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John Baez (May 30 2026 at 06:20):Anyone who is still hoping for US federal funding for science or math should read this:
I will quote some of the most damaging items, like the broad prohibition of international collaborations, the requirement to get pre-approval of attendance of any conference, the cessation of funding for open-access-mandated publication, the ability of political appointees to meddle in any decision whatsoever, etc.
Of course these new rules will challenged if approved, because it's insane. But as usual the challenges will take time.
This is arguably the most consequential change in the rule. Senior political appointees, rather than career scientists or program officers, would now be required to conduct a “pre-issuance review” of every discretionary grant before it is awarded. These appointees are explicitly forbidden from deferring to peer reviewers or routinely ratifying their recommendations.
The criteria they must apply include blocking awards that touch on denial of “the sex binary in humans,” illegal immigration, or anything deemed to “promote anti-American values.” The rule also requires that discretionary awards must:
“...demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”
In practice, this gives political appointees a veto over any science that conflicts with the current administration’s ideology.
The rule explicitly states that peer review recommendations “remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding.” This directly dismantles the post-WWII system used by NIH, NSF, DOE, NASA, and nearly every science agency, in which independent expert peer review was the primary measure of scientific merit. Under this rule, a political appointee can simply override the scientific community’s judgment with no finding of cause.
The rule repeatedly invokes a concept called “Gold Standard Science,” tied to Executive Order 14303 of May 23, 2025, without defining it in any concrete or measurable way. Under the proposed requirements:
• All grants must include benchmarks for compliance with “Gold Standard Science”
• Agencies must prioritize institutions that have “demonstrated success in implementing Gold Standard Science”
• Institutional prestige and historical reputation are explicitly deprioritized in favor of compliance with this undefined standard
Because the standard is never defined, the administration retains broad, unguided discretion to favor or disfavor institutions based on their political alignment.
The rule codifies and expands the authority to terminate active grants mid-award simply because they are “inconsistent with program goals or agency priorities.” Agencies need only provide a brief written rationale; no finding of noncompliance or fraud is required. This retroactively threatens ongoing multi-year research that researchers and institutions have built programs around.
OMB frames this as analogous to the “termination for convenience” clause used in federal contracts, but grants are fundamentally different instruments. Researchers take on staff, make commitments to participants, and design years-long projects around the presumption that a funded grant will run its course.
John Baez (May 30 2026 at 06:25):All federal award funds are prohibited from being used to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” any of the following:
• DEI or DEIA policies or practices
• “Gender ideology,” defined as any theory that “denies the biological reality of sex or the sex binary”
• Any assistance with gender transition for individuals under 19
These restrictions are embedded as mandatory grant conditions across all agencies and all programs. A university or research institution that conducts such research, even with entirely separate, non-federal funds, could face grant termination if the activity is found to conflict with award conditions.
A new government-wide rule prohibits the use of any federal funds, including indirect costs, for bilateral or multilateral collaboration with “covered foreign countries” or entities affiliated with them. The rule extends beyond China to all countries designated under broad sanctions lists, and covers travel, research activities, technical assistance, and indirect costs allocable to any such collaboration.
While legitimate national security concerns exist with certain foreign entities, this provision is sweeping enough to severely disrupt international partnerships that have been foundational to U.S. leadership in fields from climate science and astrophysics to genomics and epidemiology.
A new domestic-first framework requires that any international element in a federally funded R&D grant be affirmatively justified on a case-by-case basis by agency officials. Foreign entities cannot receive R&D awards at all except with written approval from a senior political appointee. International collaboration, currently standard practice across many scientific disciplines, would become presumptively disfavored.
The risk factors agencies may use to deny a grant application are expanded to include an applicant’s membership in or affiliation with organizations that “advocate for the overthrow of the United States Government” or “undermine public safety or national security.” Given the preamble’s expansive framing of what constitutes anti-American activity, this language could be used to disqualify researchers affiliated with civil rights, environmental, or public health advocacy organizations.
All recipients and subrecipients of federal awards must enroll in and use the DHS E-Verify system for every employee and contractor working on a federal award. Any Final Nonconfirmation must be reported to the federal agency. This adds significant administrative burden to universities and research institutions and could jeopardize grants at institutions employing researchers from abroad.
The rule restructures 2 CFR to make OMB’s guidance a directly binding regulation on all agencies, effective government-wide on a single date. This removes the previous system under which individual agencies had meaningful flexibility in adopting OMB guidance. It also eliminates the ability of individual science agencies to shield their communities from any of these changes through their own implementing rules.
Under current rules, conference attendance related to the scientific work of a grant is a standard, routine allowable cost. The proposed rule eliminates that presumption entirely. The new text states:
“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.”
This means every conference a researcher wishes to attend using grant funds must be pre-approved by the agency and written into the award at the time it is made. Conferences not anticipated when the award was issued cannot easily be added later, and the agency has full discretion to deny approval or simply decline to include any conferences in the terms at all.
Conferences are where scientists present results, receive peer critique, discover new approaches, and build the collaborations that advance their fields. Giving political appointees gatekeeper authority over conference attendance is a direct tool for isolating researchers from their professional communities.
The proposed rule makes three significant changes to allowable membership and subscription costs:
• Professional society memberships are only allowable if they are necessary to fulfill the award requirements and receive prior written agency approval
• Subscriptions to professional, academic, and technical journals are made categorically unallowable
• Memberships in organizations whose primary purpose is lobbying or issue advocacy are unallowable
The journal subscription ban deserves particular attention. Researchers routinely use grant funds to access the scientific literature that is foundational to their work. At institutions with constrained library budgets, this could make it genuinely difficult to conduct research.
The rule proposes that all journal publication costs, including article processing charges, open access fees, and similar fees, are unallowable by default. Exceptions would require either a specific statutory mandate or case-by-case agency pre-approval. The proposed regulatory text reads:
“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.”
This directly conflicts with longstanding federal open access mandates, including the 2022 OSTP memorandum requiring that federally funded research be made publicly available. Peer-reviewed publication is the mechanism by which science is validated and shared. Making it financially prohibitive for federally funded researchers to publish their findings would effectively suppress the scientific record.
All public relations costs are proposed as unallowable except those explicitly required by statute. This would restrict researchers from communicating findings to the public or press. Combined with the issue advocacy prohibition below, it adds another layer of control over how federally funded science reaches the public.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (May 30 2026 at 17:39):@John Baez I'm pretty sure everyone should read this. Imo this calls for a much stronger reaction than just being challenged after the fact "if approved". These policies amount to an assassination attempt on publicly funded research in the US.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 31 2026 at 06:57):Wow this is straight from the fascists playbook :exhausted:. Let's hope Congress will do something about it indeed...
John Baez (May 31 2026 at 08:11):Anyone can comment on the proposed new rules at the Office of Management and Budget's website - anonymously if one prefers. I said these were the stupidest rules I'd ever seen, and explained why.
Various university groups are already moving to stop these new rules.
Joe Moeller (Jun 01 2026 at 23:01):Most of this is expected (and of course horrendous), but 13 surprised me. What's the goal here?
David Michael Roberts (Jun 01 2026 at 23:30):Page and colour charges have been a part of experimental science publishing since before APCs were a thing - that's the reason $3000 was a standard level for an APC in the early days, since biologists and chemists and whatnot could already pay about that much and it was a drop in the bucket compared to actually running a 12-month experiment. Luckily for category theorists and other certain mathematicians we have so-called Diamond OA where no money need change hands (I agree of course that item 13 is stupid, though!)
V Slicer (Jun 02 2026 at 10:28):Joe Moeller said:
Most of this is expected (and of course horrendous), but 13 surprised me. What's the goal here?
It could perhaps be described as enclosement of our collective social reproduction to generate profit.
Chad Nester (Jun 04 2026 at 08:59):I actually like point 13...
Chad Nester (Jun 04 2026 at 09:00):As a whole, it is of course very sad.