US science faces new grant rules: any award can be cancelled at any time

The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has published a proposed rule that would rewrite how the federal government awards research grants, making peer review a secondary consideration and allowing agencies to cancel any grant at any time. Public comment on the proposal is open.

From executive order to formal rulemaking

In August 2025 the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to change how grant funding is handled. Under the existing system, peer reviewers rated the scientific quality of applications and subject-matter experts inside the funding agencies used those ratings to decide what to fund; the order gave political appointees the final say and told them not to “routinely defer” to reviewers.

The administration has since lost a number of court cases, and orders can be vacated without strong justification, so the OMB merged the order with other priorities and sent it through formal rulemaking instead.

Peer review becomes advisory

“Peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion,” the document states. Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation could always fund lower-scoring applications, but only as rare exceptions. Under the proposal, those decisions would be made by political appointees rather than expert staff, and grant programmes would have to be “aligned with administration policies and priorities.”

Every grant approval would carry language warning recipients that the award can be cancelled at any time if the agency decides it is no longer in the “national interest” — a standard the document does not define.

Culture war conditions and limits on collaboration

The proposal bars funding for several topics, including “theories of disparate-impact liability”, efforts to compensate for historic discrimination, and what it calls “gender ideology”. Agencies could also weigh an applicant’s affiliations with organisations that violate federal law or advocate overthrowing the US government.

International work is restricted too: the document suggests banning federal funding of collaborations involving Chinese researchers and sets a “domestic-first framework”, under which international elements need agency justification and must be in the national interest.

The proposal also blocks grant spending on publishing papers or attending conferences unless a cost is required by statute or approved in advance. The OMB presents the document as “reducing recipient burden”, citing the elimination of DEI requirements.

What researchers stand to lose

The rule would pull US scientists out of international collaborations, leave them unable to pay for publishing results or meeting colleagues, and expose applications to political screening. Even funded researchers would work under the threat that an award could be cancelled when priorities change in Washington.