Russ Vought as science czar would just about do it.
Lisa Needham at Public Notice:
The Trump administration has spent the last 18 months gutting funding for scientific research, forcing out nonpartisan experts, and elevating the most alarming conspiracy theorists in their stead. Now, a new rule proposed by the regime is threatening science itself. Normally, changes to rules about how the federal government awards research grants would probably be a somewhat sleepy topic, impactful to people who do that research for a living but not a five-alarm fire for the rest of us. But we live here now, so we all get to worry about a world where people like Russell Vought, the anti-science freakshow who heads the Office of Management and Budget, would have complete veto power over federally-funded scientific research.
That sounds like an overstatement, but it really isn’t. staffed by scientists. Actually, it’s worse than that. What OMB proposes is to take its existing authority to promulgate general guidance on financial management for government agencies and transform that into rules every agency must follow for every discretionary grant of any kind. Political appointees would have complete authority over funding decisions, rather than career experts. Grants would be evaluated based not on how they advance science or the nation’s goals, but against how well they push President Trump’s personal policies. Grantees would be muzzled from discussing anything the administration considers a “divisive” ideology and could be revoked at any time without explanation if a political appointee feels like it. This isn’t remotely how things have worked in the past.
(Rancid) vibes-based science
For decades, decisions about how federal research dollars get spent have been made by an interlocking community of experts both in and outside government. Career scientists at federal agencies work extensively with independent advisory committees staffed by experts. Evaluations were made by actual experts, not unhinged anti-vax weirdos like the ones Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. installed on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Agency personnel held dozens of study sections each month to evaluate grant proposals. This process helped ensure scientific rigor, but it also insulated science funding from the whims of political appointees. The problem now, of course, is that this administration doesn’t care about scientific rigor at all and also desperately wants political appointees, not scientists, to make funding decisions. So OMB recently dropped 400 pages of nonsense to try to make that happen. In this topsy-turvy world, a senior political appointee would have to approve every single discretionary grant — science and otherwise. And just to make sure they don’t let any actual expertise sneak in, they would be prohibited from deferring to the peer review process and “must instead use their independent judgment when evaluating Federal award proposals.”
[...] The authority for this sweeping assertion that Joe Biden spent three years forcing DEI down people’s throats with no oversight or accountability is an August 2025 Trump executive order about grantmaking that basically says the same thing the proposed rule does: Biden made stuff too woke. But there’s nothing in that executive order highlighting specific concerns with oversight or any specific improper grants. It’s just a Trump rant about forbidden DEI, racist stuff about China, and transphobia galore. But here’s the thing: even if that executive order were chock full of examples of Biden’s woke malfeasance, it still wouldn’t be actual legal authority to upend science. That’s because executive orders are not law, no matter how much Trump wishes otherwise. OK, well how about this from the rule: “Federal programs and funding opportunities were designed to advance unlawful identity-based ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (DEI) policies and preferences across the country.” Surely that has some sort of relevant citation attached to it, right? Oh, you sweet summer child. The so-called authority for that is a citation to a 5,000-word rant from the Heritage Foundation published in May 2022. And it’s not a citation to any particular thing in that rant. Apparently you need to just read the whole thing to see if it says what the administration says it does.
Heritage shoveled this article out the door a month after the Biden administration announced its “equity action plans” for multiple agencies as part of an effort to support racial equity and underserved communities. So, at the time Heritage was whining about this, literally nothing had happened save for an announcement. There were no federal programs or funding opportunities at all yet, much less any “unlawful” ones. Well, surely there must be some support for the part of Trump’s proposed rule that says Biden violated the Constitution with all this wokeness run amok: “These policies were inconsistent with basic American values and civil rights laws, including the equal protection principles of the US Constitution.” Nope! Not one, not two, but three Trump executive orders, all of which are racist, are cited here, but nary of which has any actual law. Now, even this administration knows that it can’t ram through this huge a change based only on Trump’s feels. Agencies need specific statutory authority to enact regulations. Put another way, Congress must say, when passing a law, what, if anything, agencies are allowed to do to implement it. This proposed rule, therefore, must cite laws that give OMB the authority to tell every other federal agency how to evaluate every last bit of discretionary federal grant funding. According to the proposed rule, if you go read no fewer than nine major federal statutes in their entirety, covering everything from audit requirements to federal procurement to human trafficking, you will somehow see that OMB has unfettered authority to do whatever it wants.
Needless to say, this is also not how this works. Rule-making authority is specific, not general. Put another way, as the Supreme Court already said nearly 50 years ago in Chrysler v. Brown, “there must be a nexus between the regulations and some delegation of the requisite legislative authority by Congress.” Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it smugly, Congress does not “hide elephants in mouseholes.” The executive branch can’t say it has somehow divined a right to do whatever it wants by finding One Weird Trick that no one else has ever noticed, discernible only by the brain geniuses at Trump’s OMB after reading a gazillion words in scores of statutes.
The Trump Regime has taken a sledgehammer to scientific expertise, led by Project 2025 architect Russ Vought.