If you’re at all plugged in to science, or academia, you likely know about the OMB proposed changes. If you don’t, let me share directly from the literature we’ve been sharing from my union, the Campus Faculty Association here at the University of Illinois:

“On May 29, 2026, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed regulatory changes that will fundamentally alter federal research grants in this country. It is devastating and includes many elements that will end peer-review as we know it. Political appointees will: 1) be required to give final approval for all new awards; and 2) have the power to arbitrarily terminate any grant at any time without process, explanation, or oversight. Political appointees making funding decisions without expertise and guided only by an administration's ideological values is a sure path to wasting tax dollars. These changes also will place restrictions on researchers’ use of federal funds for conference travel, international collaborations, and even publishing. The resulting isolation of scientists in the US from their global intellectual communities will cause profound harm to faculty, students, and the public.”

I hope you’ll consider submitting a public comment (they can even be anonymous) at federalregister.gov (Docket #OMB-2026-0034) by July 13^th. My own comments are posted below if you need ideas, but please note that what seems to be more effective are individually written comments rather than a bunch of identical ones.

If you are a member of a higher ed union impacted by these changes, talk to your leadership! We are gearing up for a collective fight against the federal government at a time when university administrations are choosing to hide. There will be a lawsuit, and we will win.

One last note: political interference in academia is not just for scientists - I’d even argue humanists have been under attack for far longer. A report on the humanities, commissioned by the Chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University of St. Louis, has been making the rounds, effectively claiming the humanities is in trouble because of its woke agenda. It does this without evidence, referring even to some “internal reports” rather than having good citational practices. The report is worth reading to understand the DARVO nature of these attacks (you dare work from a context that acknowledges white supremacy or misogyny as real? you’re political and biased!), but perhaps even better would be to read some of the early critiques. My favorites so far are from my colleague Agustin Fuentes, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and philosophy professor emeritus Richard Moran at the Boston Review.

My OMB public comment, plagiarism in this case welcome (but never, ever feed what I write into any type of generative or agentic AI)

[200.205] This section of OMB’s proposal is the most dangerous of the proposed changes. By definition, science with any sort of objectivity, situated or otherwise, cannot have political oversight. This change will take the decision-making away from those with expertise – scientists themselves – and put it in the hands of political actors who do not have the years of training, expertise, and scholarship to understand proposed research. What’s more, by making who gets funded a political act, we necessarily limit the kinds of research that can be done.

As a researcher in the reproductive sciences, I am especially concerned by this administration’s repeated and scientifically unsound invocation of “the sex binary.” Because this section requires adherence to this easily falsifiable concept, I am deeply concerned that we will see a lowering of the quality of research being performed in my area. Only researchers without a grasp of the basic frameworks for understanding sex and gender could possibly agree to adhere to this idea – which means specialists and experts would no longer be fundable.

Finally, the entreaty towards “Gold Standard Science” is not operationalized in a way that is remotely useful to the project of American science. What does this even mean? How does one meet this standard? What is being excluded? This is sloppy framing that does a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of researchers in this country seeking to advance society through their scholarship.

[200.205(d)] and [200.340] I also want to draw specific attention to the ways in which political appointees will be able to override peer review or cancel grants. Again, this is going to reduce the rigor and quality of scientific research produced in the United States. Where once we were leaders, training scientists the world over, doing the most innovative and best work around, now we have been reduced to fearfully submitting impoverished proposals that have the most interesting ideas removed, all in the hope someone without any expertise will not be triggered by a scientific term and deny us funding.

I will also point out that desiring this degree of control over American science shows that MAGA politicians are very precious, emotional, and easily offended. What kind of empirical work are they afraid we will conduct?

[200.300] It seems clear to me that “DEI” is so broad and ill-defined by this administration as to be almost meaningless, and that it manages to devalue any work that happens to be on women, gender minorities, non-white people, or other marginalized groups. The administration needs to recognize that if it cares about getting at the root cause of autism, or removing black box labeling from HRT, they are going to have to fund work that relates in some way to phenomena like gender, disability, and more.

[200.220] As a scholar who collaborates internationally, and has conducted research in Poland for years, I am disturbed by any prohibition on international collaboration. While I do think American science is a powerhouse, we are by no means the only game in town, and many of my best, most innovative, and most productive colleagues are those in other countries. What’s more, it’s the comparative nature of international work – the ability to do multi-sited work, or look at the impacts of different lived experiences, geographies, and more – that is crucial to the formation of new ideas in my fields of human biology and anthropology.

[200.303] [200.434] and many others produce an incredible amount of administrative work for no real scientific benefit. These represent layers of oversight intended to satisfy certain political appointees, while creating more work for others. Given the current federal administration’s interest in reducing indirect costs, how exactly will this work be covered? This is the sort of work that is done by staff typically paid off indirect costs.

[200.461] This goes against the 2022 OSTP mandate for open access science. While I hate open access fees and other publication costs as much as the next person, unless the federal government is going to create policies that make for profit academic presses run tighter margins and stop profiting off of our unpaid editing and peer reviewing labor (and then make us pay for publishing our work!) then we need to be able to pay pub costs with our grants.

[200.421] [200.450] Part of the job of science is communicating that science to the public – because so many of us are publicly funded through federal grants we understand the obligation to make our work relevant and to advance society in some way. However this work does cost money – it takes time and effort and expertise to produce video, or newsletters, or to travel to give talks. As someone who worked for several years in a science camp for young people, it takes time and money to do this work well. As for “issue advocacy,” as experts we are perfectly positioned to advocate for issues relevant to our research. Several of the types of research listed in the preamble of this rule are important and necessary for human flourishing, and mistakenly labeled as ideological. This current administration needs to stop talking about things for which they have no expertise. We need to be able to speak about whatever scholarship, interest, and expertise we have: academic freedom is the bedrock of American research.