Proposed new US funding rules: We can cancel any grant at any time - Ars Technica

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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 that grants ” 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,...