White House plans to vet public grants for ‘American values’ spark broad alarm

A set of sweeping policy changes unveiled by the White House would leave officials appointed by Donald Trump vetting every public grant issued to universities and nongovernmental organizations on the basis of their fidelity to “American values”, as defined by the president, triggering widespread concern.

All federal grants approved by Trump’s political appointees must “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities”, according to a lengthy proposal published by the office of management and budget (OMB).

Federal awards during the Biden administration “were often used during those years to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public”, the proposal claims in its executive summary. “Collectively, these policies wasted a great amount of taxpayer resources and caused great harm to public trust in government.”

A 400-page document proposing rule changes was published Friday without a press release or other formal attention, and first reported by the New York Times. Nonetheless, by Tuesday afternoon, more than 3,000 public comments had been offered about the proposal, almost exclusively in alarmed opposition.

“The proposed federal legislation that will by-pass peer review of scientific grant proposals in favor of political oversight, allow grants to be terminated at any time, for any reason, and largely prevent the use of federal funds for publishing, attending meetings, or collaborating internationally would be another devastating blow to American science,” wrote Andy McCammon, a chemistry research professor at the University of California at San Diego, and member of the editorial board of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I see first-hand the displacement of good submitted manuscripts from the United States by manuscripts from other countries, notably China. I hope the United States will stop its campaign against science before it’s too late, if it’s not too late already.”

Contacted for comment, the White House deferred to the OMB. The OMB did not immediately respond.

The proposed rule changes would codify many of the executive orders issued early in Trump’s second term, barring support for diversity, equity and inclusion activities and respect for LGBTQ+ gender identification. Under the new rules, political appointees at federal agencies would have the power to cancel any grant they deemed was not “in the national interest”, raising fears that rigorous peer reviews to determine which proposals receive federal funding would be undercut.

The new regime would permit OMB to continue the activities that started under the aborted Doge initiative, said Amy Sharma, executive director of Science for Georgia, an advocacy organization.

“Some underpaid intern did Ctrl-F on every single grant that had been pushed out by the NIH [National Institutes of Health] … and looked for words like ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ and ‘sex’ and ‘gender identity’ and they just yanked those grants,” Sharma said.

Some grant recipients were able to lean on political and business connections with government officials or elected officials and get their grant money back, added Sharma. But that has led to a culture of silence, where researchers do not want to draw visibility. “No one is talking about it because people like to be employed,” Sharma said.

One new provision explicitly bans recipients from using federal grant money to promote or support “disparate-impact” liability, which would show whether a policy or activity disproportionately harms people of color or other protected classes. This includes a strict prohibition on funding disparate-impact studies, disparate-impact litigation or any award activity driven by assumed disparate-impact risk, unless expressly authorized by statute.

The proposed changes to the way grants work present practical problems, researchers say. The proposal requires grant recipients to list the conferences they will attend over a five-year grant period, which is not just impractical, but inhibits good science, according to Barbara Nikolajczyk, a professor at the University of Kentucky studying obesity and diabetes.

“If you’re really doing the same science that you put in a grant application six years ago for a five-year grant, you’re not moving forward quickly enough,” she said. “It’s adding insult to injury, right? Injury being the ability to just completely defund your research team that you took five years to develop at any moment …

“The problem is going to be that it’s just going to slow down our ability to push innovation forwards because we will need additional approval, which always slows things down. I feel like we’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist by putting political checks into our normal workflow.”

The proposal effectively bars some kinds of collaboration with foreign entities. Researchers leaving the US for other countries is not an abstract problem: Nikolajczyk said she’s seeing it already.

Agencies would operate under these rules as a binding regulation and not “guidance” from OMB. Policy for grant administration would slip away from other agencies and be centralized under Russell Vought, head of the OMB. This would require a formal rule-making process, which began with the publication of the proposal in the federal register, and would go into effect in October.

“This is concerning as hell,” said Sharma, who previously served on grant panels at the National Science Foundation. “It’s killing academic freedom.”

The current process for grant funding is meritocratic, she argued: “You assemble a panel of subject matter experts who usually all have a PhD from somewhere, and they sit around in a room and they evaluate the applications based on the grant criteria, which is pretty well spelled out.”

The idea of political officials overriding the scientific decision-making process is akin to Soviet communism, Sharma suggested: “It’s like, well, Stalin doesn’t believe in this, so we’re not going to give money for this anymore, right?”