On May 29, the Office of Management and Budget posted OMB-2026-0034, a sweeping set of proposed changes to the ways that federal agencies administer funds granted to individuals and organizations, including the research grants made by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. The proposed changes are framed as preventing waste, fraud, and abuse, but in detail they create dramatic new restrictions on how federal funds are granted, how those funds may be spent, and what people working on federally funded projects may do. In brief: funding decisions would be made directly by political appointees, not by expert agency staff; use of funding for a variety of important activities like conference attendance, publication of results, or public outreach would be heavily restricted; and funded organizations would be restricted from speaking on a sweeping list of allegedly controversial topics, from climate change to human diversity.

Former NIH Program Officer Elizabeth Ginexi has detailed the many concerning rule changes, and helped lead a general call for people to provide comment on the proposals, from their perspectives as members of the American public, as federally funded scientists, and as representatives of scientific organizations. These comments are supposed to inform OMB’s decision to implement, revise, or scrap the proposed rule changes — and, more likely, provide an evidentiary basis for pushback by Congress and in lawsuits that seem very likely to be necessary.

I’ve signed on to statements by the scholarly societies in which I’m a member, and I’ve consulted a bit on some of the language in those; and the California State University system, my employer, also has a comment in process. Today I also submitted a comment from me, personally. Individual comments are limited to 5,000 characters, and specificity is key, so I focused in on a recurring theme I saw in the changes — restrictions on scientists’ ability to communicate. I’m posting the text of my comment here as an independent record, and in case any readers want some additional motivation or inspiration for their own comments. Comments on the proposal are still open until 11:59pm (Eastern time) on Monday, 13 July, and I’d encourage you to contribute if at all possible — you can do so here.