In this week’s update: An OMB proposal with huge implications for science, more from NIH and NSF, and another DOJ lawsuit against the University of California. After all the news, I also wrote a whole thing about libraries.
I forgot to make a Star Wars reference last week, so this week’s subtitle is the best(?) line from the leaked script for Episode IX.
Federal Research Policy
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) posted a proposal on the Federal Register today to “improve and clarify government-wide policies and requirements related to the management of Federal financial assistance including grants and cooperative agreements.” Stat has coverage, but some highlights:
The proposal includes a strengthening of regulations requiring that proposals should align with presidential priorities. There is a somewhat ominous reaffirmation that “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion”.
The proposal states that an applicant’s “history of questionable practices” should be considered when their proposals are reviewed. “Questionable practices” include plagiarism, “discredited” or non-replicable studies, and “engaging in activities or initiatives that are inconsistent with Federal civil rights laws."
There is also this quote on the use of institutional affiliation when evaluating grant proposals: "To the extent institutional affiliation is considered in making discretionary awards, agencies should prioritize an institution's commitment to rigorous, reproducible scholarship over its historical reputation or perceived prestige. For science grants, agencies should prioritize institutions that have demonstrated success in implementing Gold Standard Science"
The proposal also includes a provision that would bar the use of grant funds for article processing charges (APCs) and other publication-related costs.
According to a new AAMC report on “forward” funding at the NIH, the use of this mechanism has been largely concentrated on RF1, R01, R03, R15, and R21 awards. For more real-time information, AAMC maintains a dashboard tracking NIH funding.
According to reporting in Nature and the New York Times, the NSF was withholding funds from Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale between December 2025 to this week. After the initial reporting on this issue, the holds on Duke, Harvard, and Yale were removed.
The NIH sent out a reminder that coauthoring an journal article with a scientist affiliated with an institution not in the United States likely counts as a foreign component and is thus subject to all applicable disclosure and prior approval policies. There was reporting in Science last week about the ambiguity around this policy.
Science has an article about the Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries (SIRA) Act, a proposed bill that would prohibit U.S. scientists from using federal funding “to enter into, support, or carry out any research collaboration” with any individual associated with Chinese entities on one of several U.S. government blacklists.
There has been discussion on social media this week about an impending RFI on a proposal to report out the impact scores of NIH proposals in three “bins” (“most competitive” top 25% of overall impact scores, “competitive” 26-50%, and “not discussed” >50% or not discussed. In this scheme, neither the applicant nor program staff would have access to the raw score. More on this as it develops.
Public Health
HHS Director RFK Jr. hosts a podcast. The latest episode, which comes in the context of his calls to curb the prescription of SSRIs, is a good primer on his (and by extension the agency he direct’s) view of mental illness. It’s… rough.
Higher Education
The Department of Justice filed another lawsuit against the University of California this week, for its alleged “deliberate indifference to race and national origin discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students at its University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) campus”. Through the suit, the DOJ is seeking to require UCLA to repay federal grant money going back more, bar it from new federal contracts until it’s deemed in compliance with civil rights law, and install an independent court-appointed monitor that would oversee its civil rights practices.
Last week, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) announced that foreign nationals who were in the US legally on a temporary basis could not longer apply for a green card without returning to their home country first. The AIP has a piece on how this is particularly problematic for students and researchers.
Supplementary Material: Science is not a place
The first job I ever had was as a page in a public library. I would re-shelve books, process VHS tapes and DVDs, and - when there was nothing else to do - shelf read. For those not in the know, this is ostensibly the process of checking the stacks to ensure that everything is in the right place. I think the statute of limitations has now sufficiently elapsed that I can admit that I took the term more literally. I’d find a quiet place, fire up my Discman, and read a Stephen King book pulled from the shelf.
Later, when I worked as an academic librarian for 10+ years, I would tell this story and my colleagues would be aghast (not really, many of them had done the same thing as rebellious librarian teens). I’m bringing it up here because this week MIT announced that it is closing the stacks at several of its libraries. I have a lot of empathy for people who are disappointed by this and even more for the staff affected. Beyond the real and human cost of layoffs, it’s a bit of a complicated story to do with budget uncertainty and how library users access their collections in 2026.
But as much as I personally have always loved sitting amongst the stacks, I will forever insist that the core of a library is not its collection of books or its physical place. Yes, a library (very often) involves a building within which there are books. But what truly makes a library a library is the people. A library is a community. That collection of books is the result of an active process of management by professionals, individuals who possess specialized training and participate in all sorts of activities that look very familiar to those involved in scientific research (conferences, journal articles, grant writing etc). The same is true of the host of other services offered through the library, whether it be the children’s programming offered at a public library or the research data services offered by an academic library. The library is also its users; whose requests, preferences, and needs give shape to what the library does.
More than articles or buildings, or prizes, science is also a community. One engaged in a highly collaborative set of very human activities. I have been struggling to understand why the news this week feels so disheartening. It’s not that the news is somehow worse than in any other week. The reason I started these updates in the first place was because I found the news to be so unrelenting. But, whether it is further politicizing how science is funded or putting pressure on scientific collaboration, so many of this week’s developments take aim directly at the community that is science and who gets to participate. The attacks on inclusion and diversity are that too, of course. There is no “but” to put after that sentence. To me, right now, it just feels like it’s coming from all angles.
Every time somebody posts a photo of a dumpster full of books, there is a debate about the practice of weeding a library’s collection. But weeding does not diminish a library. What does is cutting funds, imposing layoffs, and restricting what a library can do and who it can serve. It short: dismantling its community. None of this is a perfect analogy. Comparing, librarians and scientists does a disservice to both and weeding a library’s collection is not the same as changing how that collection can be accessed. But I think this community aspect is why, though it’s always been technically the case, a phrase like “peer review remains advisory” feels so ominous. The goal is diminishment.
To end on a slightly more possible note: The OMB proposal is just that, a proposal. There is a 45 day comment period (comments to be made here). Over the last 18 months, a number of policies have been imposed and then partially withdrawn due to public pressure. Weariness isn’t inevitability. But hiding out in the stacks with a Discman and a copy of The Dead Zone is not really an option.