WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

These proposed Office of Management and Budget regulations would render the federal research grant review process opaque

On Thursday the White House released long-anticipated draft regulations that, if enacted, would give political appointees the final word on federal research grants and other funding across government agencies.

Scheduled to be officially published in the Federal Register on Friday, the 412-page proposal on federal spending rules would centralize Office of Management and Budget (OMB) control over releases of government funds, including for scientific research grants. The OMB is headed by Russell Vought, lead architect of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for the Trump administration.

“Recent years have provided evidence of the need for meaningful reform in Federal grants administration,” states the proposal’s “Background” section, which goes on to criticize “a ‘woke’ policy agenda that deliberately favored certain identity groups over others” under the Biden administration. The new rules would mandate political appointees at scientific agencies to sign off on all research awards for compliance with presidential priorities, including those on race and gender.

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And at scientific agencies, the proposal states that “senior appointees must conduct these reviews and apply specific principles when evaluating proposals,” a departure from past practice whereby apolitical expert review committees approved research grants.

Scientific peer review of research proposals, long the standard for approval of research grants at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other governmental science agencies, “remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion,” the proposal states.

“We warned of this exact form of government overreach in science a year ago,” says Colette Delawalla, founder of the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science. “It replaces expertise with political appointees, globally decouples the U.S. and completely guts our scientific ecosystem.”

The OMB plan comes after the White House released an executive order calling for such changes, alarming lawmakers and scientists, last year. Many experts noted that political appointees at agencies such as the NIH, which funds tens of thousands of research grants every year, may not be sufficiently able to judge grant proposals on their scientific merit. President Donald Trump’s executive order was then seen as a reaction to court decisions that had found the administration’s abrupt termination of thousands of grants in its first year to be illegal. The new rules would allow for grant “termination based on the discretion of the Federal agency,” according to the proposal.

“The Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) proposed rule is an escalation of the administration’s relentless attacks on independent science,” said Jules Barbati-Dajches of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement. “It replaces scientific merit with a political loyalty test and could be used to silence research that is politically inconvenient to the administration.” Barbati-Dajches warned the proposal would “give politically connected industries a functional veto over research that might reveal risks associated with products and practices.”

International research collaboration would only be allowed on a case-by-case basis under the new rules, upending long-standing scientific practice, and would be disfavored against domestic collaborations. Costs for attending conferences—the places where scientists now commonly present and discuss results—would only be allowed if participation in the event was “expressly approved” by the funding agency and written into a grant, regardless of whether the conference was announced at a later time. The proposed rewrite of federal grant rules would not affect the overhead cost rates for research grants, which the administration had previously tried to cap at 15 percent last year—an effort that was rejected by Congress. It does, however, call for favoring institutions with lower indirect cost rates and for prohibiting grant money going to publication costs “unless such costs are expressly required by statute or approved in advance by the Federal agency on a case-by-case basis.”

“What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management. It is a complete political control apparatus layered over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle,” said former NIH program official Elizabeth Ginexi in an analysis of the proposed rules.

The public has 45 days to comment on the proposed regulations—an unusually short time period for such wide-ranging changes, says Matt Owens, president of the Council on Government Relations, an organization that represents more than 150 research universities.

Editor’s Note (5/29/26): This story was updated to include comments from Jules Barbati-Dajches’s statement and Elizabeth Ginexi’s analysis.