The White House Is Working to End Decades of American Leadership in Science and Research
In a summary posted by the American Physical Society (APS), a not-for-profit membership organization made up of professional scientists that works to advance a “vibrant, inclusive, and global community dedicated to science and society,” recent rules changes for Federal grant funding from the Trump administration represent nothing less than an “existential threat to the scientific community.”
Like the Trump admin’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Forest Service despite broad working class support for its work and the mission of forest preservation, the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) rule, titled “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance,” fundamentally overhauls federal grantmaking and cooperative agreements in a way that promises devastating consequences for scientific missions across the U.S. and internationally.
In its full statement opposing the proposed rule, the APS warned the changes would politicize federal research funding, restrict international scientific collaboration and create new administrative barriers for researchers:
“The proposed rule would place federal science funding decisions in the hands of unelected political appointees, isolate American scientists from the international research community, add bureaucratic red-tape to numerous regular research activities, and erode our ability to strengthen the domestic STEM workforce.”
Their statement goes on to assert that the proposed changes, if implemented in full, would “jeopardize our global leadership, economic competitiveness and national security.” The rules have a proposed effective date of October 1st, 2026.
The proposed rules are indeed sweeping. Agencies would be able to terminate active grants ‘for convenience’ without detailed explanation. Funding for research, data-sharing, travel or indirect costs involved ‘covered foreign countries’ (defined entirely by the White House rather than limited to ‘countries of concern’) would be blocked unless specifically authorized, devastating cross-country research that often forms the backbone of some of the most exciting modern discoveries.
Moreover, journal publication and open-access fees would be presumed unallowable under federal awards, the OMB would be granted pre-approval powers for using grant funds on travel or professional membership dues.
Also, similar to the attempted changes to housing programs through HUD and other domestic critical needs programs earlier in the year, federal funding that the OMB deems related to ‘unlawful DEI’ activities would be barred.
But perhaps the most potentially devastating of all these changes (or at least, the one change that ties all of the rest together and makes them possible), is the general shift toward explicit political control over grant selections.
Political appointees will generally have ‘pre-issuance’ review authority that will have the ability to override peer-reviewed decisions made by actual agency scientists. They will be able, in fact, to make these decisions without any reference to peer-review at all should they choose, which is to say, ‘science.’
As if to demonstrate that, these changes were proposed with 45-days to comment, a period that ended on July 13th, 2026.
While organizations such as CHN Action rushed to get public comments submitted, amassing over 23 thousand letters, the deadline quickly came and went. The rush is telling, as it implies not only a contempt for the scientific community impacted by these changes, but much like the proposed rules, a lack of any sincere interest in their views on them.
In reality, from the OMB’s perspective, the comment period might as well have not existed, a galling act of policy negligence for changes that the APS says if implemented will “paralyze discovery science, stall technological innovation and ultimately compromise the health, wealth and security of our country.”
This is nothing new for an administration that has been openly hostile to grant funded programming and sciences from day one.
In fact, according to a new report from AP, “Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 to screen for projects that ran afoul of the Trump administration’s priorities.”
A recent lawsuit filed by UC researchers offers proof that the administration illegally cancelled $2 billion in grants.
In a discussion with Hyvemind, a tenured scientist likely to be affected by the cuts, whom we are identifying as Dr. A at their request due to fear of professional retaliation, said the powers granted to political appointees were the most concerning:
“Cancelling at any time will make it really difficult to hire postdocs and grad students or have contracts as institutions require long-term backing to hire," said Dr. A. "Companies won't be willing to engage with us if cancellation can occur at any time."
Dr. A went on to explain that the added uncertainly will undermine scientific work in general, and that no matter how good a scientist may be, they don’t always have the deep domain-specific knowledge to assess grants outside their expertise. That’s so much of why, in fact, that the peer-review process is absolutely essential.
“Political appointees do not have the expertise to make these decisions. Requiring their approval will slow the distribution of funds and enable non-meritorious proposals to be prioritized,” Dr. A continued, adding “Early career researchers no longer feel like they have a future, so are planning to leave the US and/or the field. This represents a huge loss that will echo through our scientific programs for decades.”
When asked about the impacts on American leadership in science and research on the global stage, Dr. A was clear: “This represents a voluntary ceding of our scientific leadership in the world.”
“We have carefully built our leadership through stewardship of federal funds since the end of WWII. These rules not only destroy our domestic scientific program, they also show that we are an unreliable partner on the global stage,” Dr A. said, explaining that international science agencies are already planning alternative bids because of lost trust in U.S. partners.
Important to note is who currently runs the OMB. Trump’s pick, Russell Vought, was named as the House Republican Conferences’ policy director by Mike Pence in 2008. Vought would later clash with Republicans in the House following the passage of the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, resigning to help establish Heritage Action for America (today just ‘Heritage Action’), serving as its VP for seven years.
A conservative advocacy organization, it’s a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, a dangerous and reactionary wealth-pipeline for neoliberal lobbying that, among many other assaults on America’s working class, authored Project 2025.
Toadies for Trump’s rise to power, the Heritage Foundation wrote glowingly of his election: “In November 2016, American conservatives stood on the verge of greatness. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a triumph that offered the best chance to reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake.” (Emphasis added)
Vought himself is an author of Project 2025. In a ProPublica piece from last year, they dubbed Vought ‘The Shadow President,’ someone with the vision, experience, and determination to see Project 2025’s goals through, a figure somewhat analogous to Bush’s Cheney but far less well known.
"The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders," Andy Kroll for ProPublica wrote. "What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government.”
The outlet also quoted a former OMB general counsel under the Biden administration: “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”
Vought’s efforts, here, should be clear enough by now: to stop, halt, undermine or otherwise dismantle any institutional impediment to the insane, inhuman worldview offered by billionaire-backed ‘think tanks’ such as the Heritage Foundation, no matter the countervailing ‘realities.’
Authoritarian regimes stamping down on the sciences is a well-researched and documented historical trend. The point is to establish the alternative realities that fascism relies on, that it fundamentally requires, in order to maintain its grip on a confused, disorganized and disaffected public whether by propaganda or outright oppression.
Antonio Gramsci wrote extensively in his Prison Notebooks (1929-1935) on the way in which modern fascist regimes seek to not merely coerce the public, but manufacture consent through fascist-captured institutions (education, media, religion, cultural displays) to reproduce its ‘alternative facts.’
If scientists get in the way of that worldview, they’re simply yet another state enemy; on the subject of climate change in particular, Trump has de facto made even rudimentary understandings of climate science an enemy to the state, demonstrated clearly late last year when he moved to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Though this was later blocked by a judge, the kind of oligarchic, chaotic powers Trump represent don’t much care: they’ll try again, stressing bureaucracies and budgets to engage in one legal fight after another, eroding institutional functionality and trust until, if necessary, they simply use force to ignore the law altogether.
In an analysis of how scientists and universities were drawn into the consolidation of fascist power in 1930s Italy, the Los Angeles Review of Books described the political violence and institutional exclusion that accompanied the Fascist Party’s rise:
“Key to the Fascist Party’s impressive ascent were acts of brutal violence against labor and socialist leaders in what it saw as a continuation of the Great War…Jews were first excluded from public life in the domains of science and education. Universities in particular became training sites for implementing antisemitic legislation that was then extended to the rest of society."
The history carries particular resonance amid the explicitly anti-DEI provisions included in these and other new OMB rules.
“The historical record suggests that the regime, in testing various tactics of intimidation and surveillance in Italian universities, wanted to keep academic elites in line and undermine their expertise,” the report continued.
These acts, in other words, are not merely a kind of celebration of ignorance, but a willing, forceful retreat into a fantasy world that has but one ordering principle: the preservation of authoritarian power.
“These rules will cause decades of irreversible damage and cutting time-critical research will waste the investments we have already made," Dr. A said. "In many cases, we won't be able to recover projects that were temporarily cancelled because the people will leave or the infrastructure will no longer be available.”
If we collectively wish to see the U.S. return to a position of global leadership in scientific research, we must collectively work to make that a collectively shared value that we do not back down on. The best way to do that today is through organizations dedicated to helping realize that value and fight for it legally.
“Science is global," said Dr. A. "And it will move on without us if we let it."
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