- A federal budget office has proposed a revision to the government’s guidance that would fundamentally change the way that scientific grants are managed.
- The proposed rule stated this would “improve transparency, accountability, and oversight…ensuring American tax dollars are not wasted…”
- Scientists are concerned that this proposed rule threatens the peer review process, creates instability in federal funds, creates opportunities for arbitrary and erroneous grant terminations, limits international collaboration and damages long-term research and management of the Great Lakes.
“Every single person in this state, whether they know it or not, is touched by federal research,” said Katie Edwards, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on empowering youth and violence prevention, including suicide interventions.
Edwards runs a large lab at the university, employing over 50 people and receiving millions of dollars in research funding. In 2025, she said, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated six of her grants. She was then part of a federal lawsuit against NIH. Grant awards have rules about when they can be terminated. A federal judge ruled that the challenged NIH directives and resulting grant terminations were illegal, and ordered 800 of the grants to be restored. Edwards’ grants were reinstated. NIH-related litigation is ongoing.
Edwards said the uncertainty of funding last year was devastating for her team. She described one employee in particular, a tribal elder and veteran, who she said called her up worried about the funding cuts.
“She said, ‘Am I gonna lose my job?’
And I said, ‘Mona, I don't know. I'm gonna do everything I can, but I don't know.’
And she said, ‘More important than my job, am I gonna have to go to all these youth and families that I've brought into our programs over the years and tell them that we're not doing this anymore?’”
Edwards described the horror of temporarily losing their funding last year mid-grant, during critical and lifesaving work she does on suicide interventions for teens.
She laid out how even temporary funding interruptions can be life or death in her work: ”It was really dangerous for youth. We had caregivers in an intervention who were struggling to support their LGBTQ+ youth and came to this intervention to understand, ‘How can I better support them? How can I understand what they're going through?’
And to be told, ‘Sorry, your experiences don't matter. You and your kid don't matter,’ it was devastating. Luckily it was something that we were able to get university funds to kind of safely wind down, right? Because we could have lost lives. I mean, these are suicide interventions.”
The current unstable atmosphere of federal grants has had enormous impacts on the scientific community, including environmental and medical research. The latest is a proposed rule by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It has submitted a revision to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance that would fundamentally change the way that scientific grants are managed.
The proposed rule stated this would “improve transparency, accountability, and oversight … ensuring American tax dollars are not wasted.”
Experts disagree. Scientists are concerned that this proposed rule threatens the peer review process, creates instability in federal funds, opens opportunities for arbitrary and erroneous grant terminations, and limits international collaboration. Language in the proposed rule also targets gender-based or diversity, equity, and inclusion — or DEI — initiatives, and there are concerns about research on specific demographics being terminated.
The U.S. Senate has blocked the ruling by including a section in its continuing appropriations act that essentially delays the finalization of the rule until December 11, 2026.
Increased political control over science
To fully understand the consequences of this proposed change, informally called the Uniform Guidance, it’s important to understand how federal funding and the scientific review process currently works.
Every year Congress appropriates a certain amount of money and then it is part of OMB’s job to apportion those amounts of money to federal agencies for further allocation to specific programs or grants, for example. This proposal would expand OMB’s authority, giving it more power over science priorities and grant allocation.
In a statement, an OMB spokesperson said the Trump administration’s proposed rule “will bring much-needed accountability to the grantmaking process and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely.”
The spokesperson also put forward factually dubious claims about why the Trump administration is pursuing the rule change.
“Federal grants were politicized under the last administration to promote a far-left DEI agenda with projects like drag shows in Ecuador and transgender experiments on mice,” the OMB spokesperson said.
While the Biden administration’s State Department did fund a LGBTQ+ program in Ecuador that included drag performances, the “transgender” mice is a misnomer. That term is misapplied to refer both to studies that tested how sex hormones affect cell development and human health, and to experiments on transgenic mice, which have modified DNA that allows scientists to use them as a model organism. Often this is done in order to study human diseases or treatments.
The current federal grant system is complex. It involves what’s called “peer review.” The peer review process is the standard method for which all grants are awarded and how scientific papers are approved to be published. It’s a system where the scientific proposal or research project is evaluated by third party, not related, experts in the field. The new OMB rule would give political appointees more power in this process, placing “agency discretion” explicitly above peer review.
Dani Jones, a research scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan, explained it like this: “If you've got a medical decision to make, you want the work to happen between you and your doctor, you and a team of medical professionals. … You don't necessarily want the governor of your state to come into the room and say, "Actually, I think this is what we should do medically.’"
"And that's true regardless of whether you agree with that hypothetical governor or not, right? It’s not about, do you agree with them or not? It’s ‘is that a dynamic you want in that conversation?’” Jones said the involvement of political appointees in scientific proposal review would change the conversation in a way that might not lead to better scientific outcomes.
Michigan and Great Lakes-area research may be particularly impacted. According to a July letter from the University of Michigan to OMB, “The impact is not limited to just our campus. Federal grants at U-M supported 16,000 jobs and generated nearly $400 million in research-related spending across the country.”
The letter requested that OMB withdraw the proposed rule. It detailed how it would affect Michigan research, calling out the increased burden of journal subscription and publication costs as well. The rule essentially would increase the cost to universities for publishing research. U-M warned that the proposed rule would “effectively cede American leadership in vital areas of science and technology to other nations.”
When asked how this will affect them, scientists continuously emphasized the impacts on research, medicine, and environmental management. It’s also important to note what this stability can look like for the scientists themselves. They are currently unsure if the projects they’re working on, the ones already funded, will be able to continue past October.
Jones said, “The concern is not that priorities change, 'cause of course, priorities do change. They are always going to change with administrations and over time. But the concern is that changing the rules after projects have already been selected through peer review and are underway, the concern is that that's gonna have a damaging effect on the way that we do science and the way that we protect the Great Lakes.”
The Great Lakes are inherently international and require consistent collaboration with Canadian and tribal governments. The OMB-proposed change would also increase limitations on international collaboration. Several scientists spoke out about this in the public comments against the rule.
Comments described the potential consequences of these changes as “disastrous” and worried that it would “seriously interfere with efforts to restore the fisheries” in the Great Lakes. Almost 500,000 public comments were submitted.
“ If it becomes harder to sustain these observing systems and these international partnerships, we'll gradually lose our ability to understand and predict what's happening in the lakes. … It won't be a big flashy failure, necessarily. There could be, but it probably would look more like just a slow degradation of our ability to observe the lakes, understand, predict, and actually make smart, informed decisions about how to manage them,” said Jones.
“The Rule is unlawful”
Michigan has joined 23 other states in opposing this rule change. Attorney General Dana Nessel and others signed a 99-page letter that listed a litany of ways in which they said the proposed rule is unlawful.
The letter stated that the rule would “severely harm the States and their residents, and violate federal law in numerous, unprecedented ways.” It offered pages of detailed arguments for how the rule would overstep the budget office’s authority, acting unlawfully and unconstitutionally.
“The Rule is a textbook example of arbitrary and capricious agency action,” said the letter.
The way the office describes itself online has dramatically changed during this administration, with the new text claiming a larger role in government. An older version of usa.gov says the Office of Management and Budget “oversees the performance of federal agencies, and administers the federal budget.” Whereas the current OMB website now states that it “serves the President of the United States in overseeing the implementation of his vision across the Executive Branch.”
Congressional intervention and what’s next
On August 8, the Senate blocked the rule from moving forward by including a provision in its continuing appropriations bill stating that the rule “shall not be issued or finalized.”
Congress has a tool called a continuing appropriations act — often termed a “continuing resolution.” It’s what has to pass in both the House and the Senate so the government doesn’t shut down. This summer, the Senate included a paragraph that blocks the proposed OMB rule from going into effect. But the House did not include language on this. So when they return from recess at the end of August, they will have to reconcile the two bills, and it’s unclear if the OMB rule block will remain.
In the meantime, researchers working on everything from Great Lakes management to health interventions are left wondering if the ecosystem of science funding is about to change completely.
