I'm not even going to summarize this, but if you value American science you need to read it.
Near the end of May, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed a new rule that would govern how the federal government handles the grants it issues, including those that fund the vast majority of scientific research in the US.
If formalized, the rule would make political priorities the prime determinant of what science gets funded and sideline the opinions of scientific experts. Grants could be canceled due to political whims, and new layers of bureaucracy would inhibit basic scientific activities like publishing papers and attending conferences. Unlike the executive orders it echoes, it would have the force of law behind it and be significantly harder to challenge in court.
Before coming into force, however, the proposal must go through a process that includes public feedback and (potentially) changes in response. The deadline for that feedback—Monday, July 13—is rapidly approaching.
I'm here to explain what makes this proposal so dangerous, why your feedback matters, and how you can craft an effective submission.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04, @02:15AM (1 child)
I recently received this email from my uni:
Here is the docket, https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001 [regulations.gov]
There is a tab at the top for the comments page, currently showing 47K comments.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Saturday July 04, @03:28AM
Another link [science.org]
Trump's Grave will be the world's most popular open air toilet.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bussdriver on Saturday July 04, @04:20AM (2 children)
I saw this quite a while ago, I simply didn't think of posting it on here. I kind of figured it would just happen and if not officially, it'll happen unofficially with every jerk move they can think up. They already are screwing up science simply because a text search came up with "diversity" and how researchers are using other terms now because if they say "genetic diversity" they get flagged for blind punishment of who knows what. It seemed like a formal expansion on what is already going on.
If this becomes formal it's a huge blow to science research and education-- since those grants are a big reason grad students get hired and higher degrees and come to the USA. The brain drain is already in decline this will make it larger and we are likely going to see a brain drain in the USA - for the 1st time it will be going in reverse! Even if it does not, the USA needs the smart people of the world coming here because just look at how incredibly stupid we are ALREADY! We're likely going below average without them coming here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Saturday July 04, @06:09AM (1 child)
It's too late to have much say, they're going to politicise science to fit their agenda no matter what you do - look up "gleichschaltung", another one of those German words which, like schadenfreude, remains in the original because it's too difficult to translate effectively. The only thing left is to vote with your feet and move to a country that still cares about science.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Sunday July 05, @03:51PM
It's too late to have much say, they're going to politicise science to fit their agenda no matter what you do
The "they" in "their" is the Republican party, NOT the USA. And since the Republican party is now seen as an authoritarian party like Russian Communists or 1930's German Nazis, and they are open about their wish for America to be a one party system like the Chinese and Russians and have nearly bankrupted almost every working class person in the country, there is going to be a huge landslide in November's election.
The Republican party may be on the verge of extinction. I can see conservative Americans, like those running The Lincoln Project, starting another alternate party like the Greenies and Libbies.
Traditionally, the Republicans were FOR science, as well as a whole lot of other things they are now against.
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jb on Saturday July 04, @09:21AM (7 children)
That's already been happening around the world for several decades now. Not in every discipline, but in many of them.
How is this move any different, other than the political priorities themselves being set by a different bunch of politicians now?
Yes, dissent is essential to scientific advancement. But (again, in many but not all disciplines) after so may years of dissent being tantamount to career suicide, reversing the bias of the existing broken system (and make no mistake it is broken: public trust in science is now lower than it has been at any time since the dark days when churches ruled the world), whilst clearly not as good as removing all such bias, must at least be more productive than continuing to maintain the entrenched bias.
(Score: -1, Troll) by DadaDoofy on Saturday July 04, @01:57PM (3 children)
You are correct. This wasn't a problem when the "scientists" at Obama's EPA determined carbon dioxide to be "pollution". Apparently, it's only "dangerous" now that the shoe is on the other foot.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05, @03:32AM
You seem to think that if you censor the science and take away funding from research, that it will somehow force the universe to comply. The physics of the universe do not depend on what's politically convenient for you.
If you had your way, we'd bring back the Roman Inquisition put scientists on trial for heresy. History shows exactly why letting people like you have control is dangerous.
E pur si muove. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by jb on Sunday July 05, @11:33AM (1 child)
A good example indeed. As I pointed out at the time, carbon dioxide is most emphatically not pollution: it is a colourless, odourless, non-toxic gas that naturally makes up much of the Earth's atmosphere: calling carbon dioxide "pollution" is just as silly as calling atmospheric oxygen or nitrogen "pollution". Now, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but it is not pollution. Two very different things: any scientist should understand the difference.
But how many scientists refrained at the time from pointing out the bleeding obvious, because they knew that do so would pretty much guarantee they'd not receive any more grants for at least 4 years? It's the exact same broken system, just with a different set of biases at play.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Sunday July 05, @03:56PM
A good example indeed. As I pointed out at the time, carbon dioxide is most emphatically not pollution
No? Neither is oxygen, but it polluted the early atmosphere [wikipedia.org] so badly that it caused the biggest great extinction in the history of life itself. CO2 will and is doing the same thing.
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05, @03:54AM (2 children)
Okay, troll, I'll bite.
Many funding programs have annual solicitations for proposals. The priorities of those programs do change from year to year based on the priorities of the administration in consultation with scientists. But yes, politicians do have some input. However, this did not involve canceling previous awards that were in good standing on the basis that they no longer fit the priorities of the current administration. Why invest the time to write proposals and start research if your funding can be pulled just because new politicians decide they don't like it? That's very different from changing the priorities in the next solicitation and using them to decide future awards.
Funding decisions also have not depended on political appointees to sign off before awards are made. There has always been peer review and then a risk assessment for proposals recommended for awards. But peer review has been made increasingly transparent, with proposals often being evaluated with a rubric, and multiple reviewers being consulted for each proposal. The highest scoring proposals are recommended for awards, and then the risk assessment is done by career employees instead of political appointees. Injecting politics into the process while reducing the importance of peer review seems to be a way for Donald Trump to funnel grant money to his cronies instead of awarding funds to scientists whose proposals scored the highest in peer review.
Russell Vought has an extreme anti-science agenda. For Trump, this seems to be more of the usual corruption.
For example, on January 19, 2021, NOAA released new scientific integrity guidelines [noaa.gov] that heavily restricted preprints. The entire point of a preprint is to share ideas and preliminary information with the public and obtain feedback before the research goes through peer review. It's inherently preliminary, but it gives the public greater access to the research their tax dollars are funding. When the first Trump administration instituted this policy the day before Trump left office, it had a chilling effect on the dissemination of research results. It is directly contrary to the Trump administration's claimed goal to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, while pretending that it's about scientific integrity.
If you're a researcher who's collaborated with someone at NOAA, and someone at NOAA should be a coauthor on your research, this effectively bars you from disseminating your results in preprints because you're subject to this policy. You can't leave a NOAA coauthor off because that violates scientific integrity. But if you include the NOAA coauthor and post the preprint online, then you're violating NOAA's policy. NOAA's preprint policy is ambiguous about what level of peer review is actually required, and it has a chilling effect on disseminating preliminary results to the public. As someone who has collaborated with NOAA researchers, this violates my freedom of speech, all because Russell Vought and the right wing is terrified that I might tell the truth and say something like that human activity is causing climate change.
Public trust in science is low because people like you have impugned the character of scientists and spent years spreading BS to attack their integrity. As a result, climate scientists and people in related fields like meteorology have faced harassment and received violent threats from the public. If you want to increase trust in science, stop spreading BS.
(Score: 2) by jb on Sunday July 05, @11:54AM (1 child)
On that point I'll agree with you, subject to one qualification. If they were fixed-term grants, then yes absolutely it was wrong to cancel them before the fixed term is up (assuming the grantees had not breached any of the grants' terms). On the other hand if they were ongoing grants, then regular review with go/no-go decisions should have been part of the process from the beginning. Governments have been cancelling funding for worthwhile long-term, open-ended scientific projects for a very long time (for example, see the Mohole project from the 1960s). But yes, if it's fixed-term, fixed-funding and no- or fixed-milestones (and none of those milestones have yet been missed, nor any misconduct proven) then I'd agree that it's wrong to cancel them. My comments related mostly to grants for new projects; I admit I hadn't considered the bit about cancelling existing projects.
Whilst the people making funding decisions are not usually politicians themselves (except perhaps for the very biggest projects), they are most often appointed by the politicians of the day and almost always influenced by the politicians of the day.
One might well say something similar to the very researchers who have allowed their disciplines to be perverted by various political priorities to date: if you're not willing to apply the scientific method, then don't call it science. It's not just "climate scientists and people in related fields like meteorology" either. In recent decades we've seen similar effects in a bunch of completely unrelated academic disciplines meet similar fates. Disciplines as broad ranging as history, medicine and occasionally even mathematics. The latter annoys me the most, since mathematics is supposed to be the purest science there is.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05, @03:23PM
Pure BS. Funding decisions have been made by program officers, who are career employees hired by other career employees. NSF previously used rotators, people on loan from academia, who were even farther removed from politics. Most NSF award decisions were based on merit review, which involves external ad hoc reviews and panel reviews to make funding decisions.
If you're a researcher in academia and have applied for funding from agencies like NSF, you might well be asked to review proposals from time to time and comment on them. And you can volunteer to serve on merit review panels. There are three major responsibilities: teaching, research, and service. Acting as a reviewer is part of the service that is expected. Politics has no influence over merit reviews. Having done ad hoc merit reviews, there's never been any political involvement whatsoever. It's about scrutinizing the science and providing feedback about the strengths and weaknesses of proposals. There's no favoritism whatsoever, and you're expected to disclose conflicts of interest and recuse yourself if appropriate. It's all about the science and the strength of the proposal.
No, merit review isn't perfect, and I was occasionally pissed off about reviews I got on my own proposals that I sometimes strongly disagreed with. But I never thought there were systemic problems with fairness, or that it was influenced by politics. When I thought an individual reviewer was being an asshole, I'd go and make revisions on comments from other reviewers that were helpful, and then I'd resubmit the proposal later. Peer review was never officially binding, and program officers have always been expected to do portfolio balancing so that funding isn't concentrated with a few elite universities. But it's also been very rare for program officers to decide they're not going to abide by the outcome of the merit review process. When a highly-rated proposal didn't get funded, it was because there were just too many strong proposals and not enough funding to go around. And the farther removed you got from merit review and NSF program officers, it's was even less likely that someone would overturn the outcome of the merit review process.
It was not a political process, and claiming otherwise is simply BS. It might sound like a good talking point on right-wing podcasts, but it has no basis in reality whatsoever.
The goal of Russell Vought's proposed rule is to insert politics into a place where it previously had virtually no role whatsoever. Political appointees might have some influence over the priorities in the initial solicitation, but it was the job of independent and non-political peer reviewers to assess the quality of proposals and how well they fit the priorities in the solicitation. Giving political appointees more control means that scientists who are actually qualified to evaluate the merits of proposals have less influence. It opens the door to corruption and potentially funneling grant money to the administration's cronies. It will surely increase the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that they claim they want to eliminate.
Here's what's actually going on now: https://www.aip.org/fyi/trump-gives-political-appointees-final-say-on-grants [aip.org]
That's the BS you're defending and supporting.
(Score: 3, Troll) by VLM on Saturday July 04, @05:08PM (1 child)
Whats the change, other than abject terror at the idea of representative democracy meaning slightly less of the previous single party rule?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05, @03:49PM
How the hell did this drivel get modded up, let alone to +4? Absolutely shameful.
There hasn't been a "party" involved in making decisions about grant funding. Those decisions have been made on the basis of merit review. The key word here is merit, and the expectation is that a proposal gets reviewed by multiple people so that no individual's opinion has too much influence over funding recommendations.
Program officers than have to do a bit of portfolio balancing to try to make sure funding isn't concentrated at a few elite universities and that strong proposals from other institutions also get funded. Practically speaking, it means that if you have money to give three awards, and your five highest rated proposals involve three from Harvard, one from Texas, and one from Florida, you might give one grant to Harvard, one to Texas, and one to Florida. But they're not going to fund poorly rated proposals over strong ones. The situation is almost always that you have far more high-quality proposals than you have money for. And politics is utterly irrelevant in the process.
I've been involved with the merit review process. I was never asked anything about politics. It just wasn't relevant. My role was to scrutinize the science and the quality of the proposal, and to evaluate how well it fit with the program's priorities. It had nothing to do with party, whatsoever.
People who submit proposals get copies of all the reviews and can see how their proposals were evaluated. If there was systemic bias where strong proposals were routinely being passed over for poorly rated ones, people would quickly find out and call it out. That simply hasn't happened. Likewise, if the process had been influenced by politics, that would have quickly been exposed. That bias simply wasn't there.
And proposals weren't voted on to determine which one reviewers liked best. They were evaluated based on merit, and there were clear criteria on which to judge merit. The goal of this is to diminish the influence of merit review, replacing it with the arbitrary whims of political appointees. Russell Vought says he wants to make changes as a way to silence things like what he calls "climate alarmism", which really refers to politically inconvenient facts that he would like to censor. Instead of merit review being king, these decisions will require political appointees to sign off on grants, meaning that they get the final say. And that will make it much easier for politicians to divert grant money to their families and cronies. Donald Trump would be very happy about this because it's yet another way for him to allow his family members to enrich themselves with taxpayer money.
This isn't about representative democracy. The backlash is about trying to make sure that funding decisions are still made on the basis of merit instead of politics. Grow up.
(Score: 5, Informative) by srobert on Saturday July 04, @06:52PM
Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World" should be required reading for legislators. He alluded to this very phenomena. How can a scientifically illiterate people democratically decide on how to allocate money toward scientific research?
Turns out that entomology is important in a world where mosquitoes are spreading disease that is killing people by the millions, and bees are essential to the agricultural pollination. Who knew?
As Sagan pointed out, not funding basic science is tantamount to eating the seed corn during a famine.