Politics, Peer Review, and the Grants That Fund American Science

On May 29^th, 2026 the Office of Management and Budget published a proposed rule to revise the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance. The public can comment on the proposed changes until July 13th, 2026, and I strongly encourage people to do so. Below are some examples of how the changes would directly impact me as an early-career scientist. There are far more changes than these six, and the impacts reach much further than scientists alone. The proposed changes significantly alter how all federal grant money is awarded, managed, and used. This means that research, Extension programs, undergraduate and graduate training, stakeholder training, peer-reviewed publishing, participation in professional societies and meetings, and all the downstream beneficiaries of science would be affected.

Political control of grant funding

As an early career scientist, I’ll be expected to write and submit grants for peer review that will ultimately fund my laboratory expenses and the stipend/salaries of those conducting research in my future lab. Winning a grant is already highly competitive: panels of academic peers evaluate the rigor and merit of the proposed work, and only the best proposals are funded. This system is being eroded by several revisions.

§ 200.205 adds pre-issuance grant reviews by senior political appointees. Under the proposal, peer review no longer controls the decisions, and instead being demoted to advisory. Political appointees would be the ones deciding whether the work is funded based on whether the work is consistent with agency priorities, the national interest, and the President’s policy priorities. That change effectively removes the guarantee that my proposals are judged solely on their scientific merit and rigor by a panel of qualified experts. It’s worth adding that for agencies like NIH and NSF, expert review isn’t just tradition — it’s required by law (42 U.S.C. § 289a for NIH; 42 U.S.C. § 1862s for NSF), which is one reason this change is on shaky legal ground.
§ 200.340 lets an agency cancel a grant mid-project because it no longer aligns with priorities or the “national interest” at the time of termination, with only a brief stated reason and no right to appeal. That disincentivizes me from pursuing ambitious projects that require hiring graduate students and buying equipment to collect data over years, because the priorities are arbitrary and may change potentially setting me back years and struggling to find funding to support any student who were supported by the grant.
§ 200.204 governs how funding opportunities are posted. While the agencies are still required to post all funding opportunities on Grants.gov, it add the ability for agency heads to approve exemptions to this requirement. Which is concerning as that effectively builds a pathway that would let an agency keep a competition from being posted publicly, potentially limiting my ability to find and apply for grants.

Together, these changes would make the funding I need to launch my career harder and more arbitrary to get. I could find myself forced to choose between ambitious, impactful work and safer, less impactful work that happens to align with the current political landscape.

Restrictions on sharing results

Conferences, professional organizations, and academic journals make up the bulk of scientific communication globally. My ability to do all of these activities under the proposed changes would be impacted.

§200.454 which mandates prior written approval by the Federal agency to use grant funds to cover membership in professional and technical organizations. Participation in these societies is essential to finding collaborations and contributing to the field broadly but can be costly. Covering just my membership to just four professional societies would cost $740 annually and ideally I would be able to provide funds for future students to join and participate in them too.
§ 200.432 would allow grant funds to cover conference attendance only if the conference was approved in the original grant application. When I think about the conferences I attended in graduate school, I couldn’t have gone to more than half of them under a rule like this, because my advisor didn’t know about them when we wrote the grant. Even now, as I’m starting a new job in a new field, I’m still learning where the best places are to present my work and connect with related research and those may change as my research path evolves.
§ 200.461 would bar using federal awards for publication costs. That includes open-access fees, which typically run $2,000–$4,000 each. Following this would eliminate thousands of journals as options for me, including about half of the top-quartile journals in my field, which all charge open-access fees. It also conflicts with federal open-access mandates, such as the 2022 OSTP public-access memo, which directs agencies to make federally funded research freely available and would be something you can’t do if you can’t pay to publish it.

Federal grants make up the bulk of funding available to researchers. Without the ability to use that grant money to cover memberships, conferences, and publication costs that means I would have to find a different source, or worst case, pay thousands of dollars myself.

Conclusion

The ability to find, receive, and effectively utilize federal grant money is essential to researchers in the United States, and ensuring my future success as I start my career. The changes to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance listed above are some of the hardest hitting and most directly impactful to the beginning of my career. If implemented these rules would span every funding agency in federal government, so there would be no avoiding the difficulty and uncertainty they would impart on an already difficult career path.

The future of the American scientific community is at stake. Let the experts decide what is good science, build trust that hard won funding won’t be pulled away, and remove barriers to the exchange of ideas between scientists. Otherwise, the system will be weakened, placing us at a disadvantage when compared to other countries who support their scientists instead of hampering them.