Saving science as we know it: Overview of new proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget, and how we can make our voices heard.

On Friday, May 29, 2026, Russell Vought officially placed the sword of Damocles over U.S. science. In a proposed rule, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) codified what has been happening since early 2025: research grants being cancelled carelessly, political appointees gaining undue control over grant-giving institutions, and restrictions being placed on what science is allowed to happen. Though this is ominous, there is a way to make our voices heard by submitting comments on the rule before July 13th, which we’ll cover at the end of this bite. But first, let’s go through what the rule really says for science in the U.S and abroad.

Primer on the U.S. Government’s investment in science

At first glance, this proposal sounds eerily like standard grant administration. That is part of what makes it dangerous. It hides a fundamental change in the relationship between science and the state, inside the language of compliance, oversight, and “taxpayer accountability.” But what is being proposed is not just a new filing requirement or a small change in how awards are processed. It is a shift in who gets to decide what science is worth doing and, if enacted, these decisions will no longer be in the hands of scientists.  

The investment of public money into science in America began after the Second World War as the government began to recognize the benefit of science for its citizens. The main research grant-giving institution, the National Science Foundation, was established in 1950 after Vannevar Bush was tasked by FDR to propose a new system for science funding. 

If you’ve read some other recent Astrobites policy posts (or the guide), you may be familiar with the establishing document Science: the Endless Frontier, written in 1945. In this document, they outline five fundamentals necessary for government support of science. As we face the impending OMB proposal, three fundamentals stand out as highly relevant. 

The OMB proposal completely eliminates all three of these fundamental ideas that have allowed science in the United States to flourish in the past three quarters of a century. In this bite, we focus on the importance of these three tenets under fire: research flexibility (point 1), peer review (point 2), and scientific autonomy (point 3). 

1. Research Flexibility

One of the strangest assumptions in this proposal is that research can be planned with perfect foresight. Anyone who has actually done research knows this is not how science works. You write a proposal with the best information you have. Then, the data arrives. A detector behaves differently than expected. A telescope schedule changes. Another conference becomes more relevant than the one you originally planned to attend. A collaboration forms because someone asks the right question after a talk. A null result turns out to be more interesting than the original hypothesis.This is not failure. This is science.

The proposal’s restrictions on conference travel (§200.432) and publication costs (§200.461) would make that flexibility much harder. Conferences are not academic vacations; they are where graduate students find collaborators, where early-career researchers become visible, where new projects are born, and where fields course-correct in real time. If conference attendance has to be explicitly approved and written into the terms of the award in advance, then scientists are being asked to predict, sometimes years ahead of time, where the most useful scientific conversations will happen. That is not realistic. 

The same is true for publication costs. A research grant that cannot reliably support publication is almost self-contradictory. The purpose of publicly funded science is not just to produce results; it is to make those results available for scrutiny, reuse, and future work. If a government supports the research but makes it harder to publish the outcome, it is not protecting taxpayer money. It is reducing the return on that investment.

The deeper issue is that science is not a vending machine where money goes in and a predetermined discovery comes out. Sometimes the most important outcome of a grant is not the result originally imagined in year one (for instance, GLP-1s originated from research on Gila monster venom). Funding needs guardrails, yes. But it also needs enough flexibility for researchers to follow evidence where it leads.

2. Peer review

Peer review may be imperfect, and scientists know this better than anyone. It can be slow, conservative, biased toward established groups, and exhausting for the people who do it. Reviewing proposals is real labor. It takes time, expertise, and care. But despite all of its flaws, peer review exists for a reason: expert judgment matters.

If a proposal is about exoplanet atmospheres, gravitational waves, climate modelling, particle physics, or a new detector technology, it should be evaluated by people who understand the field. Not because scientists deserve special treatment, but because taxpayers deserve competent review. The public should want grants to be judged by people who can tell the difference between a risky but brilliant idea and a proposal that simply sounds impressive. That distinction is often technical. It often depends on knowledge of instruments, methods, data, and the current literature. It cannot be replaced by political preference without degrading the quality of what gets funded.

The proposed rule says peer review in grant-giving can still exist, but only in an advisory role that cannot become binding (§200.205). That may sound harmless, but in practice it weakens the core mechanisms that make federal science funding credible. If expert review becomes just one optional input, and senior political appointees can override it based on broad ideas like national interest, administration priorities, or ideological fit, then the center of gravity moves away from science and toward politics.

That is bad even for people who agree with the current administration. A science system built around political loyalty is unstable by design. The priorities of administrations change. The laws of nature do not. If every election can redefine what kinds of scientific questions are acceptable, then long-term research becomes almost impossible. Graduate students cannot plan careers around that. Labs cannot responsibly hire people around that. Institutions cannot build serious research programs around that. And the country cannot expect to remain scientifically competitive while treating research funding like a political mood ring.

Peer review is not a perfect shield. But removing it does not make science more accountable. It makes science more vulnerable.

3. Scientific autonomy

Scientific autonomy does not mean scientists should receive blank checks. It means that, once public funding has been allocated through a legitimate process, the internal decisions about methods, personnel, collaboration, and scope should remain primarily in the hands of the people and institutions doing the work. That principle is not some luxury for academics. It is the reason basic research works. 

The history of U.S. science after World War II was built on a bargain: the government would support research because research serves the public good, but it would not micromanage the internal direction of every project. That bargain helped create a scientific ecosystem that became the envy of the world. The proposed OMB rule breaks that bargain.

This matters especially for long-term research. Some projects take years before they produce their most important results. Some require expensive infrastructure, specialized training, and stable teams. If a grant can be suspended or terminated because an agency later decides it no longer aligns with current priorities, then the damage is not limited to one budget line. Students lose years of work. Postdocs lose jobs. Collaborations collapse. Data sets become incomplete. Instruments sit unused. Entire research programs can be interrupted after the public has already invested in them. This is already happening: over 383 clinical trials were cancelled in 2025. What do the researchers and the patients do now? 

The proposed restrictions on international collaboration are also deeply concerning. Nature is not organized by national borders, and modern science must be international. Astronomy is maybe the easiest field in which to see this. Our telescopes are located around the world and in space and our data are used by researchers across every continent. Some of the most important scientific projects in history depend on international partnerships; CERN, IceCube, LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA, LISA, the ISS, and many major observatories are not examples of weakness. They are examples of what science can do when expertise is allowed to move across borders.

A “domestic-first” framework may sound like it strengthens American science, but the effect could very well be the opposite. If the best expertise in a subfield is abroad, U.S. researchers need to be able to work with those experts. If a student or professor cannot build the collaboration required to do frontier work, the field does not magically become stronger inside the United States. It becomes isolated. People leave. Projects move elsewhere. The country loses influence not because foreign collaboration was too strong, but because domestic science was made too rigid to compete.

The proposal’s implications for our scientific research philosophy 

The core problem with this proposal is that it misunderstands how science advances. Science needs accountability, but it also needs trust. It needs oversight, but it also needs freedom. It needs public investment, but it cannot become a system where scientific questions survive only if they flatter the political priorities of the moment.

A government that funds science should care deeply about waste, fraud, and abuse. But curiosity is never a waste. International collaboration is not betrayal. Publishing results is not a vanity expense. Conference travel is not automatically frivolous. Peer review is not an obstacle to accountability. And scientific autonomy is not a loophole. It is the condition that allows research to serve the public in the first place.

The danger of this rule is not only that some grants may be cancelled, or that some conferences may become harder to attend, or that some collaborations may become administratively impossible. The danger is that it changes the culture of science. Researchers will begin to ask safer questions. Institutions will avoid politically sensitive topics. Students will learn that the best way to survive is not to pursue the strongest science, but to avoid attention. If every research program has to be legible to the political priorities of the current administration before it is allowed to exist, then the system is no longer asking, “Is this good science?” It is asking, “Is this politically convenient science?” Had great thinkers just asked the second question, Copernicus would have never proposed heliocentrism, Socrates would never have chosen the examined life, and Darwin would never have followed up on evolution.

What can we do? Guide to submitting a public comment on the proposal

Luckily, this rule is not yet binding. Before publishing the final rule, the OMB must respond to significant comments made by the public. If they enact the rule without adequately responding to significant comments, it can be challenged in court. 

This is where we come in. Anyone can comment on the rule, whether they are a researcher or not. The rule is posted on the federal register and comments are open until July 13th, 11:59pm EST.

Comments are most helpful if they are specific and need to be addressed, not just whether you support or oppose the rule. A very useful guide to writing a comment can be found here. The idea is to provide a very clear argument for why this proposal will be disastrous for U.S. science. You should draw on your own experience, provide data that argues against this rule, or even propose an alternative solution. 

The more specific it is, the less likely they can write it off. A good guide for researchers can be found here. If you’re a researcher, describe how the rules of this grant would have not allowed you to do the current work you do. If these rules were already in place, would you be able to pay to publish in a journal? Cite specific sections of the rule. Section 200 is where most of the regulations are described. It’s also best if the comment is written from a personal email.

Thousands of people are already making their voice heard; as of writing this, there are over 143,000(!) comments on the rule. But it’s not really a numbers game; it’s a debate. A well-crafted comment is still infinitely useful. 

Congress also has the technical power veto rules that are “final,” if both the Senate and the House veto it. This has only happened once since 1996 (when this process began), but it’s still worthwhile to contact your representatives so they know about the dangers of this proposed rule. Stand Up for Science also has a good guideline on how to talk to your friends and family about the proposed rule. 

Though it continues to inch closer, the sword of Damocles over science has not yet fallen. We have the power to keep pushing back by making our voices heard. Scientific research affects everyone, and it is our responsibility as researchers and people living in this country to believe in its future. 

Astrobite edited by Natalie Price, Graham Doskoch, and Sahil Hegde

Featured image credit: Andreas Cellarius