White House proposes new 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
White House Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
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 give political appointees, “termination based on the discretion of the agency,” according to the proposal.
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. They do, however, call for favoring institutions with lower indirect cost rates.
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 (5/28/26): This story is in development and may be updated.
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