Ever since World War II, the American system of peer-reviewed grants to support science has made our great research universities the envy of the world, and has been a key source of commercial innovation as well. President Trump has already substantially weakened that system with a series of cuts and delays in federal research funding, as a way of punishing universities. Now, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, proposes to finish the job.
Under OMB’s proposed rule, all federal research awards, hundreds of billions of dollars every year, would be reviewed by Trump political appointees, who could veto them if they didn’t fit the president’s agenda. Even existing grants could be terminated on the same grounds.
The rule was put out for comment on May 29. The deadline for comments was July 13. As of the weekend, a record 93,000 comments had been received, the vast majority of them negative. The relatively few positive ones were mostly variations on the same form letter.
The proposal has created wall-to-wall solidarity in the scientific community. “This latest move is a brazen power grab by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to buck the will of Congress and the American people and will make future discoveries less likely,” Sudip Parikh, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, warned in a statement.
Political control of science could veto all research on climate, on diseases that happen to afflict different ethnic groups differently, and could blacklist scientists who even incidentally have been associated with affirmative action programs. It could also block data sharing and participation of American researchers in international conferences or consortia that include people from nations that have annoyed Trump. The ramifications are endless.
While the threat to scientific research has gotten most of the attention and resistance, the OMB proposed rule is not limited to science. It directly politicizes all federal grant funding, from agencies ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to HUD, the Agriculture Department, and the Department of Transportation.
All told, the federal government spends $1.2 trillion a year in grants and cooperative agreements. According to Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program director at the National Institutes of Health, who now writes a Substack, “Federal grants are not peripheral to how states and communities function. They represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends.”
Can Trump and Vought get away with this extreme power grab? Vought’s rulemaking calls for the new system to be finalized by October 1, conveniently before the November election when a new Congress might act to reverse it. Reviews of comments are required by law. There is no time between now and the end of September for OMB to review all the comments, but that is not likely to stop Vought.
There has been unified pushback by Democrats in Congress. Among Republicans, only Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, up for re-election, has raised concerns.
The ploy will also be challenged in court. What the Supreme Court might do is anybody’s guess. But federal grants typically come with specific guidelines from Congress. They are appropriations with the binding force of law. And the president, under the Constitution—if that means anything anymore—cannot just unilaterally cancel legal appropriations. This is part of a larger effort by Trump and Vought to take control of the budget process and make Congress irrelevant, despite the specific grant to Congress in our founding documents of the power of the purse.
The Roberts Court is partly to blame for inviting this latest overreach. The Court’s construction of the “unitary executive” doctrine suggests that as long as presidential actions are within the executive branch, the president can do pretty much what he wants, and all federal grants are made by executive branch agencies.
However, occasional extreme excesses, like Trump’s attempt to override birthright citizenship or the independence of the Federal Reserve, have been too much for even this Court. We’ll have to see where the Roberts Court stands on defense of peer-reviewed science as directed by Congress.
