The Trump administration is waging a culture war on science, and the latest salvo is in the form of a dry, bureaucratic proposal from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that could threaten the future of US science as we know it.
The proposal would give political appointees unprecedented control over grant funding, the method through which scientists receive federal money to perform groundbreaking space research such as the search for evidence of organic compounds on Mars or the discovery of some of the earliest galaxies in the universe.
A typical proposed rule from the OMB garners less than 100 public comments. This rule has netted over 54,000 comments, the large majority of which appear to be negative, including a response from respected nonprofit The Planetary Society, which has criticized everything from the proposal’s rules around publication to its move away from peer review to its chilling effect on scientists in every field.
“Nearly every proposed aspect of these rule changes has some deleterious or negative consequence for the practice of science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, tells The Verge.
“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist,” he points out. The biggest obstacle is the restrictions on the funding of open-access publication, which is the method through which space science papers are made freely available to the public.
“There’s concrete harm, even if you’re not a scientist.”
— Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society
For more than a decade, NASA has prided itself on making public the data collected with NASA instruments, as well as the science papers that come from studying that data. The new changes reverse that trend, making science data more difficult for everyone to access. Forbidding the use of grant funding for open-access publication means it’ll be harder for the public to see the research that their tax money helped fund.
“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves,” Dreier says.
Then there’s the ability to terminate grants because of the associations or political leanings of the scientists themselves. Consider the data collected by the Mars rovers — precious data that cost billions of dollars and took decades of expertise to acquire — and a scientist, who doesn’t even work for NASA directly, who wants to study that data and has a novel idea for research that their fellow scientists think is worthwhile and important. Hypothetically, the new regulations would allow a partisan non-expert employed by the White House to nix that scientist’s funding because they posted an anti-Trump meme on X years ago.
It gets worse. “You don’t even have to be in violation of a rule” to have your funding cut, Dreier says. Grants can be revoked at any time, for any reason, if they are deemed against the interests of the president’s whims: “There’s a capriciousness that is enabled by these changes, and an opacity of the decision process.”
The problems with the regulations are not just ideological. They largely impose a bureaucratic burden: Is any scientist going to want to set up an international partnership, or attend a conference, or try to publish their data publicly and for free, when doing so requires time and paperwork applying for exemptions that may or may not be granted by a government body that has no expertise or interest in their work? Are they going to set up a potentially fruitful collaboration with other scientists in China, or Russia, or even Canada, when doing so introduces a risk to their own work, knowing their livelihood could be yanked away when the president decides he doesn’t like another nation tomorrow?
“There’s no really good argument for that, unless you’re trying to use it as a means of control over the scientists themselves.”
— Casey Dreier
This is a separate, though perhaps even more dangerous, attack on science than the proposed cuts to NASA funding that are affecting programs like the operation of the Mars rovers. Under the proposed OMB rules, the contracts through which NASA builds spacecraft and collects data would remain, but the grants for scientists to analyze that data would be under political threat.
“There’s a distinction between data collection and science,” Dreier says. Building amazing tools like the Mars rovers or the James Webb Space Telescope and using them to collect data is only the first step in making progress: “The science is what happens when you pay a scientist to sit down and look at the data, interpret it, model it, test it, and then present it and go through the process of arguing about it.”
“What are we collecting data for, if we’re not going to support the scientists to study it?”
Despite the significant public pushback against the move, including a Senate hearing with the director of the OMB, Russell Vought, in which Democratic senators described the effects of the rule as “absurdity” and “bias,” the OMB does not seem disposed to back down and withdraw its proposed rule. Instead, it will likely face a series of legal challenges, including from a group of 24 governors and attorneys general who argue that the rule is unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of powers.
What is at stake here is bigger than slashed funds or a temporary refocusing on Earthly concerns over space research. “This is not a budget cut,” Dreier points out. Budget cuts are easy to understand and easy to argue against. What is happening here is more pernicious: “This is a surgical, scalpel-like attack on the actual process of science that is buried under procedural rules and boring-sounding language.”