Re: Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance
91 Fed. Reg. 32198 (May 29, 2026) (FR Doc. 2026-10817)
OMB-2026-0034-0001
Submitted by: ■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■■
■■■■■■■, ■■■■■■■■
June 9, 2026
I write in opposition to the proposed rule in its entirety, and specifically to the provisions identified below, each of which injects political and ideological criteria into what has been, since the Second World War, a merit-based, expert-driven system of federal research funding. I have organized my comments by section, as requested in the proposing release. A general comment on the preamble follows the section-specific comments.
The pattern across these provisions is consistent and unmistakable: wherever the rule says "transparency," the operative mechanism is surveillance of grantees' speech and associations. Wherever it says "accountability," the mechanism is termination at will. Wherever it says "merit," the mechanism is the substitution of political appointees' judgment for expert peer review. Wherever it says "the needs of the American public," the mechanism is alignment with "the President's policy priorities." I ask that OMB respond to each comment below on its own terms.
[200.205] This section is the keystone of the proposed apparatus and should be withdrawn. It requires senior political appointees to conduct pre-issuance review of every discretionary award and directs that peer review "remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion" — with appointees expressly instructed that peer recommendations are not to be "ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding." This inverts eighty years of settled practice. Political appointees hold their positions by virtue of political loyalty, not scientific competence; the proposed rule would have them overrule the unanimous judgment of a field's experts with no required finding of cause and no articulated standard of review. The further requirement that discretionary awards "demonstrably advance the President's policy priorities" converts a statutory grant program — whose purposes Congress, not the President, defines — into an instrument of the incumbent administration. The "Gold Standard Science" benchmark requirement compounds the problem: the term is nowhere defined in measurable terms, which means compliance is determined by the unreviewable discretion of the same political appointees. An undefined standard enforced by political officers is not a standard; it is a loyalty test. Vagueness of this kind in a funding condition also raises serious constitutional concerns under the unconstitutional-conditions doctrine*.
[200.205] I separately object to the direction that agencies "prioritize institutions demonstrating rigorous and reproducible scholarship" as evaluated by political appointees rather than by scientific peers. Reproducibility is a genuine concern within science, addressed through scientific mechanisms — replication studies, registered reports, data-sharing requirements. Placing the determination in the hands of appointees with no obligation to scientific method converts a methodological value into a pretext for content-based selection.
[200.202] Proposed §200.202(a) requires that program goals and objectives be "aligned with administration policies and priorities." Congress authorizes and appropriates for federal research programs; the Constitution vests the spending power in the legislature. A regulation requiring that every program be designed around the sitting President's priorities — rather than around statutory purpose and scientific need — effects an administrative impoundment of congressionally directed funds whenever a field of inquiry falls out of presidential favor. The mechanism is content-neutral on its face and content-targeting in operation: an administration that disfavors, for example, firearm-injury epidemiology, climate attribution science, or vaccine-hesitancy research need never say so in a statute. It need only decline to "align" programs with those topics, and this section makes the misalignment dispositive. The proposing release nowhere explains how this requirement is to be reconciled with appropriations acts that direct funds to specific research purposes.
[200.202(e)] The proposed "domestic-first" framework requires case-by-case justification of any international element in a federally funded R&D award and bars foreign entities from R&D awards absent written approval by a senior political appointee. Science is irreducibly international. The detection of gravitational waves, the sequencing of the human genome, the imaging of a black hole, and the development of mRNA vaccines were all multinational efforts. Making international collaboration presumptively disfavored — and gating exceptions behind political officers — does not protect American science; it amputates it from the global enterprise in which American leadership has been exercised. The provision also duplicates, without coordinating with, existing research-security regimes (NSPM-33, the CHIPS and Science Act's disclosure requirements), suggesting its purpose is not security but control.
[200.202(d)] Authorizing agencies to restrict eligibility among categories of nonprofit organizations invites viewpoint-based exclusion by proxy — for example, excluding 501(c)(4) organizations precisely because issue advocacy is constitutionally protected activity that the administration disfavors. The proposing release offers no neutral criterion limiting this authority.
[200.206] The expanded risk factors are the surveillance mechanism of this rule, and I object to them specifically. Permitting agencies to deny awards based on an applicant's "history of questionable practices based on publicly available and verifiable information" and on "affiliations with organizations" alleged to "undermine public safety or national security" is an invitation to disqualify scientists based on their social media posts, their attendance at lawful protests, and their membership in professional and civic organizations. "Questionable" is not a legal standard. "Undermine public safety" is not a legal standard. These are elastic phrases whose content will be supplied by the political appointees installed as gatekeepers under §200.205. The preamble's own framing — which characterizes peer-reviewed research agendas as "woke," "neo-Marxist," and "anti-American" — demonstrates exactly how elastically these terms will be construed. Conditioning a public benefit on a citizen's lawful speech and associations violates the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny. This is the provision that makes the rule's invocation of "transparency" Orwellian: the transparency demanded is not of government to citizen, but of the citizen-scientist's private political life to the government.
[200.300] The proposed national-policy provision prohibits the use of award funds to "fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate" DEI practices or "gender ideology," the latter defined as theories that "deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans." A regulation of grant accounting has no business adjudicating contested questions of biology and philosophy by fiat — and this definition does precisely that, settling by regulatory pronouncement questions that endocrinologists, geneticists, and clinicians investigate empirically. Worse, the operative verbs ("promote, encourage, facilitate") are so broad that an institution conducting such research with entirely non-federal funds could face termination of unrelated federal awards. That is not a spending condition; it is leverage applied to suppress disfavored research institution-wide, of the kind the Supreme Court rejected in Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International (2013), which held the government may not leverage funding to regulate protected activity outside the contours of the funded program.
[200.218] The prohibition on using awards to "promote or support theories of disparate-impact liability" is a prohibition on a body of social-science and legal-empirical research, by name. Disparate-impact analysis is a methodological tool — a statistical examination of differential outcomes — used across economics, epidemiology, education research, and housing studies. Forbidding federal funds from "supporting" a theory is forbidding research into a question. The federal government may choose its enforcement policies; it may not, through a grants regulation, declare a field of empirical inquiry off-limits because its findings are politically inconvenient.
[200.220] The prohibition on "covered foreign collaborations," extending to indirect costs allocable to any such collaboration, would in practice prohibit routine, safety-critical scientific exchange. As reported in connection with this rule, even satellite collision-avoidance communications with Chinese operators — of which dozens occur daily — would be jeopardized. A rule whose breadth endangers orbital safety in the name of security has its priorities inverted. Legitimate research-security concerns are already addressed by targeted statutes and directives; this provision's indiscriminate sweep indicates its function is isolation, not protection.
[200.303] Mandating E-Verify enrollment for every employee and contractor working on a federal award imposes a substantial unfunded administrative burden on universities — institutions that lawfully employ large numbers of foreign-national researchers on valid visas — and serves no purpose related to financial management of awards, which is OMB's statutory remit under 31 U.S.C. 503. This is immigration enforcement smuggled into a grants-accounting regulation.
[200.340] Codifying authority to terminate any active award, mid-performance, on a bare written statement that it is "inconsistent with program goals or agency priorities" — with no finding of noncompliance, no meaningful process, and no protection for reliance interests — destroys the foundation on which multi-year research is built. Scientists hire staff, enroll human subjects, establish animal colonies, and procure instruments on the premise that a funded award will run its course absent cause. The preamble's analogy to termination-for-convenience in procurement contracts fails: contractors price termination risk into bids and are compensated for termination costs; grantees cannot and are not. In combination with §200.205, this section completes the control loop: political appointees decide what is funded, and political appointees may unfund it at any moment thereafter. No rational institution will invest in long-horizon research under such a regime — which may be the point, but should not be the policy of the United States.
[200.432] Proposed §200.432 provides that "the costs for attending conferences are allowable only if participation in the conference is expressly approved by the Federal agency and included in the terms and conditions of the Federal award." Under the current Uniform Guidance, conference attendance reasonably necessary to the funded work is a routine allowable cost; the proposal eliminates that presumption and replaces it with award-by-award, meeting-by-meeting pre-clearance. Conferences not anticipated at the time of award — which is to say, most of them, since science does not schedule its developments around grant cycles — cannot be charged without reopening the award terms, and the agency retains unreviewable discretion simply to decline. Conferences are where results are presented, criticized, and improved — where science performs its self-correction. Requiring political pre-approval for participation in the basic institutions of a researcher's profession is a tool for isolating scientists from their disciplinary communities, with the denial power resting in the same politically appointed reviewers established under §200.205.
[200.454] This section makes professional society memberships allowable only upon prior written approval, makes journal subscriptions categorically unallowable, and disallows membership in organizations engaged in "issue advocacy." Each element is indefensible. (1) Journal access is not overhead; it is the literature on which research is built. Categorically disallowing subscriptions makes it materially harder to conduct the very research the award funds. (2) Nearly every scientific professional society — the AAAS, the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, the AGU — takes public positions on matters of science policy; that is part of their function in a democracy. Disallowing membership in any organization that engages in "issue advocacy" forces scientists to choose between their professional communities and their funding, and constitutes viewpoint-based pressure on associational rights protected by the First Amendment.
[200.461] Proposed §200.461(a) provides that "publication costs (including page charges, article processing charges (APCs), or similar fees such as open access fees for professional journal publications and other peer-reviewed publications) are unallowable under Federal awards," excepted only where "specifically required by Federal statute or approved in advance by the Federal agency on a case-by-case basis." The section then states: "A general requirement to make results publicly available must not be construed as authorizing publication costs." That final sentence is an admission against interest. OMB acknowledges that federal agencies — NIH and NSF among them — require open-access publication of funded results, and then expressly forbids construing that requirement as authority to pay the fees that open-access publication entails. The mandate survives; its funding is abolished; the gap is to be closed by case-by-case approval from the same politically appointed reviewers established under §200.205. Open-access fees exist because the government required open access. A rule that retains the requirement while disallowing its cost is not fiscal discipline — it is a publication chokepoint, with discretionary release. Peer-reviewed publication is how science is validated and how the public receives results it has already paid for; making it contingent on appointee pre-approval suppresses the scientific record selectively and silently.
[200.421] and [200.450] Together, the public-relations disallowance and the new "issue advocacy" prohibition — barring any messaging that promotes or opposes a "social, political, or public policy position unrelated to the statutory objectives" of the award — could be read to prohibit a federally funded epidemiologist from publicly describing the public-health implications of her own findings. Because the preamble itself characterizes entire fields (climate, public health, equity research) as ideological, the determination of what is "unrelated" or "political" will be made by officials who have announced in advance that they regard the science itself as politics. This is a prior restraint on scientists' speech about their own work, enforced through the threat to their livelihoods.
[200.204] The exception permitting agency heads to withhold funding opportunities from public posting when announcement "is in the national interest of the United States" is boundless. "National interest" is not a standard; it is a permission slip for conducting grant competitions in private, awarded to favored recipients, outside public view. A rule whose first stated objective is "transparency" should not contain a provision authorizing secret competitions on undefined grounds. I note also the new authority for OMB to require agency reports identifying specific recipients of awards over any period — which, combined with §§200.202 and 200.205, gives the Executive Office of the President direct visibility into, and leverage over, which institutions receive funding. Transparency in this rule flows in one direction only: toward the White House.
[200.112] The required disclosure of any proposal personnel formerly employed by the awarding agency within two years is presented as a transparency measure but, in the context of this rule, functions as another data point for the political vetting of applicants. If conflict-of-interest screening were the genuine object, the provision would be administered by career ethics officials under defined standards, not fed into a pre-issuance review conducted by political appointees.
[General — Preamble, Sections I and IV.A] The preamble's evidentiary basis consists substantially of White House fact sheets, a Heritage Foundation report, and a partisan committee document — not GAO findings, not Inspector General audits of the peer-review system, not any independent administrative assessment of the merit-review process the rule proposes to subordinate. The preamble characterizes peer-reviewed research as promoting "neo-Marxist perspectives" and a "'woke' policy agenda." A rulemaking record built on partisan characterizations of disfavored research is the demonstration of the danger, not the justification for the remedy: it shows precisely how the discretion created by §§200.205, 200.206, 200.300, 200.340, and 200.450 will be exercised. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, a rule must rest on reasoned decision-making and a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made. The facts recited here are political grievances; the choice made is political control. Whatever else that is, it is not reasoned decision-making, and it is arbitrary and capricious within the meaning of 5 U.S.C. 706.
[General — comment in closing] I spent my career in information technology in the financial industry, where I learned that systems are judged not by their stated intentions but by their failure modes and incentive structures. The failure mode of this rule is total: every checkpoint in the grant lifecycle — program design (§200.202), public notice (§200.204), merit review (§200.205), risk review (§200.206), award conditions (§§200.218, 200.219, 200.220, 200.300), conferences (§200.432), professional membership (§200.454), publication (§200.461), public communication (§§200.421, 200.450), and continuation (§200.340) — is converted into a point of political control, exercisable without cause and without meaningful review. No future administration of any party should hold this power. The scientists of the Soviet bloc could have told us where Lysenkoism** leads; the proposing agencies should not need the reminder.
I urge OMB to withdraw the proposed rule in its entirety.
* The unconstitutional-conditions doctrine holds that the government may not condition the receipt of a public benefit — including a federal grant — on the surrender of a constitutional right. The doctrine is well established in Supreme Court precedent: Speiser v. Randall, 357 U.S. 513 (1958); Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U.S. 173 (1991); Agency for Int'l Development v. Alliance for Open Society Int'l, 570 U.S. 205 (2013). The last case is directly on point: the Court held that the government may attach conditions to the use of federal funds within the funded program, but may not use funding leverage to regulate a grantee's constitutionally protected activity outside the contours of that program. Several provisions of this proposed rule — particularly §§200.300, 200.450, and 200.454 — condition award eligibility or continuation on the suppression of protected speech and association well beyond the boundaries of the funded work.
** Trofim Lysenko was the Soviet agronomist who, under Stalin, gained political control over Soviet biology and genetics from the late 1930s through the 1950s. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics as "bourgeois pseudoscience" and had scientists who disagreed imprisoned or killed. Soviet agricultural science was set back by decades; crop failures followed. The parallel is not rhetorical flourish: a state apparatus that substitutes political-ideological tests for expert peer review, controls what research may be conducted, and punishes scientists whose findings conflict with official doctrine is Lysenkoism — regardless of which direction the ideology runs. The United States built its postwar scientific preeminence precisely by rejecting that model.
Respectfully submitted,
Submitted by: ■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■■
■■■■■■■, ■■■■■■■■