It's Leave a Comment Time again
Hello people already tired of US American Project 2025 bullshit. Today's is Russell Vought/the OMB Office putting forth a proposal that all federal science grants have to be reviewed for "woke."
I'm not kidding. The proposal includes the word "woke" in quotes. It also includes some Trumpian ranting about DEI and gender ideology.
The basic idea being, following vague and basically undefined guidelines (whatever they decide woke means that day), the OMB office of Federal Financial Management will review applications for research grants and the like and reject or approve them based on "woke."
Being Russell Vought-run, this would likely mean anything they decide has to do with climate change, women, gay stuff, trans stuff, and possibly anything that might even remotely be about sex positivity or reproductive rights.
Comment period is open until July 14th.
Here is the proposed regulation. It's a doozy.
On this page, you will see a link to regulations.gov which is where you actually leave a comment. In the search bar right at the start of this page, you enter OMB-2026-0034 and it will take you to the place to comment on this bullshit.
I am hoping someone smart will start posting sample comments for us all. I did a ranty comment already but I wouldn't recommend that. I will do a proper one later. (Yeah, you can comment again. You can also comment anonymously.)
Some things to bring up: the guidelines are (probably deliberately) vague and undefined. This is going to drastically inhibit and hamstring valuable research. This is going to damage the US' reputation (even more). This is going to damage our status as an international power. (I mean, if you are looking for an argument to use against these people. We deserve to lose that but this is to save the science and the research, so.... Project 2025 wants Americans uneducated, isolated, and dumb but paradoxically also still wants to be the number one superpower. I know. P2025 people are real stupid.) This will cost the US money in possible future innovations, as the best and the brightest will go elsewhere and take their cutting edge tech and knowledge with them. (As they should honestly, but again, we are trying to defend the scientists here now who need their grant money.) Talking about money usually helps when arguing with these losers.
Anyway, hopefully someone posts this better, or creates some sample posts. Here this is for now.