Leslie Eastman at LI, Proposed OMB Rules Could Reshape How US Science Is Funded and Published, "Laughably, unhappy scientists complain proposed grant system overhaul could politicize research funding — as if that weren’t already happening."
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is proposing major changes to the rules that govern how federal grants, cooperative agreements, and other financial assistance are managed across the government. The goals are to increase oversight of how taxpayer money is used, align awards with current law and administration policy, and reduce what OMB views as unnecessary burdens on recipients.
These changes apply to all federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The 412-page behemoth certainly has the potential to shake up the science-industrial complex that has gutted American trust in science to a meager 36%.
Among the action items embedded in this OMB plan, the new rules would allow agencies to terminate awards if they conclude that a grant “does not effectuate program goals, federal agency priorities, or the national interest as they exist at the time of the termination,” and also under any additional termination provisions written into award terms. This substantially widens discretion beyond classic noncompliance or performance failures.
Given the grants that continued to fund Wuhan bat virus research, the ability to slash funds for dangerous research should be viewed as a positive.
The proposed rules would also forbid spending federal funds on publication costs (e.g., journal publication fees), which is a significant departure from longstanding practice and directly affects the dissemination of research funded by federal grants.
I was utterly unaware of any policy mandating that agencies would be force to continue funding work that they no longer believed was important to their mission. In fact, once, a grant on which I was a PI was delayed for over a year because the agency (guess who) decided they would rather have a satellite than our project. To be fair, we eventually did get the money, or at least most of it.
I'm sure the fear here is that the Trump administration will cancel a bunch of grants issued during the Biden administration that do not conform to their vision. There are lots of examples, but prominent among them would be climate science. For many years, one the magic phrases that helped get funding was "global warming" (or "climate change"). A lot of investigators who promiscuously promised to link their work to "climate change" may be regretting that choice.
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