An OMB plan to defund science – and everything Trump doesn’t like

The list of tactics used by the Trump White House against its perceived enemies is nasty and brutal, but certainly not short. This involves indicting them (James Comey, John Bolton), investigating them (Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Gavin Newsom), threatening to investigate them (Chris Christie, Bruce Springsteen), and threatening to sue them (top election officials in all fifty states). The administration has sent troops to cities the president doesn’t care about (Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland); he sued the universities that had upset him (Harvard, UCLA); and has withheld billions of dollars in funding from groups and projects he deems “woke,” unnecessary, or inconsistent with Donald Trump’s priorities, whatever they currently are.

Recently, the White House announced plans to codify its retaliation campaign. The proposal, which would significantly increase the president’s power over how federal funds are distributed, would give Trump a “new stick” to “advance his partisan agenda and punish his political rivals,” charges a letter signed by all Senate Democrats. “The stakes couldn’t be higher,” says legal site Lexology.

The proposal in question comes, unsurprisingly, from the Office of Management and Budget, led by Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025. Titled, innocuously enough, “Federal Financial Assistance Regulations,” it would replace current guidelines for approving government grants, which generally leave the task to government officials and peer review committees. Instead, the final say would go to political appointees. All discretionary grants from the federal government would have to be evaluated by senior administration officials, who could reject them on the grounds that they do not fit the president’s agenda. Grants could also be stopped at any time for the same reason.

The rules would affect hundreds of billions of dollars in funding disbursed by agencies ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Department of Transportation, to finance everything from local dance performances to massive infrastructure projects. As Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program director at the National Institutes of Health, noted in a recent Substack article, “federal grants are not peripheral to how states and communities operate. They represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends.” The proposal, she added, would place “the entire federal-state financial partnership under political control, without an act of Congress.”

OMB’s stated rationale for the new rules is to “improve transparency, accountability, and oversight of federal awards.” But no one – and that includes Trump appointees – seems to believe it. Trump’s nominee for OMB deputy director, Hal Duncan, emphasized during his confirmation hearing last month that the proposal would allow the administration to prevent federal money from supporting “divisive DEI ideologies.” At the same hearing, Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, accused the White House of trying to “turn the entire federal government into one big slush fund to reward those aligned with the administration and punish everyone else.” Among the many groups that have expressed concern about the changes are the National League of Cities, the School Superintendents Association and the National Council of Nonprofits.

Research organizations were particularly opposed to the OMB proposal. “This latest decision is a brazen power grab by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to go against the will of Congress and the American people and will make future discoveries less likely,” Sudip Parikh, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recently wrote. Among the many provisions of the proposed rules is one that would prohibit federal money from being used to support collaborations between researchers in the United States and their colleagues in many other countries. “With this focus, America would not be allowed to be included in the International Space Station,” Colette Delawalla, founder and leader of the group Stand Up for Science, said in an interview. “The same goes for any type of weather monitoring and pandemic monitoring. »

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