Opponents Challenge Trump Regime’s Scheme to Politicize Federal Research Grants

Interview with Melinda Rostal, an epidemiologist and lead for Office of Management and Budget response with the group Defend Public Health, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

OMB to politicize federal research grants

Russell Vought, the chief architect of the Project 2025 blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term and current head of the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, has issued proposed new regulations for federal research grants that are set to go into effect on Oct. 1.

Among the most devastating changes is one that would have senior political appointees—rather than career scientists or program officers—decide who grants are awarded to, and would allow Trump bureaucrats to cancel grants for any reason or no reason at all, at any point in the grant cycle. It goes without saying that under the Trump regime’s right-wing, white nationalist ideology, proposals focused on DEI, gender and related research projects, would not be eligible to receive federal funding.

Between The Line’s Melinda Tuhus spoke with Melinda Rostal, an epidemiologist and the lead for OMB response with the group Defend Public Health, a national public health watch dog organization founded in the wake of Trump’s 2024 election win. Here she describes some of the proposed changes to regulations, their potential impact, and what people are doing to fight back.

MELINDA ROSTAL: So OMB is an office that provides guidance to the federal agencies and the federal agencies are the experts, apolitical experts in their fields who determine where the funding goes. So if funding’s going to the National Institute for Health, then we would have experts who know about epidemiology, who know about medicine, who know about public health, all of those things that would be evaluating the grants, rather than someone who’s from a budget office who really doesn’t have any experience or credibility in assessing whether a grant should be funded or not.
MELINDA TUHUS: I was looking at a summary of some of the changes and it seems like each one is enough to devastate or almost destroy scientific research in the U.S. So political appointees take control of grant awards and peer review is no longer binding—peer review being reviews of proposals by fellow academics who know about the issues and could weigh in on whether they think it’s worth funding that particular project. If you could talk about what you see as some of the biggest problems with these proposed changes.
MELINDA ROSTAL: Peer review is one of the most important ways that the scientific community ensures rigor in our processes. So we do this for journal articles and we do it for grant proposals. And this allows, as you said, the experts from the field to be able to evaluate how well the grant is put together, whether or not the grant’s going to be helpful to the field, whether or not it’s already been done, whether or not what’s written, the methodology that’s going to be used is going to give us what the person says they’re going to give us as the outcome. So they evaluate all of that. And that’s not something that someone who’s not in the field can really look at and know by reading the grant proposal. So it’s really critical that we have these experts in place and they’ve been in place since World War II when the NIH started this system and they have multiple different committees all on different topics.
So your grant proposal will go to a specific committee in the field that you’re working in and you will have experts from that field in the room discussing your grant proposal. And then they give it a score and then that sort of determines whether or not you get funding. Now that can still take place.

However, the political appointee doesn’t have to use any of that scoring or any of that information in order to determine whether a grant is approved or not. They can also terminate the grants without any rhyme or reason. They can terminate them just at will. And so if grants are being terminated in the middle, you can really waste a lot of money. I would also add, there’s a set of four, I think, public communication restrictions. Scientists cannot discuss their funded work with the public. You can’t pay for conferences on funding, you can’t pay for scientific affiliations on funding, you can’t pay for journal subscriptions on funding.

So if we want science to move forward, we need to be able to learn about other scientists’ work. And those are the avenues that we do that with. And that’s how we build on other people’s research. So we’re wasting money. Again, the taxpayer money is getting wasted because each person’s going to be doing their own research on the same thing because they don’t know anyone else has done that research, right? I think that’s an important one. And we have serious threats that we’re facing on this global system. So we have climate change, we have plastic pollutions, we have biodiversity loss at massive scales. All of these things require global international collaboration and America is pulling itself out of that. We’re not putting our innovation into it so it’s missing out on our knowledge, but also the world’s going to move on without us.

MELINDA TUHUS: Can the government, can the Trump administration just implement this because they’re in power now or is there any way to stop it?

MELINDA ROSTAL: We can do things to stop it. July 13th is the last day to comment and we want to try and get as many comments as we can. Even if you’re just a citizen who doesn’t know science, comment and say why you think this is bad and why you think science is important in your life or why this might infect your town. We’re also working to support potential legal action. What comes after the rules go into effect is legal challenges. The regulations do not go into place until Oct. 1st. And then after that, the Trump administration, they have the right to make these regulation changes and Congress who has the power of the purse has the right to stop them. We need pressure on them to act.

For more information, visit Defend Public Health at defendpublichealth.org.

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