A sneaky rule change has the potential to blow up scientific research in the United States. But there’s still time to fight it.

On May 29th, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a 412-page proposal to revise federal financial assistance. The language is a combination of distinctly Trumpian attacks on “woke” policies and boring governmentese designed to make your eyes glaze over as quickly as possible. But under phrases like “providing further clarification on the regulatory status of the OMB requirements” is something darker — a threat to scientific research in this country, the livelihoods of thousands of scientists, and the lives of millions of vulnerable people.

If this rule change goes forward, science in the US “will stop,” says Colette Delawalla, the founder and CEO of Stand Up for Science. “It won’t exist anymore.”

But OMB must look at — and address — all substantive public comments, and the rule change remains open for comments until July 13th. Another route also has potential. If Congress submits an objection, it’s possible the rule change would not go forward.

The rule change would require political oversight of more than $1 trillion of federal grants across 42 different agencies. Federal grants are what pay for most of the scientific research, and the researchers, at universities across the country, from research into new vaccines to studies on natural hazards. If the rule passes, political appointees could look over and veto any grant, for any reason, at any time. Scientists could not collaborate with colleagues in many other countries. They could not go to conferences without preapproval, and would be prevented from using their research money to publish their work so the public could access it. All federal grants must align with “the President’s policy priorities,” and all mentions of “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) or “gender ideology” are immediately off the table. People applying for research funding who can’t fulfill these demands, the rule change says, are welcome to get funding elsewhere. If you don’t like it, the document implies, leave.

And while scientists have been vocal about their concerns, they are far from the only ones affected. The rule change sweeps over agencies including Education, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, NASA, and Health and Human Services. All of them offer federal grants that fund programs from mental healthcare access to low-income housing to Head Start programs.

The effects of the second Donald Trump administration on scientific research have already been traumatic. Grants have been cancelled or delayed, and graduate student enrollment is decreasing at top schools.

In most scientific research, peer review is required to get experiments published. Scientists submit their findings to a journal, and the journal reaches out to other scientists in the field, asking them to critique the work. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the same goes for federal grants that give scientists the money to do that work in the first place.

“It’s looked at by three scientists on a study section who read the proposal fairly carefully and write critiques, and then it’s discussed at the study section meeting, and that gets a score based on that, and then that goes to advisory councils,” explains Jeremy Berg, former editor-in-chief of the Science journals and former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH.

After many layers of scoring and approval, those with the highest scores, meeting the top priorities for research, are funded. Competition is fierce. Depending on the institute, between the top 8 and 20 percent of grants were funded every year, according to the latest available numbers.

These roles have always been advisory, and the institute director could intervene. But generally, the science holds sway. “When you were just in basic science, there really wasn’t much politics at all,” Berg says. “Except for a very small number of very specific issues, which obviously had a political appointment,” such as embryonic stem cell research in the early 2000s, “the NIH director didn’t mess with individual grants at all.”

Presidential or congressional priorities can put fingers on the scale to some extent. Congress might make appropriations for Alzheimer’s research or cancer, putting more money toward research in those areas. Meanwhile, a disease going unrecognized can have deadly consequences. “It’s not abstract,” Berg says. He started research and clinical practice at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. “And President Reagan didn’t say anything about it for four years, and there was no concerted effort to deal with it,” he recalls. “That position of politics over science probably killed a lot of people.”

The process is similar at the NSF, where proposals go through layers of people with scientific expertise. Proposals are ranked based on their intellectual merit and their potential for broad impact, says Donna Riley, the dean of the school of engineering at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who served a term as a program officer at the NSF from 2013 to 2015. The “vision was that the science needs to be insulated so that the best ideas get funded, period,” she says.

The system is far from perfect. “Yes, presidents and their advisers can have input, can identify topics that are of national importance,” says Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine in Orono. But since World War II, “the priorities for the National Science Foundation emerge from the scientific community.” Knowing that other experts would read and pass judgment on grants led to trust in the system. “You don’t have to worry about a constant whiplash as we go from, you know, Democrat to Republican.”

Scientists, it turns out, often know good science when they see it. Google has its origins in an NSF grant. More than 100 scientists have received the Nobel Prize either doing work at the NIH or supported by NIH funding.

The key in the 412 pages from OMB lies in a word change. “What OMB is recommending is that they change this from just a simple guidance to a regulatory policy,” says Joanne Padrón Carney, the chief government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC. “It puts in place a whole expansive authority over agencies and their procedures and their priorities when it comes to funding scientific research,” she says.

The change from guidelines to policy means it would be difficult to undo. It “essentially would cement these changes into regulation,” Padrón Carney explains. “If you wanted to make any changes in the future, it’d have to go through a formal rule-making process, and you would have to wait for a new administration that is interested in making those changes.”

The rule change document is not shy about the reasons. It states that “in 2021 Federal agencies became increasingly focused on using their award programs to serve a ‘woke’ policy agenda.” The new level of review will ensure that grants “advance the President’s policy priorities,” providing muscle to President Trump’s Executive Order 14332, and echoes the “Gold Standard Science” touted in Executive Order 14303.

“Rolling out the, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a gold standard of peer review, all science is going to have to meet this standard, which is not defined,’ ignores the fact that that standard already exists and is clearly well defined,” Gill says.

In keeping with the administration’s weird fixation on “DEI” and trans people, part of that “Gold Standard” is making sure that agencies explicitly do not fund diversity initiatives, that everyone accepts “the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans,” and that no federal grant promotes “the so-called ‘“transition’” of a child under 19 years of age from one sex to another.” That means no research grants for health equity for people of color or LGBTQIA+. Many of those grants, including clinical trials, have already been cancelled. Why use a dog whistle when you can simply scream?

The OMB has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Grants will have to align with the president’s policy priorities, and if the government determines they do not, they can be cancelled at any time. “At the NIH, when we’ve canceled grants in the past, it has been usually when there’s been extreme scientific misconduct or something like that where there’s been fraud, lying, scientific malfeasance,” says Elizabeth Ginexi, who served as a scientific program officer at the NIH for 22 years. “It was never ‘I don’t really like the topic of your grant.’”

Scientists also regularly present their work at conferences around the world, but the rule change would require those conferences to be pre-approved. “It sounds like they’re just asking you to be fiscally responsible,” Gill says. “But there are often conferences that emerge to recognize an emerging need.” Conferences are where scientists find collaborators, where students find future jobs. Now, attendance would be determined years in advance by a political appointee.

Federal funds also can’t be used to publish findings under the rule change. Journals can charge thousands of dollars to publish a single paper, especially if the paper is open-access and free to anyone. Previous federal guidance under the Biden administration requires all federally funded research to be open-access, but this rule would not allow grants to pay for it. “There’s no other place for that money to come from for most of us,” Gill says. So scientists might have to publish fewer papers, which would have negative impacts on their careers, or seek out cheaper journals, which often are not open- access, making it harder for the public and other scientists to read their findings.

The collaborations scientists want to form would also be at risk, Delawalla says. The rule change prohibits using federal money to collaborate with foreign adversaries. “But it doesn’t say people, it’s parties,” Delawalla says. The wording is vague. “We don’t know if that means an individual scientist, if it means a university, if it means a country.” Can a scientist collaborate with someone who also has a collaboration with China? What about using software developed and hosted in China?

And not all collaborations with foreign powers are bad ones — even collaborations with foreign adversaries. There have been multiple documented “near misses between our US satellites in outer space and China’s satellites in outer space, and there is an office here in the United States and an office there in China, and they are colleagues and they collaborate every day, every hour of the day to make sure that our stuff does not collide,” Delawalla says. “That line of communication is immediately severed upon passage of this rule.”

Much of the wording of the new rules is troublingly vague, says Padrón Carney. “You’re essentially putting in the hands of individuals that have yet to be appointed to make those decisions of what it means, what’s gold standard science, what does anti-American mean? What does a good foreign collaborator mean? What does domestic first mean? And what does that mean when it comes to if you have a foreign student in your lab?” According to the latest available data, international scientists make up about 19 percent of all workers in STEM. They make up 43 percent of PhD-level scientists.

“We did expect something along these lines before midterms,” says Delawalla. After the Gold Standard Science executive order came out in May 2025, Delawalla and Stand Up for Science launched a public campaign, warning scientists and the public that the government was trying to take over scientific research.

“It’s really funny ’cause people thought we were so nuts,” she says. “People were like, ‘This is extreme, you guys are extremists, you’re being loud about things, this isn’t going to happen in America.’”

Grants and funding programs have been getting cancelled since the first days of the second Trump administration, and the effects are real. “We’re on the verge of creating a cure for HIV/AIDS,” says Ginexi. The NIH had put out a request for grant applications, to fund the work. The Trump administration cancelled the request. “The reason why they canceled it is because it would use a technology very similar to mRNA technology, and they don’t believe that that should be done,” she says. “We could have literally had a vaccine ready so that no one would get AIDS anymore.”

The cancelled grants and programs mean scientists are already getting pushed out. A letter to JAMA, published June 8th, showed that the number of scientists supported by federal grants dropped in 2025 for the first time since 2016. “Specific demographic groups were hurt worse than others,” Berg says. Black and Hispanic scientists suffered the worst declines. “People who come from minority communities tend to work on subjects related to health disparities or other things,” Berg says. “Not everybody, but some of them do.” Those programs were among the first to go.

Knowing a grant could be cancelled at the drop of a hat puts added pressure on researchers, Gill says. Many scientists who submit federal grants are using them to pay not just for test tubes or mice, but for people’s salaries. “When you have a graduate student who moved across the country or a technician who just had their third kid,” she says, knowing your funding could be pulled means knowing you might have to let them go.

In anticipation of tough times, some graduate programs are already shrinking. “There are places like MIT, which I think has 80 percent as many graduate students as they did the previous year, because they’re just downsizing all their programs, because they’re not sure how they’re going to pay for it,” Berg says.

Those graduate students are the future. “We’re going to lose the future of our science pipeline,” Ginexi says. “We will basically no longer be doing much science in the U.S. at all.”

Rule changes like these are open to a public comment period, and the comment period on this rule change remains open until July 13th. The rule has already amassed more than 38,000 comments as of June 29th. “People should be leaving public comment. You do not have to be an expert to comment on this,” Delawalla says. Comments can be left anonymously. Stand Up for Science has a page with guidelines for comments.

Simply filling out a comment form might seem like it’s going to woosh, ignored, into the ether. But OMB must look at and address all substantive comments, Delawalla says. “Writing comments in this moment really, really matters because every time somebody creates a scenario, a hypothetical scenario, and they say, ‘My lab, my business, my health is reliant on this grant, and if this gets canceled, here’s how it will impact me,’” she says. “If that grant gets canceled, we have a litigation hook.”

The lawsuits may matter, because “the entire document is on incredibly shaky legal ground,” Ginexi says. “You’re supposed to have legitimate rule reasons to be making rule changes.” The document cites reports from right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. “Saying that the NIH or NSF or whoever has been funding neo-Marxist things, that’s not evidence,” she says. “That’s not a reason. That’s nonsense.”

Congress could also intervene before the rule is enacted. “All they would have to do is pass a joint resolution of disapproval of this rule, and it would go away,” Ginexi says. So many scientists and organizations are calling on people to call their congresspeople as well. “We’re calling our congresspeople and trying to shame the Republicans into stopping this by letting them know that this is going to tank the economy in addition to ruining science. I mean, it’s going to be an unmitigated disaster,” she says.

Science should generally be a bipartisan issue, but even if it wasn’t, the effects of the rule change would be sweeping. “What I think most Americans don’t really think [of] on a day-to-day basis is how many of the services that arrive in their communities happen, right?” Ginexi says. “Some of it gets paid by your local taxes, or your county, or your state, but a very significant number of programs and offerings that we have available to us come from the federal government.” If those programs are subject to political review, and can be pulled at any time? “Everyone will be affected, not just scientists, every community in the country,” she says. “We are going to see devastation to our federal grant programs like we’ve never seen before in this country if this is allowed to go forward.”