Re: Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance (2 CFR), Vol. 91 Fed. Reg. No. 103 (May 29, 2026)
Sections addressed: [200.205], [200.300], [200.340], [200.432], [200.454], [200.461] (plus additional provisions listed below)
What is at stake
The stated goals of this proposal — transparency, accountability, and oversight of taxpayer dollars — are ones I share. But its operative provisions do not serve those goals, and indeed appear to be designed to do exactly the opposite. They transfer the core decisions of federal research funding from qualified scientific experts to political appointees, at every stage of the funding lifecycle. Several provisions would raise administrative burden rather than reduce it, and the cumulative effect would be to make federally funded science less rigorous, less stable, and less responsive to the public interest.
Indeed, the rule changes proposed here will, in my opinion, result in the loss of the US’s leadership role in the world scientific establishment, a role that has been carefully maintained since World War II and has provided the United States with much of the material and social benefits that we currently enjoy. I urge OMB to withdraw or substantially revise the rule, and in particular to strike or rewrite the provisions identified below — most urgently [200.205], [200.300], [200.340], [200.432], [200.454], and [200.461].
About me
I am a faculty member and principal investigator at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where I have spent much of my career developing new approaches to understanding enzyme function with the overarching goal of developing new treatments for diseases as diverse as Parkinson’s Disease and prostate cancer. Throughout my career, I have been generously supported by both the NIH and NSF, and have served as a peer reviewer for both of those agencies, as well as for the Pentagon-based DTRA (the Defense Threat Reduction Agency). Recently, we started a company, CYPselect LLC, to provide precision medicines based on discoveries made in our lab. I am proud of the Federally-supported work we have done over the years, and proud of the students that I have trained in the course of that work: Many of them are now Ph.D.s or M.D.s involved in both basic medical research and in providing patient health care at notable institutions, including Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, UCLA David Geffen Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine.
The provisions that displace expert judgment
[200.205] Pre-issuance review by political appointees, with peer review demoted to advisory. The proposal requires senior appointees to conduct a pre-issuance review of every discretionary award, directs that awards “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities,” and specifies that appointees “must not ministerially ratify or routinely defer to” peer reviewers, whose role is reduced to advisory. This inverts the logic of merit review. Whether a proposed study is methodologically sound, adequately powered, properly controlled, and not duplicative is a technical question, not a political one — and it is precisely the question expert peer review exists to answer. A generalist appointee is not positioned to assess whether a proposed design is confounded, whether a sample is adequate, or whether an analytic plan supports the inferences drawn. The post-war American research system became the most productive in the world because the allocation of public funds was tied, through peer review, to independent technical judgment rather than to the preferences of whoever held office. A political review forbidden from deferring to that judgment does not add a safeguard atop merit review; it overrides merit with something that is not merit. A similar “upside-down” approach to biological science in the Soviet Union (Lysenkoism pushed by Stalin) resulted not only in a complete lack of progress in the life sciences in the USSR, but resulted in widespread famine and death because of misplaced applications of Lysenko’s ideas. Futhermore, due to persistent adherence to Lysenko’s false ideas, the Eastern bloc was not part of the genetic revolution that took place from the 1960s to the present in the United States and led to the US’s premier standing in biomedicine today. For these reasons, I urge OMB to strike the subsections subordinating expert peer review to the opinions of political apparatchiks.
[200.300] Content-based award conditions. Embedding categorical prohibitions on broad, loosely defined subject areas as mandatory award conditions across all agencies introduces a content test into a system whose value depends on following the evidence wherever it leads. Beyond the constitutional and statutory questions others will brief, there is a practical scientific cost: vaguely bounded prohibitions create compliance uncertainty that chills legitimate, mechanism-focused research adjacent to the prohibited categories and invites risk-averse institutions to self-censor rather than risk an award. That uncertainty is itself a burden, and it falls hardest on exactly the long-horizon basic research the public most needs. Again, examples from history prove that the most important practical applications of science often arise from unexpected places. The anti-cancer drug cisplatin was discovered because a scientist was curious why bacteria behaved differently in the presence of a platinum electrode. PCR, the basic method for rapidly duplicating and amplifying DNA, used in hudreds of laboratories around the world, arose from research on the geysers and hot springs of Yellowstone Park. MRI came about because of physicists working on superconductivity. These are only a few examples. There are many more.
The provisions that isolate researchers and raise burden
[200.340] Mid-award termination for shifting “priorities.” The proposal expands the authority to terminate active awards on the basis of “agency priorities,” requiring no finding of noncompliance and only a brief written rationale, and analogizes this to the termination-for-convenience clause in federal procurement. The analogy fails. A grant is not a purchase of a deliverable; it is a multi-year commitment around which a laboratory hires and trains staff, enrolls and incurs ongoing ethical obligations to human research participants, and structures years of work that cannot simply be paused and resumed. Discretionary mid-stream termination converts every federal award into a contingent liability and will systematically push investigators and institutions away from ambitious, long-duration projects toward safe, short ones. That is the opposite of good stewardship. I urge OMB to restore termination only for cause.
Training scientists and medical personnel is a multi-year commitment. Without firm assurances that awards will not be terminated without cause, so that trainees can be supported for guaranteed periods of time, the pipeline will rapidly empty, and the next generation of doctors, health-care workers and researchers will cease to exist.
[200.432], [200.454], and [200.461] — the cost provisions that sever science from its own infrastructure. Taken together, three changes would cut federally funded researchers off from the professional machinery that makes their work usable:
- Conferences ([200.432]) would be allowable only if pre-approved and written into the award at issuance. Conferences are where results are presented, critiqued before publication, and turned into collaborations. A researcher cannot anticipate at award time which meeting in year three will matter, and a discretionary, per-conference approval gate adds an administrative step where none is needed.
- Journal subscriptions ([200.454]) would become categorically unallowable, and society memberships would require prior approval. Access to the literature is not a discretionary perk; it is the precondition for knowing what has already been established, which is the first requirement of rigorous, non-duplicative work.
- Publication costs, APCs, and open-access fees ([200.461]) would be presumptively unallowable, in direct conflict with existing federal public-access policy — funding the research but not the step that validates and disseminates it. The proposal states that a general requirement to make results public “must not be construed as authorizing publication costs,” stranding the public’s investment at the point of delivery.
Each is presented as cost discipline. Each in fact adds a discretionary approval gate or strands a sunk investment, and the conference and membership provisions plainly increase the per-award administrative workload the rule claims to reduce.
Additional provisions of concern
Beyond the provisions treated above, the following would each do real harm and belong on the record; their brevity here should not be read as concession:
- [200.205] “Gold Standard Science” as an undefined test — grants must meet, and institutions are prioritized by, a standard the rule never concretely defines, leaving open-ended discretion to favor or disfavor institutions. Who decides what is “Gold Standard”? Even I, a veteran researcher with extensive experience in peer review of the work of other scientists, cannot say what this means.
- [200.202] Program goals aligned to administration priorities; [200.202(d)] eligibility limited to chosen nonprofit categories; [200.202(e)] a domestic-first default — together these let program design, applicant pools, and international participation be set politically rather than by statutory need or expert judgment.
- [200.204] Competitions exempted from public posting — a broad “national interest” exception could move entire competitions out of public view, defeating transparency.
- [200.206] Affiliation-based denial — applicants could be disqualified for organizational affiliations unrelated to the merit of the work.
- [200.220] Broad ban on international collaboration — sweeping, entity-agnostic restrictions, reaching even allocable indirect costs, would disrupt partnerships foundational to U.S. science.
- [200.303] Mandatory E-Verify for all recipients — a new government-wide compliance burden, contradicting the rule’s burden-reduction rationale and threatening institutions employing international researchers.
- [200.421] / [200.450] Public-communication and advocacy limits — researchers could be barred from communicating their own federally funded findings on subjects deemed to be politically sensitive.
- Government-wide binding effect on a single date — the restructure removes individual agencies’ ability to adapt or buffer these changes for their scientific communities.
In closing, the theme running though all of these provisions is the replacement of expert, evidence-based judgment with discretionary political control at every stage of the funding lifecycle, paired with cost rules that isolate researchers from the scientific literature and useful scientific conferences. A grants system can be made more accountable without being made less rigorous. These provisions sacrifice the second in the name of the first, and the public — which pays for this research precisely so that it will be sound and usable — is the party that loses. I respectfully urge OMB to withdraw or substantially revise [200.205], [200.300], [200.340], [200.432], [200.454], [200.461], and the related provisions listed above.
Respectfully submitted, Thomas C. Pochapsky, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Brandeis University, Waltham MA 02454
Founder and CSO, CYPselect LLC, Arlington MA 02476