The murder of expertise
Russ Vought as science czar would just about do it.
This edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
The Trump administration has spent the last 18 months gutting funding for scientific research, forcing out nonpartisan experts, and elevating the most alarming conspiracy theorists in their stead. Now, a new rule proposed by the regime is threatening science itself.
Normally, changes to rules about how the federal government awards research grants would probably be a somewhat sleepy topic, impactful to people who do that research for a living but not a five-alarm fire for the rest of us. But we live here now, so we all get to worry about a world where people like Russell Vought, the anti-science freakshow who heads the Office of Management and Budget, would have complete veto power over federally-funded scientific research.
That sounds like an overstatement, but it really isn’t.
A new proposed rule puts OMB atop science, despite not being a science agency staffed by scientists. Actually, it’s worse than that. What OMB proposes is to take its existing authority to promulgate general guidance on financial management for government agencies and transform that into rules every agency must follow for every discretionary grant of any kind.
Political appointees would have complete authority over funding decisions, rather than career experts. Grants would be evaluated based not on how they advance science or the nation’s goals, but against how well they push President Trump’s personal policies. Grantees would be muzzled from discussing anything the administration considers a “divisive” ideology and could be revoked at any time without explanation if a political appointee feels like it.
This isn’t remotely how things have worked in the past.
(Rancid) vibes-based science
For decades, decisions about how federal research dollars get spent have been made by an interlocking community of experts both in and outside government. Career scientists at federal agencies work extensively with independent advisory committees staffed by experts. Evaluations were made by actual experts, not unhinged anti-vax weirdos like the ones Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. installed on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Agency personnel held dozens of study sections each month to evaluate grant proposals.
This process helped ensure scientific rigor, but it also insulated science funding from the whims of political appointees. The problem now, of course, is that this administration doesn’t care about scientific rigor at all and also desperately wants political appointees, not scientists, to make funding decisions. So OMB recently dropped 400 pages of nonsense to try to make that happen.
In this topsy-turvy world, a senior political appointee would have to approve every single discretionary grant — science and otherwise. And just to make sure they don’t let any actual expertise sneak in, they would be prohibited from deferring to the peer review process and “must instead use their independent judgment when evaluating Federal award proposals.”
What metrics, exactly, would these political appointees be required to use instead? They have to ensure “that discretionary awards advance the president’s policy priorities.”
That gives away the game. Grant decisions aren’t the result of priorities established by Congress or scientific necessity — just whatever Donald Trump wants. With that, it isn’t really surprising that the proposed rule bans any research on diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as anything related to “gender ideology.” This is necessary, per the rule, because Joe Biden made everything woke.
“Federal awards 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 rule reads.
The authority for this sweeping assertion that Joe Biden spent three years forcing DEI down people’s throats with no oversight or accountability is an August 2025 Trump executive order about grantmaking that basically says the same thing the proposed rule does: Biden made stuff too woke. But there’s nothing in that executive order highlighting specific concerns with oversight or any specific improper grants. It’s just a Trump rant about forbidden DEI, racist stuff about China, and transphobia galore.
But here’s the thing: even if that executive order were chock full of examples of Biden’s woke malfeasance, it still wouldn’t be actual legal authority to upend science. That’s because executive orders are not law, no matter how much Trump wishes otherwise.
OK, well how about this from the rule: “Federal programs and funding opportunities were designed to advance unlawful identity-based ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (DEI) policies and preferences across the country.” Surely that has some sort of relevant citation attached to it, right?
Oh, you sweet summer child. The so-called authority for that is a citation to a 5,000-word rant from the Heritage Foundation published in May 2022. And it’s not a citation to any particular thing in that rant. Apparently you need to just read the whole thing to see if it says what the administration says it does.
And reader, it does not say any such thing.
Heritage shoveled this article out the door a month after the Biden administration announced its “equity action plans” for multiple agencies as part of an effort to support racial equity and underserved communities. So, at the time Heritage was whining about this, literally nothing had happened save for an announcement. There were no federal programs or funding opportunities at all yet, much less any “unlawful” ones.
Well, surely there must be some support for the part of Trump’s proposed rule that says Biden violated the Constitution with all this wokeness run amok: “These policies were inconsistent with basic American values and civil rights laws, including the equal protection principles of the US Constitution.” Nope! Not one, not two, but three Trump executive orders, all of which are racist, are cited here, but nary of which has any actual law.
Now, even this administration knows that it can’t ram through this huge a change based only on Trump’s feels. Agencies need specific statutory authority to enact regulations. Put another way, Congress must say, when passing a law, what, if anything, agencies are allowed to do to implement it. This proposed rule, therefore, must cite laws that give OMB the authority to tell every other federal agency how to evaluate every last bit of discretionary federal grant funding.
According to the proposed rule, if you go read no fewer than nine major federal statutes in their entirety, covering everything from audit requirements to federal procurement to human trafficking, you will somehow see that OMB has unfettered authority to do whatever it wants.
Needless to say, this is also not how this works. Rule-making authority is specific, not general. Put another way, as the Supreme Court already said nearly 50 years ago in Chrysler v. Brown, “there must be a nexus between the regulations and some delegation of the requisite legislative authority by Congress.” Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it smugly, Congress does not “hide elephants in mouseholes.” The executive branch can’t say it has somehow divined a right to do whatever it wants by finding One Weird Trick that no one else has ever noticed, discernible only by the brain geniuses at Trump’s OMB after reading a gazillion words in scores of statutes.
But that’s exactly what is happening. The administration isn’t pointing to some specific grant of authority to do this, some way in which Congress has given OMB the go-ahead to completely alter every rule and regulation about how federal grants are awarded and overseen at every agency. It’s just saying that you can sorta make an inference if you squint.
The administration is also engaging in a massive amount of sleight of hand here, hoping people won’t quite catch it as they move the goalposts so far that they now live in Canada. OMB does have authority to promulgate guidance on fiscal management, which agencies may adopt and modify as preferred. But the new rule purports to shift all that guidance to be binding regulations for every agency. Worse, going forward, future changes would apply to every agency with no discretion. Put another way, it would give OMB near-total control of government grants.
This Rube Goldberg contraption serves another purpose.
The administration previously ran into trouble when it attempted to stealth-install OMB as a sort of super-regulator over all other regulatory agencies. Immediately after Trump retook office, OMB issued a sweeping spending freeze on all federal assistance programs, which courts repeatedly blocked by saying it didn’t have the authority to do so. But the new rule is a backdoor way around that, essentially. If all agencies have to follow OMB’s lead on everything in lockstep, then it can’t be said that OMB is exceeding any authority by telling agencies what they can do with their funding regardless of congressional priorities or agency expertise.
Even if everything about this proposal were aboveboard in terms of authority, what the rule would do would be catastrophic. Sober-minded science types are the ones banging the gong here, and they are uniformly freaked out.
Buckle up, because it wouldn’t just be that political appointees get to decide science funding based on the most rancid vibes, or that every grant applicant would have to pledge allegiance to no DEI. The rule also bans US scientists from collaborating with foreign researchers, prohibits grantees from using federal money to publicize their research in any way (such as attending conferences) without prior government approval, and tells researchers that grant money cannot be used for publication costs when they are routinely several thousand dollars a pop.
Also forbidden? Any communication that the government thinks is impermissible “issue advocacy.” Voter registration activities are out, period. And given that, as former NIH program official Elizabeth Ginexi points out, the rule’s preamble itself says that climate science and public health research are “divisive ideologies,” it’s pretty clear what type of communication would be forbidden.
Finally, remember how the early era of DOGE mass-terminating grants led to endless litigation over whether it had the authority to do so? This solves that problem too, because the political appointees with authority to grant or deny funding would also have the authority to terminate any existing grants based on those eternally rancid vibes.
It’s not too late to fight
So, to recap: Trump issues executive orders that are nothing but memorializations of his bigotry. OMB then pretends that these things are actually law and therefore apply to the entire executive branch and, by extension, the entire country. Then OMB pretends it has divined a cool secret new way to see that Congress actually wanted it like this all along. And in the end, we’re right back where we started in January 2025: an administration asserting that Trump’s election meant he has the right to completely dictate all government policy and spending unilaterally.
It’s monstrous, but it’s also so weedy and tangled and hard to follow that it can get lost.
One last procedural bit: the administration is trying to ram this through as quickly as possible, with the comment period closing July 13. Multiple science organizations have asked to extend it given what a huge change this is, but that’s almost guaranteed not to happen.
As of this week, there are over 14,000 comments about the rule, and everyone is forgiven the temptation of just heading over and banging out a howl of rage. However, some comments are more effective than others — well, at least in a normal world.
You don’t need to be a scientist or a policymaker to offer a good comment, nor do you need to write a treatise. Effective comments can be short and do not need to be some sort of legal argument, but they should be specific: point to something in the proposed rule or explain a specific harm that can arise, for example. Don’t copy and paste someone else’s. There’s a real temptation to pump up the numbers that way, but the government treats getting 1,000 identical comments as one single comment.
Stand Up For Science has a good guide on how to draft a useful comment, one which, in a grim irony, relies extensively on a guide created by OMB itself during Trump’s first term. We never thought we’d look back on that first term as a high point, but here we are.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Nazi Germany might have won WW2 if Hitler had been able to develop the nuclear bomb first. Know why he didn't? Because he thought physics was "Jewish" (the Nazi word for "woke") and drove every competent physicist in Germany and Austria to flee into exile. That brain drain benefitted us and may have saved the world. This latest pogrom may do the same, but it won't be pretty for us.
What’s actually being built here isn’t a science policy. It’s an epistemological loyalty test.
The OMB rule makes sense once you stop reading it as administrative reform and start reading it as behavioral architecture. The goal is eliminating every decision node that operates on criteria other than regime approval. The community is defining its own standards of truth.
The Chrysler v. Brown problem is probably fatal in court. But that assumes the goal is durable legal authority rather than a chilling effect during the years it takes to litigate. Researchers don’t wait out three-year circuit battles. The damage is behavioral: labs self-censor, proposals reshape around political palatability, talent reroutes to Europe.
From Portugal, the American science exodus isn’t hypothetical. It’s visible in European hiring patterns, in Swiss federal lab conversations, in American postdocs quietly acquiring residency abroad.
I am seeing this right now.
The administration thinks it’s winning a culture war.
It’s compounding a brain drain that will run for a generation.
🐌Johan