the Federal program.
I would argue that taxpayer monies have essentially allowed journals to become echo chambers of the preferred narratives. The “old-fashioned” way of publication funding may be part of the reason that so many sound scientific theories and data deviating from that presented as “true science” haven’t been able to find their way into the scientific debate and discourse — which goes directly against the principles of the scientific method that is a bedrock of our modern era.
The new requirements also fold in a series of prior executive actions, including those restricting DEI programs and related institutional activities, effectively making them baseline conditions for receipt and management of federal funds. They also prohibit the funding of anything promoting gender ideology or the transitioning of minors.
Of course, the elite scientific community is in hysteria. This passage from Nature is an example of the caterwauling on the subject.
Many comments were from prominent researchers, such as leading oceanographer Dawn Wright, chief scientist of Esri, a global company specializing in geographic information system software, in Redlands, California, who wrote that the proposal “is dangerous and absolutely politicizes science”.
Suzanne Segerstrom, a biostatistician at Oregon State University in Corvallis, wrote: “This regulation harms taxpayers, harms Americans’ health, and contravenes federal policy. I am in strong opposition.”
…The proposal is a “brazen power grab by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and will make future discoveries less likely”, said Sudip Parikh, the chief executive officer of scientific society American Association for the Advancement of Science, in a statement. The American Society for Cell Biology described it as a “massive threat to American science”.
NPR pushes the idea of “peer review” as the great protector of The Science™ .
Since the post-World War II period, the U.S. scientific community has relied heavily on a system of peer review to offer feedback on studies and maintain integrity in research. The same has been true for federal science agencies when evaluating proposals for research funding. Typically, agencies adopt recommendations from independent advisory committees on issues including vaccine schedules, environmental standards, or census methodology.
While not legally binding, peer review in practice has been enormously influential and become part of the norms of government.
“ While it’s been true that peer review panels have always been treated as advisory by agencies, it was usually the combination of peer review with a non-political career expert at an agency that made the determination of whether to issue an award or not,” said Donovan.
However there has been a cascade of fraudulent, AI-slop science papers that have been “peer reviewed.”
In fact, back in 2024, researchers created a fake eye disease called “bixonimania” to see whether AI chatbots would repeat it as if it were real. Not only was that fake disease diagnosed, but it made it into “peer reviewed” journals.
Then, there was the Dr. Anthony Fauci-led paper, also “peer reviewed,” about the supposed “natural” origins of the covid virus.
The status quo the OMB seeks to reform carries its own serious credibility crisis: a peer review system increasingly compromised by paper mills, AI-generated fabrications, replication failures, and institutionally captured journals that have helped erode public trust in science to historic lows.
The decades-old model of government-funded, peer-reviewed science has proven it is not self-correcting; it has required outside pressure to even acknowledge glaring failures like gain-of-function funding and narrative-driven publication practices.
Imperfect reform is not the same as wrong reform; the far greater risk lies in defending a broken system simply because dismantling it is uncomfortable for those who have long thrived within it.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
President Eisenhower, January 17, 1961.
Source: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address
He knew exactly what excessive dependence on Federal money would eventually do to “the nation’s scholars.”
Thank you for listening.
Beginning on June 23, 1988 look what the “scientific-technological elite” have done with their claim that the emission of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels will cause dangerous global warming to the economies of many countries and in particular to that of the UK, Germany, Australia, and New York and California.
These “scientific-technological elites”, should be rounded up, prosecuted for fraud, and upon conviction, sent to federal prison.
“The goals are to increase oversight of how taxpayer money is used, align awards with current law and administration policy,”
I can just imagine what folks here would be saying if Obama had said that scientific grants had to align with administration policy.
AS the order said:
” Discretionary awards must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”
Your ability to imagine whatever it is you need to imagine, is legendary.
So what would you have said if Obama made such a requirement?
What do you say, now, to Obama having aligned science and administration policy?
He did not align science. He aligned his policy.
No he aligned science like they all do .. you could argue he did it less but not at all is wrong and even your lefty science mag nature commented on it
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01396-0
To claim Biden was as pure as the driven snow is factually wrong.
So the shoe is on the other foot now and suddenly it’s bad.
So either complain when either side does it or not at all.
And that’s how Muslim outreach became a NASA goal.
Exactly where did the replication crisis in so many disciplines occur and why? You consider alignment with Presidential policies as a bad thing. Most of us don’t. The American President is in control of what research is prioritized in order to maximize taxpayer dollars and achieve what the U.S. needs most, end of story. If the public doesn’t like what is prioritized, they have the opportunity to elect legislators that can change it and/or a new President.
As to climate science, why is there a dearth of scientific papers researching experimental methods to actually measuring the processes of heat transfer into and out of CO2. How about experimental methods of measuring and determining the attribution of heat transfer to space from water vapor, CO2, etc.?
There is a plethora of academic papers doing data mining and other data manipulation to attempt to show how CO2 warms the atmosphere catastrophically, yet a dearth of papers studied how to experimentally measure what is occurring.
There is ignorance and lack of attention to measurement uncertainty and how it is propagated throughout the use of measurements. You don’t believe me? Show me a study or paper that outlines the uncertainty components and creates a detailed uncertainty budget for the different devices used to measure temperature.
Why does the WMO publish ranking information for weather station temperature stations, yet the additional uncertainty for poor stations is never mentioned or propagated to the averages at those stations?
Why is it academia has never created scientific studies to measure and forecast the impact of windmills and solar panels to local wildlife? Why do non-governmental organizations have to push for this to be done?
Academia should not be in charge of prioritizing what taxpayer monies are devoted to. The people who make the decisions should be the elected representatives of the taxpayers. The President of the U.S. and the administration he is in charge of should be vitally involved in making these decisions.
A question for which Nick will not be providing an answer. Nick has stated that merely raising the issue of measurement uncertainty in climatology makes one an “uncertainty crank”.
As a matter of fact, it doesn’t matter what Obama said, but that his administration did in fact align scientific grants with administration policy.
Thinking that Obama’s hands were clean and Trump’s are dirty shows your blindness to the simple reality of “He who distributes the gold, controls the gold”.
Yes, and what Roger Pielke Jr. experienced is an example of Obama applying pressure to take away a researcher’s funding and squeeze his office into a literal closet. His removal as a science researcher was not enough, he had to be punished, to be made an example of for the purpose of controlling others.
Myself, I would strike the “and administration policy” phrase. Federal research spending should be for all the people, not just those who support the then existing administration. It’s a freedom-of-speech issue and a freedom-of science issue and the approval of disapproval of a grant should be made strictly on the issue of science.
taxpayer funding should always be to the advancement of national goals. Better BASIC science is one of those goals as all other scientific and engineering discovery leading to products that improve standard of living comes from the basic science fields of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. The actual productization of that basic science is best left to the private sector.
Freedom of speech freedom of science, ok, but I get a say when it is my tax dollars funding those. When the dollars become involved it elevates to a new level.
You’re making sh*t up and it doesn’t matter. President gets to set policy, the public gets to complain, and Obama is irrelevant.
Nick, You’re not an American, but just so you know, the federal government has funded a bit over half (50-60%) of U.S. university research for many decades. That means that other sources of research funding cover close to half. So if whiny scientists do not like presidentially directed funding priorities, they can go find their own money elsewhere.
I have been inside higher education for the last 24 years of my career. It has been obvious to any somewhat more than casual observer that federal funding has long been driven by administration priorities and pop culture narratives. Along with this has come a litany of problems — poor or lack of experimental design, poor replicability or outright lack of replication efforts, scientific fraud, pal review, editorial gatekeeping, etc. Meanwhile, with ethics and morality in the toilet, the motivation to seek and tell the truth has fallen prey to other human motivations (pride, Power, prestige, fortune, compromise). Institutional pride exacerbates this as we see university marketing and communications offices issuing stupid press releases touting “breakthrough” any “unprecedented” findings, wrapped up and publicized by stupid and ideological reporters and mainstream media.
It is also easy to see communist and leftist capture of the institutions and professional organizations. Activists winnow their way into organizational boards and leadership positions and then issue proclamations that run counter to the organizational charters and to the principles of the rank-and-file membership. This leaves, ethical scientists and engineers with a dilemma — stay and fight or just walk away.
Outside academia the same process has been taking place, right notably with US teachers unions. When my wife taught high school math in the 1970s, it was already well-known that the NEA had been captured by the leftists. A splinter organization, the American Federation of Teachers, at the time offered a more conservative alternative better aligned with many teachers’ values. Unfortunately, today, those unions that “represent” the vast majority of unionized teachers in the US are now in complete radical leftist lock step. The objective is not teaching, but instead indoctrination. Joseph Stalin would be proud.
All this is to say Nick, that if you value science and scientific integrity, you should be ready as the rest of us for an overhaul of the system of federal selection, funding, and oversight of research. Of course leftists as yourself have no moral or ethical foundation to guide your views or opinions, so if you have to lie or wear blinders to advocate your position, you will do so. So as Bob Dylan eloquently sang, you “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.”
I would put Obama in the devil’s camp, and he made good headway in destroying science and US culture. Even if imperfect, this current administration’s efforts to recover sanity are way overdue. If it takes the likes of a Donald J Trump at the helm to take decisive action, then so be it.
A teacher’s union contributed $5 million to a political campaign in California.
That to my way of thinking is outrageous. First question: Did they submit the idea of the donation to the union membership? Was it voted?
My personal beef with peer review and global warming science refers to the conclusion of McShane and Wyner about the selection of proxies for the reconstruction for example of past temperature:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.2433
“””the application of ad hoc
methods to screen and exclude data increases model uncertainty in ways
that are unmeasurable and uncorrectable.”””
This critique by renown mathematicians was published 15 years ago and basically applies to any proxy reconstruction.
It should have been impossible to publish any of the thousands of articles claiming past knowledge by reconstruction without addressing this.
They also call it “selection bias”, in reconstruction articles data series are presented and trends are calculated from it by various methods, but an essential step is missing, a precise analysis how much the data series is actually representative for the parameter calculated from it (for an example google “stripbark pines” and ask yourself if it is possible that other factors besides pure temperature might have had in influence in the growth of those trees over thousands of years – hint: the name gives a clue)
You should be a reviewer.
There is also technology that has helped failure of the system. It is obvious that many ‘scientific’ papers use boilerplate in many areas of their study which could border on dishonesty. It also encourages repetition and redundancy. I have seen uncounted numbers of such papers in marine sciences which also lack adequate homework. It is difficult because of the mass of studies in many areas, but not excusable. I wonder how many equations are actually thought out properly, am too lazy to check such.
unfortunately, for the past couple of decades there has been boilerplate requirements from the funding organizations. As a researcher, it is common to include such language to assure your next grant application gets past initial screening.
Publish of perish – the academic dilemma.
Perhaps add these conditions:
If replication is not possible then all authors are unable to apply for funding for 5 years.
If paper is forced to be retracted, authors not able to work for any government funded body.
And so on. It would be cleaned up quite quickly.
Those types of conditions, which should be addressed, probably contribute to the explosion in the size of “communications” staff within government funded research organizations. The “communications” teams are responsible for promoting and explaining the impact of the organization’s science endeavors.
Let me just say that the composition of those teams disproportionately incudes people with pink and purple hair.
Such teams should not be funded by research grants because such work is not related to scientific research.
That’s a philosophical issue that has already been decided.
Communication and publication expenses are specific line items in grant budget forms. In addition, communication staff are covered to some extent as part of “overhead.” The left leaning tendencies of academics and such staff are bad enough, but deficit spending is the malady that eventually will collapse the system in some manner, e.g., run away inflation. Spending every last dollar and overspending are incentivized.
I would require balanced budgets at all levels and I would do away with unions for government workers. I’d incentivize savings and efficiencies. I’d curtail remote “work” as a standard practice.
One reason post secondary education has become so expensive is because staff has been bloated with administrators and their workers. They are rewarded for bringing in more grant money and for expanding staff counts.
I am very familiar with this game and the absurdity and hypocrisy of most of it.
I have seen this in some organizations. My college is fairly lean as there are 22 support staff for about 70 researchers and 1200 students. It keeps us all quite busy making sure all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed to the greater institution. (To be fair there are another 15 or so outside our college that provide research support in purchasing and accounting, but they support researchers in other colleges as well.) One of the other colleges has about 5 times that ratio.
NPR’s ‘defence’ of peer review borders on the laughable. Such review stands and falls with two conditions: are the reviewers knowledgeable? and are the reviewers honest, in good faith? Personal experience learned me the answer is: often they are, but too many times they failed on one and even on both points. Ask any descent climate researcher who had a perfectly sound paper rejected because it did not conform to the IPCC mythology.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the reviewers had a stamp they used on submissions that labeled them HERETIC.
Most of us are aware of The Conversation and it leftist tendencies. It is basically funded by university members that use state and federal funds to do so. It operates similarly to NGOs that take government funds and use them for promoting left wing causes.
“The proposed rules would also forbid spending federal funds on publication costs (e.g., journal publication fees), which is a significant departure from longstanding [sic] practice and directly affects the dissemination of research funded by federal grants.”
One can hope for this. The results of Federally funded research should be published on the web, in a site maintained by OMB or the granting agency. Reviewers, if any, of the reported research must be listed along with their comments if the review work is paid for by the research funding. If there was no review, that fact must also be stated on the title page. If the reviewers were not paid by grant funds, the reviewers names and professional associations must be listed but the contents of their comments not reported unless they approve. The research should be open to the public but for that classified as to national security. If any researcher wishes to publish their work on paper, they can pay for it separately but never with federal funds.
That oughta to it.
I like your suggestions, however, the lobbying efforts of Wiley, Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, Springer, etc., are strong. The battle is on.
Getting rid of the pay to get publish fee is an excellent move.