The Office of Management and Budget's May 29 proposal would put roughly $1 trillion in research funding across 42 agencies under direct political appointee veto, bypassing peer review; the public comment window closes July 13.
On May 29, the Office of Management and Budget published a 412-page proposal that would let political appointees at 42 federal agencies review and kill almost any science grant before it is awarded. The rule, document 2026-10817 in the Federal Register, covers roughly $1 trillion in federal research funding and rewrites the operating manual for how Washington doles out money to universities, hospitals, and independent labs.
OMB is the executive-branch agency that writes the president's budget and oversees how agencies spend it. The agency framed the change as a cleanup of outdated rules on "federal financial assistance" — the catch-all term for grants, cooperative agreements, and similar funding. The real effect, according to the Association of American Universities, is to move the final say on grant approval from outside scientific peer reviewers to political officials inside each agency.
What the rule does in practice is more invasive than the word "cleanup" suggests. According to the American Council on Education's section-by-section summary, the proposal would require preapproval before grant recipients could spend federal money on international collaborations or conference travel. It would restrict the use of grant funds to publish in open-access journals. And it embeds explicit carve-outs barring research framed around "diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility" programs or "gender ideology" — restrictions that read to many in the research community as ideologically driven and at odds with how scientific projects are actually designed.
For decades, the US research funding system has run on a basic bargain: working scientists review their peers' proposals on quality, and the agencies that hold the money — the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, NASA, NOAA, and the research arms of USDA — award grants on the basis of those reviews. The proposed rule does not abolish peer review. It stacks a political review on top of it and gives that review veto power at any time. Any grant, for any reason, at any point in its life, could be looked over and killed.
That structure is what makes the rule different from a single political fight over a single grant. The scope is the federal financial assistance system itself, not a line item, not a single agency, not a single topic. A veto over NIH-funded vaccine research is the same legal mechanism as a veto over NSF-funded seismology or DOE-funded fusion work. The rule applies to all of it, and the authority sits with political appointees at each of the 42 agencies that distribute the money.
The reaction from the research community was fast. The American Association for the Advancement of Science called the rule a politicization of federal grantmaking. The Association of American Universities warned of "major changes" to how the federal government partners with research universities. The American Council on Education circulated its analysis to college and university presidents. And last September, more than 50 scientific societies signed a separate letter objecting to the executive order that preceded this rule.
The most direct warning came from Colette Delawalla, founder and CEO of Stand Up for Science, who told The Verge that if the rule goes forward, "US science will stop" and "won't exist anymore" and that "every community in the country" will be affected. The phrase is the kind of alarm that an advocacy group is allowed to sound. The mechanism behind it is what makes the alarm land: when political appointees can reach into any grant, at any agency, at any time, the projects that depend on federal funding — vaccine development, climate models, earthquake and hurricane warnings, basic physics and chemistry — are not funded or not, based on a political judgment that does not have to defend itself to a peer panel.
The comment window is the live pressure point. OMB is statutorily required to review and respond to substantive public comments before finalizing the rule, and that window closes July 13. After finalization, Congress has a separate route: under the Congressional Review Act, Congress may overturn a recently issued rule through a joint resolution of disapproval, which requires only a simple majority vote in both chambers and cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Neither lever is certain. But both are open, both are time-bounded, and both are the only ones that operate before the rule becomes the operating manual of US science funding.
The rule is still proposed, not final. The language, the effective date, and even the length of the comment period can shift between now and July 13. What does not shift is the mechanism: peer review on the bottom, political veto on top, applied uniformly to a $1 trillion research system that did not ask for the second layer.