A proposed Office of Management and Budget rule has turned into a fight over who gets to decide which federally funded science happens, and under what political conditions. The Planetary Society, a nonprofit space advocacy group, says the Trump administration’s proposal would threaten space research by shifting more control over grants toward political appointees and away from peer review.
Federal grants are the unglamorous machinery behind a lot of space science. NASA may build instruments, fly rovers, and collect telescope data, but researchers often need grant money to analyze that data, write papers, publish results, and argue with other scientists until the work survives contact with reality. The Planetary Society says the OMB proposal would interfere with that process.
The rule has attracted unusual public resistance. Proposed OMB rules typically receive fewer than 100 public comments, according to The Verge. This one has received more than 54,000 comments on Regulations.gov. The New York Times reported that most of the comments appear to oppose the plan.
What the proposal would change
The Planetary Society’s formal response objects to several parts of the proposal, including limits on using grant funds for open-access publication, a reduced role for peer review, and language the group says could discourage scientists from pursuing normal research work.
Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, told The Verge that “nearly every proposed aspect” of the rule changes would damage how science is done. His most concrete objection is the proposed restriction on paying open-access publishing costs with grant money.
Open-access fees are how many research papers become available to readers without a journal subscription. NASA has spent more than a decade emphasizing public access to data collected by its instruments and to papers produced from that work. Dreier argues that blocking grant money from covering those costs would make taxpayer-funded research harder for taxpayers to read.
The group also objects to provisions it says would let grants be ended because of a researcher’s associations or political views. Dreier told The Verge that the proposal could allow funding to be pulled even when a scientist has not broken a rule, if officials decide the grant conflicts with presidential priorities.
That matters for space research in a specific way. A NASA rover or telescope can collect data for years, at enormous public expense, while scientists outside NASA compete for grants to study it. Under the process described by Dreier, the spacecraft contract might survive while the money for independent analysis becomes vulnerable to political review.
Legal and political pushback
The proposal has also drawn attention in Congress. At a Senate hearing with OMB Director Russell Vought, Democratic senators criticized the rule’s effects as “absurdity” and “bias,” according to The New York Times.
A group of 24 governors and attorneys general has also challenged the proposal in a comment letter, arguing that it is unconstitutional and violates the separation of powers.
Dreier framed the proposal as separate from proposed NASA budget cuts that have threatened programs such as Mars rover operations. His argument is that this fight is about the rules governing research itself: whether scientists can get money to analyze public data, publish it openly, and collaborate without waiting for political clearance from officials who may have no expertise in the work.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
