Peer review now optional, political staff would screen grants for forbidden topics.
Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), during a television interview at the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday, July 7, 2025. Credit: Getty | Al Drago
Last August, the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to fundamentally alter how grant funding is handled by the US government. Under the system that had made the US a scientific superpower, peer reviewers rated the scientific quality and feasibility of grant applications, and subject-matter experts within the funding agencies used these ratings to determine which grants got funded. Under the proposed rules, political appointees would have the final say, and they were specifically instructed not to “routinely defer” to peer reviewers.
In the interim, the administration has lost many court cases because it turns out that issuing executive orders doesn’t circumvent legal requirements, and the orders can be vacated if they lack strong justification. To avoid that same fate, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has decided to merge the executive order with other administration priorities and send it through the formal federal rulemaking process.
The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn’t in the “national interest.” The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.
It is, in short, a recipe for how the government can finish the job of crippling American science.
Putting the OMB in charge
Previously, the rules governing grantmaking were handled on an agency-by-agency basis. The OMB issued overall guidance, but the Department of Energy wasn’t expected to follow the exact same procedures that were developed for the National Institutes of Health, to give two examples. The new document is meant to change that situation, turning what had been guidance into rules. By publishing them, the OMB is starting the formal rulemaking process, which will then proceed through public feedback and a final rule published in the Federal Register.
The document itself is an odd grab-bag of micromanaging grant processes, assertion of presidential power, and airing of cultural grievances. In many spots, it’s not even internally consistent—it insists, for example, that “Federal financial assistance must not discriminate on the basis of the viewpoint,” and then turns around and complains about the viewpoint of grants that “were often used… to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public.”
Its lack of coherence, however, will not prevent it from causing staggering damage to the US scientific system.
For starters, it would formalize the deprecation of peer review as a factor in deciding which grants to fund. “Peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion,” the document states. That was always technically true, as agencies like the NIH and National Science Foundation reserved the option of funding some lower-scoring grants if experts within those agencies felt they had merit that the reviewers had overlooked. But those were considered exceptions and were relatively rare.
Nearly everything about that will be changing if the OMB has its way. The people making those sorts of decisions will no longer be expert staff, but political appointees. Scientific merit is meant to matter less than vague standards like “in the national interest.” And the document states blatantly that any grant program would need to be “aligned with administration policies and priorities.”
The administration has been on a losing streak in court cases involving its widespread cancellation of grants in 2025, in part because the agencies doing the terminating didn’t follow any formal procedure. The new rules would formally declare that agencies don’t need a reason. All grant approvals would include language warning the recipient that they could be canceled at any time if the agency providing the funding decides that the grant is no longer in the national interest.
Grants meet the culture war
The document makes clear what sorts of things might be considered administration priorities and national interest—and they’re largely a war on woke. For example, the Trump administration canceled PEPFAR, a program meant to limit the spread of HIV in Africa; it’s a step that is estimated to lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. But to the OMB, that’s a good thing, because the alternative was woke: “Far-left activists hijacked the critical work done by the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which was established to respond to the AIDS crisis in Africa. Due to wasteful spending, PEPFAR became a left-wing foreign aid entitlement that attempted to promote abortion and gender ideology.”
(Its cited source for that is an editorial from the Heritage Foundation, a far-right-wing think tank.)
While it demands “viewpoint neutral” behavior from everyone receiving money, it has no issues with engaging in viewpoint discrimination itself. For example, it outright bans any funding for “theories of disparate-impact liability,” the idea that apparently race-neutral rules might have impacts that differ based on the race of the people involved. Also banned: any attempts to compensate for the historic discrimination that has kept women and minorities from having equal opportunities in society. That’s considered DEI, and thus forbidden.
Also out: funding for what it terms “gender ideology,” which it defines as an effort to “deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans.” Apparently, studying human chromosomal disorders, which can result in unusual combinations of X and Y chromosomes, is no longer welcome in the US. “Ending government-sponsored promotion of divisive gender ideology is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, and trust in government,” the OMB asserts, based on no evidence whatsoever.
There’s also a political litmus test for funding that harkens back to the McCarthy era, when those with “un-American” ideas were ostracized. “OMB proposes a new provision that agencies may consider an applicant’s affiliations with organizations engaged in activities that violate Federal law, undermine public safety or national security, or advocate for the overthrow of the United States Government,” the document notes.
Good luck collaborating or publishing
These would all be problematic on their own, but the OMB is just warming up. If you had foreign collaborators, you might be out of luck. The document suggests an outright ban on federal funding of collaborations involving Chinese researchers. But even our allies are apparently meant to be collaborated with as a last resort. “When designing research and development programs, and evaluating applications,” the OMB states, “Federal agencies must apply a domestic-first framework, under which international elements may be included only if the Federal agency determines that such elements are justified, consistent with program objectives, and in the national interest of the United States.”
(There are some indications that agencies started applying this standard even before the OMB document was published.)
Research journals generally require scientists to pay for the privilege of publishing there. But if the OMB gets its way, making these payments from a grant will be forbidden unless you get approval from the funding agency: “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.” The same approval will be needed to pay for travel to a conference.
Amazingly, OMB is creating this massive administrative hassle in a document that claims it is “reducing recipient burden.” Its justification for that claim is that it’s eliminating any DEI requirements.
If you wanted to cripple science research and were disappointed that Congress continued to fund it, this is the sort of document you would produce. It pulls US scientists out of the international community, leaves them unable to communicate their findings and meet with other scientists, and leaves grant applications subject to culture war litmus tests and the whims of non-expert bureaucrats. Those lucky enough to see a grant funded will live in constant fear that it could be canceled whenever the winds change in Washington, DC.
Public comment on the proposed rule is now open.
John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.
