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1. Political Appointees Take Control of Grant Awards (§200.205). Senior political appointees, rather than career scientists or program officers, would now be required to conduct a "pre-issuance review" of every discretionary grant before it is awarded. These appointees are explicitly forbidden from deferring to peer reviewers or routinely ratifying their recommendations.
2. Peer Review Is No Longer Binding The rule explicitly states that peer review recommendations "remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding."
3. "Gold Standard Science" as an Undefined Political Test (§200.205) without defining it in any concrete or measurable way.
4. Active Grants Can Be Terminated at Any Time, for Any Reason (§200.340). The rule codifies and expands the authority to terminate active grants mid-award simply because they are "inconsistent with program goals or agency priorities."
5. DEI, Gender Research, and Related Topics Banned as Grant Conditions (§200.300)
6. Broad Prohibition on International Scientific Collaboration (§200.220)
7. "Domestic-First" Framework for Research Awards (§200.202(e))
8. Applicants Can Be Denied Based on Organizational "Affiliations" (§200.206)
9. E-Verify Mandated for All Grant Recipients (§200.303)
10. OMB Claims Direct Binding Authority Over All Agencies
There's 19 total, some might have merit with a bit of tweaking but the majority of this is flat out anti-science garbage.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday June 01, @05:02PM (2 children)
They probably have jobs instead of government handouts to defend.
I voted for this and I'm happy about it. Along with like 99+% of the population.
The type of people who will be affected on the borders of this are exactly the type you'd expect and they are going to complain very loudly, but they certainly don't represent the values of 99% of the population. #4 is the only somewhat questionable one. Say you want to rent land to put a ... seismometer upon it or whatever. If its impossible to pull your funding for five years you sign a five year lease. That's tricky if they could in theory cancel next week. My guess is this will result in some middleman landlord BS that basically funnels grant money to unproductive middlemen in some financialization scheme (I'll buy the land as a private citizen then lease it month-to-month at a high cost and my high cost only benefits me not the general public or "science")
Overall nine steps forward, one minor stumble, whatever...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday June 01, @06:57PM
So if a scientist approached me and asked me what it would take to get a seismometer on my admittedly fairly small acreage, I would say something like "Happy to help, where do you want to site it, let's sort something out about power usage, how you read it, etc". Because I see the progress of scientific knowledge as more important than trying to make an easy buck. And I suspect most scientists do too, because it's way easier to make money being a Wall Street guy than a scientist.
That your first instinct when you see "science funding" is "who is skimming off most of it" better represents the problem in the USA than anything else, because it basically says there's nothing that won't be sacrificed for the Almighty Dollar. When even the churches start looking very much like pyramid schemes, we're already announcing the decision that small green pieces of paper are all that actually matter to us. And if that's really true, we can't accomplish anything at all as a society anymore.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03, @09:00AM
Agreed. As an independent this favorably exceeded expectations.