Russ Vought as science czar would just about do it.
Lisa Needham at Public Notice:
The Trump administration has spent the last 18 months gutting funding for scientific research, forcing out nonpartisan experts, and elevating the most alarming conspiracy theorists in their stead. Now, a new rule proposed by the regime is threatening science itself.
Normally, changes to rules about how the federal government awards research grants would probably be a somewhat sleepy topic, impactful to people who do that research for a living but not a five-alarm fire for the rest of us. But we live here now, so we all get to worry about a world where people like Russell Vought, the anti-science freakshow who heads the Office of Management and Budget, would have complete veto power over federally-funded scientific research.
That sounds like an overstatement, but it really isnât.
staffed by scientists. Actually, itâs worse than that. What OMB proposes is to take its existing authority to promulgate general guidance on financial management for government agencies and transform that into rules every agency must follow for every discretionary grant of any kind.
Political appointees would have complete authority over funding decisions, rather than career experts. Grants would be evaluated based not on how they advance science or the nationâs goals, but against how well they push President Trumpâs personal policies. Grantees would be muzzled from discussing anything the administration considers a âdivisiveâ ideology and could be revoked at any time without explanation if a political appointee feels like it.
This isnât remotely how things have worked in the past.
(Rancid) vibes-based science
For decades, decisions about how federal research dollars get spent have been made by an interlocking community of experts both in and outside government. Career scientists at federal agencies work extensively with independent advisory committees staffed by experts. Evaluations were made by actual experts, not unhinged anti-vax weirdos like the ones Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. installed on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Agency personnel held dozens of study sections each month to evaluate grant proposals.
This process helped ensure scientific rigor, but it also insulated science funding from the whims of political appointees. The problem now, of course, is that this administration doesnât care about scientific rigor at all and also desperately wants political appointees, not scientists, to make funding decisions. So OMB recently dropped 400 pages of nonsense to try to make that happen.
In this topsy-turvy world, a senior political appointee would have to approve every single discretionary grant â science and otherwise. And just to make sure they donât let any actual expertise sneak in, they would be prohibited from deferring to the peer review process and âmust instead use their independent judgment when evaluating Federal award proposals.â
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The authority for this sweeping assertion that Joe Biden spent three years forcing DEI down peopleâs throats with no oversight or accountability is an August 2025 Trump executive order about grantmaking that basically says the same thing the proposed rule does: Biden made stuff too woke. But thereâs nothing in that executive order highlighting specific concerns with oversight or any specific improper grants. Itâs just a Trump rant about forbidden DEI, racist stuff about China, and transphobia galore.
But hereâs the thing: even if that executive order were chock full of examples of Bidenâs woke malfeasance, it still wouldnât be actual legal authority to upend science. Thatâs because executive orders are not law, no matter how much Trump wishes otherwise.
OK, well how about this from the rule:Â âFederal programs and funding opportunities were designed to advance unlawful identity-based âDiversity, Equity, and Inclusionâ (DEI) policies and preferences across the country.â Surely that has some sort of relevant citation attached to it, right?
Oh, you sweet summer child. The so-called authority for that is a citation to a 5,000-word rant from the Heritage Foundation published in May 2022. And itâs not a citation to any particular thing in that rant. Apparently you need to just read the whole thing to see if it says what the administration says it does.
Heritage shoveled this article out the door a month after the Biden administration announced its âequity action plansâ for multiple agencies as part of an effort to support racial equity and underserved communities. So, at the time Heritage was whining about this, literally nothing had happened save for an announcement. There were no federal programs or funding opportunities at all yet, much less any âunlawfulâ ones.
Well, surely there must be some support for the part of Trumpâs proposed rule that says Biden violated the Constitution with all this wokeness run amok: âThese policies were inconsistent with basic American values and civil rights laws, including the equal protection principles of the US Constitution.â Nope! Not one, not two, but three Trump executive orders, all of which are racist, are cited here, but nary of which has any actual law.
Now, even this administration knows that it canât ram through this huge a change based only on Trumpâs feels. Agencies need specific statutory authority to enact regulations. Put another way, Congress must say, when passing a law, what, if anything, agencies are allowed to do to implement it. This proposed rule, therefore, must cite laws that give OMB the authority to tell every other federal agency how to evaluate every last bit of discretionary federal grant funding.
According to the proposed rule, if you go read no fewer than nine major federal statutes in their entirety, covering everything from audit requirements to federal procurement to human trafficking, you will somehow see that OMB has unfettered authority to do whatever it wants.
Needless to say, this is also not how this works. Rule-making authority is specific, not general. Put another way, as the Supreme Court already said nearly 50 years ago in Chrysler v. Brown, âthere must be a nexus between the regulations and some delegation of the requisite legislative authority by Congress.â Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it smugly, Congress does not âhide elephants in mouseholes.â The executive branch canât say it has somehow divined a right to do whatever it wants by finding One Weird Trick that no one else has ever noticed, discernible only by the brain geniuses at Trumpâs OMB after reading a gazillion words in scores of statutes.
The Trump Regime has taken a sledgehammer to scientific expertise, led by Project 2025 architect Russ Vought.
