WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Office of Management and Budget published a proposal titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance" on the Friday after Memorial Day. The proposal would centralize control of federal grants under political appointees, shifting authority from civil servants and enabling terminations based on alignment with the President’s agenda.

The plan would replace current guidance for signing off on government grants, which generally leaves the task to civil servants and peer-review panels. Under the proposal, final approval authority for federal grants would shift to political appointees, and senior Administration officials would be required to assess all discretionary federal awards. Officials could deny or terminate grants at any time if they determined the projects did not fit the President’s agenda.

The proposal includes a provision that would prohibit federal money from being used to support collaborations between researchers in the United States and their colleagues in many other countries. The Office of Management and Budget stated the rationale for the new rules is to "improve transparency, accountability and oversight for Federal awards." The agency is aiming to finalize the new regulations by October 1st and has already received more than ninety thousand comments on the proposed rules.

Hal Duncan, Trump’s nominee to be the Office of Management and Budget’s deputy director, noted at his confirmation hearing last month that the proposal would enable the Administration to prevent federal money from supporting "divisive D.E.I. ideologies." The rules would affect funding disbursed by agencies ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Transportation Department, touching programs that represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends, according to former National Institutes of Health program director Elizabeth Ginexi.

Critics have condemned the proposal as a threat to scientific independence and federal fairness. "This latest move is a brazen power grab by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to buck the will of Congress and the American people and will make future discoveries less likely," said Sudip Parikh, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Colette Delawalla, founder and head of Stand Up for Science, warned that under the new guidance, "America would not be allowed to be included in the International Space Station. The same goes for every type of weather monitoring and pandemic monitoring."

Senator Patty Murray accused the White House of trying "to turn the entire federal government into this one big slush fund to reward those aligned with the Administration and punish everyone else." A letter signed by all the Democrats in the Senate charged the proposal would hand Trump a "new cudgel" to "advance his partisan agenda and punish political rivals." The National League of Cities, the School Superintendents Association, and the National Council of Nonprofits have also expressed concern about the proposal.

The controversy arrives against a backdrop of ongoing tensions over federal research funding. Last year, the Administration terminated or froze nearly eight thousand research grants. Federal judges have ordered many of those grants to be reinstated, but roughly a third—totaling some $1.4 billion—have yet to be released. President Trump proposed slashing the budget for the National Science Foundation by more than half for the current fiscal year, but Congress rejected the cuts and held funding flat. Despite that, the Administration has refused to disburse National Science Foundation funds.

The National Science Foundation has been operating without a director for the past fifteen months. President Trump nominated a financier with no scientific expertise to lead the agency, but the Senate has yet to confirm the nominee. In April, President Trump fired all twenty-two members of the National Science Foundation’s science advisory board, which had been working on an analysis showing China has overtaken the U.S. as the leader in key scientific fields. According to the website Grant Witness, the agency is on track to make roughly seventeen hundred grants this year.

Sally Kornbluth, president of M.I.T., reported that the institution’s graduate enrollment has declined by about twenty percent. "It’s a loss for the nation," she said. "When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations, and cures." The legal website Lexology stated, "The stakes could not be higher."

Why It Matters

The proposal represents a significant shift in how federal grants—critical sources of funding for state governments, nonprofits, academic institutions, and local agencies—are administered. By replacing civil service and peer-review systems with political oversight, the rules could reshape the distribution of billions of dollars in public funds and affect everything from public health to transportation infrastructure. The move also fits within a broader pattern of executive branch efforts to assert centralized control over independent agencies, a dynamic explored in prior academic research on political appointees versus career civil servants.

With a finalization deadline of October 1st and more than 90,000 public comments already submitted, the proposal is advancing through the regulatory process amid intense scrutiny from scientists, local leaders, and members of Congress. The outcome could influence not only grant allocation but also the United States’ role in international scientific collaboration and its capacity to respond to global challenges like pandemics and climate change.