White House Moves to Give Political Appointees More Power over Federal Grants Public Comment DEADLINE July 13, 2026

May 29, 2026

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by Ali Swenson (Associated Press) President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday (May 29, 2026) moved to give political appointees more power over the billions of dollars in grants awarded by federal agencies, a move scientists say puts critical research funding into the hands of partisans without relevant expertise.

In what would be the most sweeping change to the federal grantmaking process in years, the proposed regulations would require senior appointees to review funding to see if it complies with the law and the president’s priorities.

The rules would also give administration officials more freedom to terminate grants that have already been awarded, a process that could jeopardize millions of dollars in ongoing research.

The Office of Management and Budget, which issued the more than 400-page proposal, said President Joe Biden’s administration allowed a lack of transparency, accountability and oversight in the federal grant process that led to “woke” programs receiving federal funding.

“Collectively, these policies wasted a great amount of taxpayer resources and caused great harm to public trust in government,” the document reads. “The proposed reforms are necessary to ensure greater accountability for use of public funds.”

After a public comment period, OMB and federal agencies will decide whether to revise the proposal before finalizing it as soon as this summer.

Scientists have said the move will cripple the scientific engine that has made America the world’s leader in research and development by giving control over federal research funds to people who are influenced by politics. They’ve raised concerns the changes will delay grant review and approval, slowing scientific progress and medical breakthroughs.

Friday’s proposal fulfills an executive order issued by President Donald Trump last summer. Throughout the president’s second term, his administration has been terminating research grants on topics that the president deems inappropriate for study, including transgender health and diversity, equity and inclusion.

The LGBTQ+ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign slammed the Trump administration’s draft regulations, saying they would strip money from any program that acknowledges diversity, abortion or the existence of transgender and nonbinary people.

“Withholding public grants from programs that depend on them because you refuse to acknowledge the humanity of certain communities is not good government - it’s fascism,” said spokesperson Laurel Powell. “We will fight back.” READ MORE

Related articles

Trump Administration Proposes Giving Political Appointees Final Say on Research Funding (Union of Concerned Scientists)
Trump targets science in OMB’s grants revamp -- A new administration proposal is part of a larger campaign by the president to exert political control over the federal scientific enterprise. (E&E News Greenwire)
Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance (Federal Register)
Office of Management and Budget Government-Wide Regulations for Federal Financial Assistance (American Council on Education)
In (qualified) defense of the research project grant (Science)

Excerpt from Union of Concerned Scientists: The Trump administration on Thursday released a proposed rule that would allow political appointees to decide who gets billions of dollars of funding for federal research.

Below is a statement from Dr. Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists:

“The Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) proposed rule is an escalation of the administration’s relentless attacks on independent science. It replaces scientific merit with a political loyalty test and could be used to silence research that is politically inconvenient to the administration.

“For decades, federal research funding has relied on merit review, transparency and scientific judgement.

“If enacted, Thursday’s proposed rule would limit federal funding to research aligned with the 'President’s policy priorities,’ render peer review merely 'advisory,' and enable political appointees – which could include the President himself – to make all final funding decisions. It also allows agencies to consider an applicant's history, essentially creating a political litmus test to receive grant funding.

“Handing political appointees the power to override or shape research funding decisions risks skewing taxpayer-funded science toward ideology instead of evidence and threatens the independence of scientific research.

“If the rule is enacted, the administration could deny applications that propose research related to the administration's targeted words or topics, including climate science, LGBTQ+ health and vaccine safety. This would threaten innovation and hamper society's ability to better understand issues critical to public and environmental health. It could also give politically connected industries a functional veto over research that might reveal risks associated with products and practices. The proposal would have downstream effects on the future of these areas of research and scholarship, by deterring scientists from pursuing topics they fear the administration might deem unsavory.

“Congress must move swiftly to advance the Scientific Integrity Act. The bill would establish stronger safeguards to protect federal scientists from political interference, require agencies to maintain scientific integrity policies and ensure government decisions are informed by evidence rather than political agendas. At a moment when independent science is under immense and increasing pressure, it is lawmakers’ duty to strengthen available guardrails." READ MORE

Excerpt from E&E News Greenwire: Liz Borkowski, a researcher at George Washington University, said there was “a general bipartisan recognition” that experts in a given field are the most qualified to set research goals and send funding to worthwhile science.

“This rule seems to be envisioning science as a tool for advancing political priorities rather than for answering important questions,” Borkowski told POLITICO’s E&E News.

Asked for comment for this story, an OMB spokesperson said the regulatory changes will align spending with current law, executive orders and “agency priorities.”

“Overall, the goal is to promote transparency, efficiency, and responsible stewardship of federal funds,” the spokesperson said. “They also improve the ability of agencies to identify and respond to waste, fraud, and abuse.”

OMB’s proposal said institutions would be given priority that demonstrate “rigorous and reproducible scholarship;” incorporate performance metrics of Trump’s “Gold Standard Science;” and stick to “research integrity” when applying for federal funds.

Under the rule, one or more senior political appointees designated by their agency head must conduct “a pre-issuance review” of all discretionary grants, making sure they follow several principles, including to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” Career officials typically have the final say on awards.

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Last month, the administration fired every National Science Board member. The group oversees the National Science Foundation, a major source of research funding.

OMB’s proposal is expected to be effective Oct. 1 to ensure “government-wide uniformity and transparency” for federal awards made in fiscal 2027, according to Friday’s notice. Public comments on the rule are due on or before July 13.

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Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst with the Union for Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy, said instead of applications being awarded on merit, political appointees loyal to the administration could decide who receives funding.

“When viewed in the larger context of how the Trump administration has attacked and politicized science, including developing a list of topics, like climate science and clean energy, that agencies are prohibited from using, this is especially concerning,” Barbati-Dajches said.

In addition, recommendations for funding generated by peer review should remain “advisory” and not regarded as “de facto binding” by appointees, according to the proposal. That would allow political leadership to ignore consensus opinion from scientists on what requires research.

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“What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management,” Elizabeth Ginexi, a former National Institutes of Health program official for 22 years, said on Substack. “It is a complete political control apparatus layered over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.”

Democratic lawmakers blasted the OMB rule as well.

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But funds would also be halted for “issue advocacy;” applicants’ “affiliations” would be considered; and “the use of international elements” in research taken into account.

“I’m also alarmed by the fact that this rule would block sharing of scientific findings and hinder international collaboration, both of which have long been hallmarks of the scientific enterprise,” Borkowski said.

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Last month, the administration fired every National Science Board member. The group oversees the National Science Foundation, a major source of research funding.

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Borkowski said U.S. grant funding in the past has helped scientists develop cures for diseases, boost crop production, and reduce deaths from hurricanes and wildfires.

“If an administration starts viewing science as something that should be driven by politics rather than expertise, we stand to lose immeasurable benefits to public health and well-being,” she said. READ MORE

Excerpt from Science: In a debate that has been building for years, a growing coalition of reformers has concluded that the research project grant (RPG) approach used by many science funders in the United States and based on competitive, investigator-initiated, and peer-reviewed proposals cannot support transformative science. Crystallizing this debate, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has just committed $1.5 billion over the next decade to X-Labs, independent and milestone-driven research organizations meant to bypass not only the RPG but also the universities that have long been its principal recipients. Although the reform impulse may warrant sympathy, the X-Labs prescription merits skepticism.

Criticisms of RPGs cluster around several legitimate themes. Peer-review committees demand preliminary data so extensive that applicants must essentially complete their experiments before being funded to attempt them. Applications that were once a few pages can now be hundred-page compliance exercises. Success rates for federal research grants have fallen by half or more over the past half-century, forcing investigators into endless cycles of writing, rejection, and revision—a treadmill that crowds out contemplative thought. These are real pathologies. They diminish the attractiveness of scientific careers and skew the funded portfolio toward the incremental and the safe.

The reformers’ solution is elegant in theory. Rather than forcing scientists to write grants, give them stable institutional homes; rather than funding projects, fund people and organizations. Create a network of 10 or 20 institutes, each empowered by block funding (longterm, unrestricted institutional support) to pursue research programs the RPG cannot support. The promise is Bell Labs redux: the industrial lab that gave society the transistor, information theory, and the laser, none from a grant application.

The central confusion is that Bell Labs was not a government program, but the research arm of a regulated monopoly, AT&T, funded by captive ratepayers, accountable to no appropriations committee, free to operate on a time horizon no public agency could sustain. The true parentage of X-Labs is not Bell Labs but the continental model: Germany’s Max Planck Institutes (MPIs), France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and the US Department of Energy (DOE) national labs.

MPIs operate on the Harnack principle: build an institute around a small group of exceptional scientists granted nearabsolute autonomy. On paper, scientific paradise; in practice, junior scientists live entirely at the director’s pleasure. CNRS researchers become civil servants for life in their early 30s—freedom from fundraising, paid for by an institution slow to adapt when priorities shift. DOE labs are block-funded, stable, and ossified by the safety and compliance apparatus that public funding inevitably brings. At $18 billion a year, they already do at scale much of what X-Labs propose to invent, a fact the X-Labs discourse has somehow overlooked. Block funding does not eliminate bureaucracy; it relocates it. The reformers compare the messy actual RPG to a platonic ideal of institutional science that has never existed under public auspices.

What the RPG gets right is easily overlooked because it is built into the mechanism, not into the wisdom of any administrator. The grant follows the investigator; a scientist treated badly can leave and take their funding with them, giving the scientist real bargaining power vis-à-vis their institution. The system also offers multiple doors—NSF, DOE, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other agencies and private foundations—so that a paradigm out of favor at one agency may find support at another. NIH alone makes roughly 40,000 RPG awards a year, a portfolio that could support randomized experimentation and rigorous self-evaluation if agencies were so inclined, and that a handful of X-Labs could not. The bundling of research with graduate education that the RPG sustains is the commons from which any new institution would draw the scientists it proposes to redeploy.

One ought to be wary, not opposed. But the moment is hard to ignore: an administration proposing deep cuts to the NSF, the National Science Board dismissed, universities pressed by immigration restrictions and a new endowment tax—a conjunction that should sober anyone weighing a reform that risks hollowing out the institutions producing most US basic science. The RPG embodies a distinctively American policy instinct: decentralization, competition, bottom-up initiative. Its virtues are structural; its vices are accretions of practice. The first would be diluted by major reallocation toward institutional funding; the second can be addressed by deliberate reform. Yet in a tight budget, even modest experiments redirect scarce dollars from a strained system. With bipartisan legislation introduced to extend the X-Labs model to NIH, the scientific community should be asking whether the grass is truly greener on the institutional side, and what safeguards would prevent it from browning over time. READ MORE