In late May 2026 the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed a rewrite of the rules governing all federal grantmaking. Docketed as OMB-2026-0034, it revises the framework known as the Uniform Guidance, and it carries a 45-day comment period that closed on July 13, 2026.
Three provisions bear on federal science. Agency heads would designate senior political appointees to conduct a “pre-issuance review” of discretionary award proposals, which must “demonstrably advance the President's policy priorities.” Agencies could terminate active grants deemed inconsistent with agency priorities. And publication costs, including article processing charges and open-access fees, would become unallowable unless an agency specifically approves them, which affects whether federally funded results can be published where other researchers can read them. The proposal also requires agency approval for conference attendance costs.
The response was unusually large. The docket drew 341,699 public comments by the deadline, far beyond what a federal rulemaking normally attracts. An analysis by Tech Policy Press found that 94 percent of the comments it examined opposed the rule, with the politicization of grant decisions the leading concern.
Brandon Jones, president of the American Geophysical Union, said the rule would “restructure the foundational rules of U.S. science funding... to serve political priorities rather than the public good.” Geoscientist Hannah Mark said it “turns grantmaking into an entirely political process, and means... America would quickly lose our status as a leading scientific power.” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, told Space.com the approach was “actually taking a page out of the Communist Party playbook.”
One claim in earlier reporting should be flagged rather than repeated. Space.com reported that appointees could weigh whether a scientist's “social media and personal lives align with the values of the current political party,” and that funded scientists would be restricted from publishing in journals or joining professional societies the administration deems engaged in “issue advocacy.” That characterization has not been corroborated in the coverage from the AAU, the American Physical Society, the AAMC, or Eos, all of which analyzed the proposed text closely. It is treated here as single-sourced.
The argument for the rule is that elected officials legitimately set national spending priorities, and voters can hold a president accountable for those choices in a way they cannot hold peer reviewers accountable. The objection is that peer review answers a different question, whether the research is methodologically sound, and a political appointee is not positioned to answer it. As proposed, the regulations would have taken effect October 1, 2026, but Congress has since barred the budget office from finalizing them before December 11 (see the update below) (see Federal Agencies Admit in Court Stipulations That They Used Keyword Searches to Pick University of California Grants for Termination).
Update (September 21, 2026): Congress stopped the rule, for now, and the White House is reported to be going around the stop. The stopgap spending bill that the Senate passed 90-6 on August 8 and Trump signed in early September blocks the Office of Management and Budget from finalizing these revisions until December 11, according to the Association of American Universities. The block lasts only as long as that spending law and applies only to the budget office's rule. After a September 18 Oval Office meeting, Trump had his budget director begin drafting an executive order that would reach the same end at NIH through a board with veto power over grants (see Trump Drafted an Order Giving His Budget Chief a Veto Over NIH Grants, Then Backed Off After Susan Collins Objected).