FILE – A water researcher tests a sample of water for PFAS at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Center For Environmental Solutions and Emergency Response in Cincinnati, on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel, File) For generations, the U.S. has led the world in scientific discovery because federal research grants are judged primarily by scientists, not by politicians. That principle is now in jeopardy.
The Office of Management and Budget has proposed a government-wide regulation that would fundamentally alter how federal grants are awarded. Buried in its sweeping rewrite of federal grant rules is a directive that peer review recommendations must remain merely “advisory” and must not be “routinely deferred to” by political appointees or their designees.
Congress must not allow this rule to take effect. Any continuing resolution funding the federal government must explicitly prohibit appropriated funds from finalizing, implementing, administering or enforcing it.
This is not an obscure administrative dispute. It is a threat to the foundation of American science, which is a major driver of American economic strength.
Scientific peer review is imperfect, but it exists for an indispensable reason: Evaluating a research proposal requires deep expertise. Determining whether an experiment is rigorous, whether its methods can answer the question posed, whether its conclusions would be meaningful and whether it represents the best use of limited research dollars cannot be reduced to a political checklist.
At the National Institutes of Health, scientists with relevant expertise spend thousands of hours evaluating the significance, rigor and feasibility of competing proposals. Similar systems operate at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and other agencies. Agency leaders retain discretion to balance scientific merit with public health needs and programmatic priorities. But those decisions occur within a system where expert assessment carries real authority.
The Office of Management and Budget proposal would invert that relationship. Political appointees would be instructed not to routinely defer to scientific review. Peer review could become little more than advice that officials are free, and even encouraged, to disregard.
That language is especially alarming because the same proposal gives officials broad and subjective criteria for selecting grants. It invokes concepts such as the “national interest,” “Gold Standard Science” and “anti-American values.” Whatever one’s political affiliation, no administration should possess the power to decide which scientific questions are acceptable using standards this vague.
A cancer study should not be funded or rejected according to whether a political appointee approves of its possible findings. Neither should research on infectious disease, reproductive biology, human development or any other field. The validity of an experiment does not change when control of the White House changes.
Political review would also reward caution and conformity. Scientists would begin asking not which questions are most important, but which questions are least likely to offend the administration. Young investigators would quickly learn that intellectual independence carries financial risk. Universities could discourage research in politically sensitive fields. The resulting self-censorship would be both difficult to measure and profoundly damaging.
The proposal reaches beyond future awards. It would also broaden agencies’ ability to terminate existing grants when they are deemed to no longer serve the administration’s priorities or what the administration determines to be the public interest. A laboratory could hire staff, recruit trainees and begin a multiyear project, only to have its funding withdrawn after an election. Clinical studies and long-term research programs cannot operate under such conditions.
The consequences would not be confined to universities. Federal research supports the discoveries that produce new medicines, strengthen national security, create industries and prepare the country for emerging threats. The biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors depend heavily on knowledge generated through federally funded basic research. When political interference weakens that research pipeline, patients, workers and the American economy ultimately pay the price.
Congress should therefore include unequivocal protective language in any continuing resolution. At minimum, the legislation should provide that no funding approved in a continuing resolution can be used to implement, administer or enforce the proposed White House regulation, or any similar to it.
Congress should also preserve the established statutory protections governing scientific peer review and require federal research agencies to disclose and justify any decision to fund or reject a proposal contrary to expert review. Political officials must remain accountable for departures from scientific merit; such decisions should never occur behind closed doors.
This issue should not divide Republicans and Democrats. Every administration is temporary. A power created for one president will be inherited by the next. Members of Congress who might trust today’s political appointees should ask whether they would willingly give the same authority to officials appointed by the opposing party.
The answer should be no.
Congress controls the public purse, and a continuing resolution is not merely a mechanism for keeping agencies open. It is Congress’s opportunity, and responsibility, to prevent executive agencies from using taxpayer dollars to dismantle the safeguards that have made American research the strongest in the world.
Scientific priorities should reflect national needs. Elected leaders appropriately set budgets and broad goals. But politicians should not decide which experiments are scientifically sound, which hypotheses may be tested or which conclusions are permissible.
American scientific leadership was built by allowing evidence to prevail over ideology. Congress must defend that principle now, before political review becomes the governing rule for American research.
Carole LaBonneis the Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern University.
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