On the proposed rule changes to the administration of federal grants | What's new

What's new Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics. By Terence Tao

Home

About

Career advice

On writing

Books

Mastodon+

Applets

Subscribe to feed

On the proposed rule changes to the administration of federal grants

9 June, 2026 in opinion | Tags: Federal grants, OMB, politics | by Terence Tao

The United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a vast and radical set of rule changes to how federal grants from all funding agencies are administered. (A summary of the key changes, by a former Senior Program Officer at the National Institutes for Health, can be found here.) This is no mere tinkering at the edges of existing policy; many basic principles, such as the central role of peer review in grant-making decisions, are seriously compromised by the proposed rules, while the administrative burden of complying with grant rules are significantly increased, and hamstring the ability of funded scientists to react to new developments and forge new collaborations.

There is much to discuss in these proposals; see for instance this post by Karen Saxe (vice president for Government Relations at the American Mathematical Society), this news item on the response from the astronomy community, this op-ed from Ars Technica, this article from the New York Times, this article from Science, or this story from CNN. I will focus here on just one of the impacts, regarding the need to maintain agility and flexibility in a competitive and rapidly changing environment.

Some types of research, particularly those closest to industrial or other real-world applications, can be planned in a predictable fashion, in which the timelines for hitting key milestones are clear, and schedules for events can be planned years in advance. However, basic research — of which pure mathematics is a quintessential example — expects (almost by definition) to discover previously unknown directions and connections that cannot be predicted perfectly at the time a research project is proposed. Many of the most striking breakthroughs in such subjects come from uncovering such expected developments and rapidly capitalizing on them – for instance, by quickly organizing seminars, workshops, or conferences on a suddenly "hot" topic.

To give just one example of this sort of serendipitous discovery, a significant portion of the foundational theory of compressed sensing was initiated from a chance meeting in 2004 between myself, Emmanuel Candes (a statistician) and Justin Romberg (an electrical engineer) at a program at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) on multiscale geometry. This theory – has led to notable accelerations and other improvements to a range of technologies, from MRI scans to radio interferometry to electron microscopy. The three of us, as well as the IPAM program we participated in, were all funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), but the extraordinarily fruitful collaboration was not fully anticipated in any of the proposals. (Disclosure: I now serve as director of special projects at IPAM.)

This is the type of fortuitous interaction that would be severely impacted by the proposed rule changes. Consider for instance Section 200.432 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which concerns the use of grant funds to support conference costs:

A conference means an event whose primary purpose is to disseminate technical information beyond the recipient or subrecipient and is necessary and reasonable for successful performance under the Federal award. Allowable conference costs may include the rental of facilities, speakers’ fees, attendance fees, costs of meals and refreshments, local transportation, and other items incidental to such conferences unless further restricted by the terms and conditions of the Federal award.

As just one of many significant rule changes proposed is the following addendum to the above text:

OMB proposes to expand § 200.432 to add a requirement that costs for attending conferences are allowable only if participation in the conference is expressly approved by the agency and included in the terms and conditions of the award. The revision would clarify that recipients are not authorized to attend conferences using Federal funds that do not serve to advance program outcomes.

This rule change would limit conference activity support to pre-approved plans that followed the scheduled objectives in the original proposal, which is written some time before the research takes place. However, it is the nature of novel research (particularly in fundamental sciences such as mathematics) to have serendipitous opportunities emerge that were not anticipated in the original grant proposal, such as an unexpected and exciting new connection between the problem one was initially studying, and another subfield of math or science...