Donald Trump’s assault on the American scientific enterprise has been death by a thousand cuts. But the latest push from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) may just be the kill shot.
OMB proposed a rule to “improve government-wide policies and requirements related to the management of grants, cooperative agreements, and other forms of assistance.” This rule will impact funding to over 40 different federal agencies, ranging from NASA and HHS to the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities to the Peace Corps by – among other things – giving political appointees veto power over grant funding applications both when they are initially considered and once the grant period has commenced. The final rule is expected to be published any day now to tee it up to go into effect on October 1.
The rule’s stated goals are to enhance accountability, transparency, and oversight of federally funded scientific research, which sound innocuous. In reality, it does the opposite by pushing the grantmaking process behind closed doors and politicizing practically every element of American research — not to mention implementing requirements that go against the law in a host of different ways. Just to provide one example, as the American Association of Universities put it, “Congress has repeatedly directed federal agencies to fund university research in ways that explicitly require the kind of demographic-conscious program design the proposed rule would prohibit.”
To put the importance of the scientific enterprise in context, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “government-funded [research and development] (R&D) accounts for roughly one quarter of all business sector productivity growth since World War II.” Concerns about this rule aren’t centered on protecting the Ivory Tower — they’re about the economy, competitiveness with China, and, as the Democratic leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee highlighted, Americans having access to groundbreaking medical treatments first.
