Opinion Piece: A Proposed Federal Rule Would Hand American Science to Political Appointees and Reshape Federal Funding

This opinion piece was submitted as a public comment on the Office of Management and Budget's proposed rule “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance” (docket OMB-2026-0034-0001), open for comment through July 13th, 2026.

As an astrophysicist and science communicator at The Pennsylvania State University, I have devoted my career to answering some of humanity's most fundamental questions: How did we get here? What forces have shaped the evolution of the cosmos? And when did the ingredients for life first form? Using the James Webb Space Telescope, I try to answer these questions by studying the most distant galaxies ever observed – work that is made possible through federal research funding, which has always been awarded on the strength of the science rather than the politics.

However, a new federal rule would place the politics before the science.

Roughly one year ago, we were facing a similar existential threat when I warned that the President's proposed science budget cuts would devastate American research and negatively impact Arizona's economy. Congress, which controls federal spending, has for the most part rejected those proposed budget cuts. But a quieter and far more enduring threat has now arrived: not through the budget, but through the rulebook.

On May 29th, 2026, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a 412-page proposed rule entitled “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance” that would rewrite how every federal science agency awards and administers research grants. The most consequential thing about it is procedural. For decades, these rules have existed as non-binding guidance; this proposal would elevate that guidance into binding regulation. The difference matters since a regulation applies to every federal agency uniformly, is far harder to challenge in court, and can only be undone by Congress. Last year, the courts struck down the administration's unlawful grant freezes and terminations as overreach. The proposed rule is the workaround, a way to make those same policies permanent and judge-proof. I strongly urge OMB to withdraw the proposed rule.

The quiet and often overlooked genius of American science funding is peer review. Each step of the peer review process exists to ensure that public money follows the best ideas rather than the best-connected people. When a researcher submits a proposal, it is read by a panel of independent experts, screened for conflicts of interest, judged anonymously against published criteria, and debated until the panel reaches a consensus on a ranked list of proposals.

It is true that someone has always been able to weigh those rankings against budget and program needs. At NASA and the National Science Foundation, that someone is a program officer: a permanent civil servant, hired for scientific expertise, who turns panel rankings into funding decisions. This discretion is not new. Section 200.205 represents what's new by requiring a senior political appointee to personally review every award, explicitly forbid that appointee from deferring to the expert panel, and demanding that funded work “demonstrably advance the President's policy priorities.” Peer review would be demoted to merely “advisory.” The damage would not be limited to the proposals that get overturned; the deeper harm is the science that will never get proposed since researchers would learn to anticipate political preference instead of pursuing the most promising questions. By replacing merit review with political review, you do not just change who wins grants – you change what science inevitably gets done.

To make matters worse, Section 200.340 would let an agency terminate any active award at any time, citing only that it no longer serves “agency priorities,” with no detailed justification required and no formal appeal. For an early-career scientist, this is not a distant risk but an immediate one: my research depends on multi-year funding that, under this rule, could be canceled midstream for reasons I would never be told. Taken together, these changes would concentrate authority over American research in a small group of political appointees who answer to no panel and no court.

But the proposed rule reaches even further. I publish my results in the journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which, like most journals in my field, recover their costs through page and article-processing charges that are typically paid for using federal grants. Section 200.461 would make those charges unallowable except by case-by-case agency approval, and states explicitly that a requirement to make results public does not authorize paying to make them public. This is in direct conflict with the 2022 federal open-access policy requiring that taxpayer-funded research be made publicly available to the taxpayers who funded it. The burden falls hardest on non-profit, community-owned publishers like the AAS. Section 200.454 would compound the harm by restricting professional-society memberships that sustain the journals of the AAS.

Section 200.432 would allow conference costs only when an agency approves them in advance and writes them into the award. Every January, thousands of astronomers gather at the meeting of the AAS where major scientific results are presented, where collaborations take shape, where findings are publicly scrutinized before they ever reach a journal, and where early-career researchers like me can be interviewed for the positions that keep us in the field. Requiring political pre-approval for each trip hands the government a quiet veto over which scientific gatherings researchers may attend.

The United States has led the world in science for nearly a century for one reason: money followed scientific merit, judged by experts; not loyalty, judged by appointees. Reputations built over generations can be squandered in a single one. Once the world's best researchers conclude that American grants reward politics rather than discovery, they will take their talent elsewhere, and we may never win it back.

The good news is that this is still only a proposal and it is open for public comment through July 13, 2026. OMB is legally required to consider every substantive comment and to respond to those demonstrating real harm before any rule can be finalized. As a federally funded scientist who would be directly affected by the proposed rule change, I respectfully and strongly urge OMB to withdraw the following provisions:

1. §200.205 – political-appointee review that overrides expert peer review.
2. §200.340 – termination of active awards without meaningful cause or appeal.
3. §200.432 – prior political approval for attending any conferences or workshops.
4. §200.454 and §200.461 – restrictions on professional memberships, publication, and open-access costs.

I urge every scientist, and every citizen who has ever benefited from American discovery, to submit a comment of their own before the deadline. Science is not a partisan enterprise. It is the foundation of our prosperity, our security, our understanding of the Universe, and our unique place within it. The question is not whether American science can survive political oversight; the question is whether federal funding will continue to answer to evidence, or be made to answer to politics.

Jakob M. Helton is an Evolving Universe Postdoctoral Fellow at The Pennsylvania State University studying the most distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope. Read more about the OMB proposed rule from the AAS and the Planetary Society.