The ‘commander’s intent’ and science

In Project 2025, the conservative playbook from the Heritage Foundation, Russ Vought, an architect of the infamous document, writes that the director of the Office of Management and Budget should have “the most comprehensive approximation of the president’s mind as it pertains to the policy agenda” and that the office should be the “keeper of the commander’s intent.”

Writing in 2023, Vought describes the OMB as “the president’s air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync,” with the authority to “let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course.”

Though not directly addressing research funding, Vought’s vision for the office he led in the first Trump term and would eventually lead again in the second exposes the blueprint behind the OMB’s bombshell revisions to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance released last month.

The guidance fortifies the “commander’s intent” for the future of federally funded academic research. The revisions transform into regulation several of the president’s non–legally binding executive orders, including eliminating any identity-based DEI policies, prohibiting the use of federal funds for elective abortions and requiring that science grants include benchmarks for “Gold Standard Science” (without a clear definition of what that is).

But the most worrying mandate is based on an executive order calling for political appointees to review grants before they are issued. These senior staff will determine if grants advance the “president’s policy priorities” injecting a layer of partisan politics into a process that has been designed to be independent of any political agenda. More worrying still is that the expert panels long used to assess grant proposals on scientific merit are merely “advisory,” the OMB says.

Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who recently left NASA due to political interference told CNN that a merit-based science funding system is one of the reason’s the U.S. is a global research superpower.

“The system wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t stupid,” she said. “Putting uninformed political hacks in charge of it is deeply stupid.”

The guidance also sets the OMB up to assume the role of air-traffic controller for grant funding. It asserts a “statutory” authority to set government-wide requirements that agencies must follow. Under the existing guidance, agencies—full of subject-matter experts— have the flexibility to interpret federal grant-making policies as they see fit. The OMB claims that its new way of doing things will provide “greater clarity” on the binding effect of its policies.

The new guidance also gives agencies and “the executive branch more broadly” the ability to ground planes that are flying off course—i.e., terminate and suspend active grants that don’t align with the president’s politics. The terminations would require minimal rationale—a revision that some scientists say could protect agencies from legal challenges to grant terminations and suspensions. Researchers and institutions that have built programs, teams and labs around multi-year grants could be diverted and grounded mid-flight.

The OMB’s traffic control goes further still: It would require agencies to pre-approve which conferences grantees can attend and doesn’t allow researchers to put funds toward publication costs or subscriptions to professional journals.

Many of the OMB’s revisions “would materially alter long-standing, foundational principles underpinning federally supported research,” Barbara Snyder, president of the American Association of Universities wrote in a letter to the OMB.

The thinking behind the OMB’s tactics to exert greater political influence over federal research funding may have been laid out three years ago, but the reality of these revisions goes far beyond a policy playbook. If, after the 45-day public comment period, the office moves forward with the revisions unchanged, our science will turn undeniably political and we’ll be further away from developing new ways to grow food, understanding our solar system or discovering life-changing tools to fight disease. As Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer and executive publisher of Science journals said, “Alzheimer’s disease will not be cured by a budget analyst from either political party.”