Would result in major changes to how the federal government does scientific research

Jun 04, 2026

Late last week, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a draft of proposed new regulations for scientific grant management across the federal government. This would be the second major rewrite of the OMB grant guidance in 2 years, with a revision having just occurred in 2024. This publication of the draft opens the proposed regulations to public comment, an initial step in the federal process to finalize the regulations — OMB is targeting October 1 (start of Fiscal Year 2027) for these new regulations to become binding.

There have already been a flurry of articles and opinion pieces written about these proposed regulations, including these by Science and Nature. Most of these have focused on the potential for these regulations to inject political interference into federal science — and I will have more to say about that in later posts and newsletters — but as someone who was responsible for taking grants through the entire federal lifecycle from outlining proposed research to developing the funding opportunities to awarding and managing grants, I want to use this initial post on this topic to talk about the administrative and bureaucratic implications of these proposed regulations.

The length and complexity of the document is actually where I want to start — reading the 412-page document you immediately become lost in a maze of phrases like “title 2 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), subtitle A” and “OMB also relies on authorities including the Single Audit Act Amendments of 1996 (Pub. L. 104-156, as amended, codified at 31 U.S.C. 7501-7507).” The very nature of the document makes it seem like it is a purely bureaucratic and administrative document. As someone who spent a decade actively awarding and managing federal scientific grants, I can categorically state that these new regulations would have a tremendous real world impact — mostly negative, in my opinion — on how federally supported science is done. OMB says the high level goals of these regulations are to streamline and simplify bureaucratic processes and improve oversight of federal science grants. There is undoubtedly a serious need for those sorts of improvements — the problem is, I do not see much evidence that these new regulations will be particularly effective in accomplishing these goals.

One of the proposed regulations that has received the greatest pushback from the science community is the requirement that political level appointees within agencies must approve all grants to ensure “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities, prohibit the use of funds for discriminatory or otherwise impermissible purposes, and emphasize ensuring compliance with applicable law.” Most of the outrage I have seen about this has been focused on the idea of non-scientists making decisions about scientific grants based on political rather than scientific reasons — and this is a very valid concern.

However, I have concerns about much more basic administrative issues as well. It is already a long, complex administrative process to award and manage federal research grants. The idea that every grant will have to be approved by the political level of an agency will just add more process and delay to an already time consuming process. These proposed regulations are filled with these sort of additional processes and approvals, for example:

• OMB proposes to require that Federal agencies must publicly announce funding opportunities for all discretionary awards—not just those that will be openly competed — and that all funding notices be posted for at least 30 days. This will add significant bureaucratic overhead for federal science program managers and extend timelines.
• Per the draft, “OMB proposes to revise § 200.201(b) to eliminate the use of fixed amount awards unless otherwise authorized by Federal statute.” Fixed amount awards provide an entity a fixed funding amount to accomplish certain research milestones regardless of expenditures. While there are definitely problems with this type of award and ways in which federal oversight should be improved, eliminating them entirely will add significant bureaucratic overhead for both agencies and the institutions receiving grants.
• Another bureaucratic obstacle is that the new regulations prohibit the use of grant funds for researchers to attend scientific conferences or publish their work in scientific journals unless the specific expenses are authorized in advance. While there are many potential issues with this, the core problem in my opinion is that research (obviously) does not have predefined outcomes, and as a result researchers do not know the specifics of what conference or journal their research results might be appropriate for — and certainly do not know the details of how long or how many papers or presentations might come out of their work. The idea that any of this can be specifically requested in a proposal is simply unrealistic and shows a total lack of understanding of how the scientific process works.

This lack of understanding is really how I would ultimately summarize this whole proposal. Federal scientific research is extremely reliant upon grants to external institutions. This is by design — the federal government has chosen not to bear the cost and burden of a permanent infrastructure of federal scientists and facilities to perform the scientific research the country needs. Hence, our society has developed a robust academic and private (for-profit and non-profit) sector scientific framework that the government can leverage as its priorities and available funding change from year to year. This framework is reliant upon the federal grant process.

As I have discussed about so many other aspects of the federal science apparatus, the grant system certainly has serious issues that need reform and improvement. Given the complexity of the system, such reforms need to be done in a very thoughtful manner with extensive input from, collaboration with and buy-in from all of the various stakeholders. This proposal does not have any of that — and in my opinion whether by design or ineptitude, it would essentially make the current system of federal science pretty much impossible. Even if one agrees that the system is in need of reform, breaking the system without having a robust, viable alternative would leave our nation very vulnerable to falling behind in a global economy and society increasingly reliant upon science and technology.

Given this is a 412 page document about an incredibly complex topic, there are many more specific aspects of it than I have room to discuss today — but I wanted to ensure I covered the parts of it that my experience gives me some (hopefully) useful insight about. The public comment period on the proposed regulations is open through July 13th — you can provide your input here.