Good morning let's talk about the apocalyptically bad proposed changes to grant funding in the USA!
The administration is trying to rewrite policy to outlaw use of grant funding for anything they consider "woke" and to put political appointees directly in charge of approving grants. This is very bad. Grants fund a lot of research and nonprofit work, and this is aimed at making it almost impossible for research that doesn't support the current administration's ideology to happen in this country.
In more detail, it changes a bunch of wording from suggestion to requirement; bans using grant funds for international collaborations with any countries that the administration considers suspect; and blanket prohibits anyone who has previously done work interpreted as "undermining public safety," "inconsistent with religious liberty," or "discredited" from receiving grants. It also bans all grant funding for projects affiliated with DEI "policies, principles, or practices," "gender ideology," and "transition".
These guidelines are known as the "Uniform Guidance." The Uniform Guidance previously outlined the principles that grant distribution should follow, but it allowed grant-awarding agencies like the NSF broad oversight to set their own policies, which typically involved boards of subject-matter experts who reviewed grant applications and decided which projects got money. This was a flawed system, but replacing subject-matter experts with political appointees and banning a ton of research subjects is not the move. The administration has been meddling with grants since Trump was elected, but this rewrite would change flexible guidance to inflexible regulations and codify previously scattered, ad-hoc grant cancellations and politically-motivated review practices into law.
Historically, the Uniform Guidelines have been applied primarily to research grants. The wording, however, is designed so it can apply to any government grant, including grants for nonprofits. Which means that grants for everything - food banks, medical clinics, really everything - could be subject to formal review by political appointees and cancelled for mentioning anything to do with gender or race, or for being associated with any person or organization with a history of work related to gender or race.
It's hard to say exactly how bad this would be if it goes into effect, but the range is somewhere between "functional ban on all research directly related to race and gender for the rest of this administration" and "functional ban on all research and nonprofit activity that isn't right-wing approved for the foreseeable future".
But we aren't there quite yet! The proposed changes are open for public comment until July 13, and broad public resistance still has some influence. You should go comment here.
