Scientists are sounding the alarm. In May, researchers and scholars submitted almost 500,000 comments to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) proposal to allow political appointees to overrule peer review, restrict international collaborations, and deny funding to politically unfavorable research. 

The OMB explained the lengthy rule change as an effort to “improv[e] transparency, accountability, and oversight for use of Federal funds” in research. But accountability and oversight in this case would mean political inspection of all federally funded research to ensure it is following partisan fashions. This would fundamentally change American science. While debates about how the government funds science are not new, there has never been a comparable effort to control U.S. research at the level of individual projects and recipients. 

The OMB is calling into question the public’s trust in a strong connection between what scientists want to study and what the nation needs. The new rule would openly reject the norm that political officials set broad priorities while experts evaluate individual projects.

When asked to describe the rationale behind the proposed rule before Congress, current OMB Associate Director of Legislative Affairs and candidate for Deputy Director Hal Duncan stated, “So, fundamentally, some of the most important things are to ensure that grants are not going to divisive DEI ideologies. They’re not going to support illegal immigration. They’re not going to support radical gender ideologies.” 

By accusing science of being divisive and radical, the OMB is calling into question the public’s trust in a strong connection between what scientists want to study and what the nation needs. Faith in this connection supported scientific autonomy in the past, and this OMB proposal, whether rejected or not, is a wake-up call for the scientific community. 

Scientists who want to preserve their independence need new ways to defend it.

A History of Scientific Self-Governance

The foundational argument for scientific self-governance emerged after World War II. It grew out of debates on the question being raised today: How should publicly funded science be directed? How should political objectives relate to scientists’ freedom to choose promising directions for their work?

Some politicians, such as Senator Henry Kilgore, wanted funding to be allocated geographically and shaped by broader constituencies than just scientists. He wanted science funding decisions to resemble other kinds of government decisions, influenced by broad input from those who would be affected in labor and industry. 

Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, argued in a seminal report to the president called Science, The Endless Frontier that the best way to advance the nation’s welfare was to refrain from trying to direct science like other kinds of public effort. Bush argued that scientists themselves should direct federal research because fundamental knowledge was a special kind of product. Only experts were appropriate judges of what was promising work, and this work would naturally produce societal benefits.

If the OMB proposal is channeling an authentic public distrust, scientists will need better ways of ensuring and demonstrating their work’s connection to society’s needs.

Bush’s argument for autonomy was not an instant winner. President Truman even vetoed a bill to create the National Science Foundation that failed to provide for adequate political oversight. To survive, federal agencies for basic research had to balance the need for government accountability with the centrality of scientific judgment.

Even Bush, who believed strongly in the “free play of free intellects,” did not argue that scientific freedom was innately deserved. Rather, Bush argued that scientific freedom was optimal for producing national benefits: security, better health, and prosperity. 

By the 1950s, scientific autonomy became a norm based on arguments that tied science to the nation’s interests and compromises that provided for general oversight but kept political judgment at the level of priority setting, a safe distance from individual projects in the laboratory. This allowed science’s expert communities to work relatively autonomously, with a clear understanding of what the agencies would regard as progress and reward with funding. 

The Current System Is a Mixed Bag

The tensions between freedom and oversight have never disappeared. It has always been difficult for scientists to remain independent of political pressure. Richard Nixon ejected science advisors critical of his policies. The Reagan administration relied on political loyalty and referrals for scientific roles. George W. Bush’s administration was criticized for attempting to force science into line with executive policy positions. 

Traditionally, however, the question of what projects deserve appropriated grant funds has been left to expert peer review to decide.

Greater emphasis on efforts to directly connect researchers to communities in need at the local scale could be a promising path to rebuild the connections between scientific and societal priorities.

The new OMB rule would openly reject the norm that political officials set broad priorities while experts evaluate individual projects. While the Reagan administration hid its efforts at politicizing peer review and reversed course when caught, the Trump OMB proposal aims to codify a level of political control reminiscent of Soviet Russia’s economically disastrous suppression of genetic science led by Trofim Lysenko in the mid-20th-century. 

During this period, Lysenko portrayed genetics to be an anti-Communist discipline and successfully advocated for a national ban on genetic research. This ban isolated the Soviets from the international scientific community and led to repeated crop failures and food scarcity due to ineffective breeding programs. 

After Stalin’s death, Lysenkoism died out and was renounced by the Soviet Union in 1964.

Similar to Lysenko, advocates of the OMB rule change see certain avenues of research (such as the study of DEI or gender) as anti-American. In response, today’s scientists should not simply repeat Vannevar Bush’s 1945 argument that basic research guided by scientific merit would enrich the nation by peacefully conquering the endless frontier of knowledge — funded by the public, directed by scientists, and delivered by industry.

In reality, the flow from fundamental knowledge to positive societal outcomes is not nearly as direct as Bush suggested, as a complex policy environment and the private interests of companies shape how innovation affects society.

Furthermore, changes to the governmental oversight of science should have congressional approval and actively insulate science from the influence of individual politicians, businesses, and other interests.

What’s more, 75 years after Bush’s promise, many of the nation’s problems are still acute: our economy has grown tremendously, but we are not the healthy, wealthy, secure society Americans in the 1950s imagined science would produce. And while a lot of basic research has yielded unexpected and useful products, the connections between scientific merit and societal benefit should no longer be relied on as a bulletproof defense of research autonomy. 

Nevertheless, Americans want the government to fund research, lawmakers want to foot the bill, and industry knows the scientific groundwork is needed. But if the OMB proposal is channeling an authentic public distrust, scientists will need better ways of ensuring and demonstrating their work’s connection to society’s needs. For example, greater emphasis on emerging efforts to directly connect researchers to communities in need at the local scale could be a promising path to rebuild the connections between scientific and societal priorities. 

What’s certain is that installing excessive executive control is the wrong way to prioritize societal needs. Codifying centralized power over such a complicated and valuable system is a dangerous proposition: Political loyalty doesn’t qualify appointees to guide sophisticated, long-term innovation processes. 

Furthermore, changes to the governmental oversight of science should have congressional approval and actively insulate science from the influence of individual politicians, businesses, and other interests. 

While finding a way to balance expert independence with democratic accountability is no small feat, it’s clear that OMB proposal is no solution at all.