The Trump administration has proposed a rule that would hand political appointees direct control over every dollar of federal grant money in America, a $1.5 trillion pot that currently funds everything from cancer trials to veterans' housing to satellites that stop us from crashing into China in orbit. A clinical psychologist named Colette Delawalla has spent the last few weeks racing around Capitol Hill trying to get Congress to care, and what she found there is almost as alarming as the rule itself.
What This Rule Actually Does
The proposal came from OMB director Russ Vought on May 29. According to the Guardian, it would strip scientific and subject-matter experts of authority over federal research grants and hand that power to political appointees instead. Every discretionary award would have to, in the rule's own words, "demonstrably advance the president's policy priorities." The rule also bans anything that "promotes anti-American values," a phrase so vague it could swallow entire fields of medicine whole.
Former NIH program official Elizabeth Ginexi, who left the agency last year after 22 years when DOGE dismissals made her job impossible, called it "a multi-front assault unprecedented in my lifetime." That's not hyperbole from a scorned ex-employee. That's a career scientist who watched the slow unraveling of American public health infrastructure from the inside, and she's saying this is worse than anything she's seen.
Delawalla's group, Stand Up for Science, analyzed roughly 10,000 NIH-funded clinical trials and found that nearly half could be killed under the new rule. The reasons range from the presence of prohibited words like "equity" in the grant language to the inclusion of any international collaboration whatsoever. We're talking over 1,000 cancer-related trials, hundreds of pediatric studies, and hundreds more studying veterans, suicide, heart disease, and diabetes. Gone. Because a political appointee decided the research didn't advance Trump's priorities.
The Satellites Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Here's a detail that should make every single person who enjoys not dying in a debris field sit down for a second. According to Delawalla's conversations with members of Congress, US and Chinese satellites have near-misses 75 times a day. There are coordinating offices in both countries actively working together to prevent collisions. Under this rule, that collaboration would be illegal.
"Within hours, there will be collisions," Delawalla told the Guardian, describing what she told members of Congress. "A forced error, because this kind of collaboration will be illegal." She said lawmakers who heard this responded with genuine shock. Which tells you everything about how well Congress has actually read the 411 pages of this proposal.
Only one member of the more than 30 she met with was fully up to speed on the rule's contents: Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen. One congressman. Out of thirty. That's the level of attention being paid to a rule that could functionally dismantle American scientific research as we know it.
The Hill Visit That Should Depress You
Delawalla spent three days on Capitol Hill meeting with lawmakers one by one, sounding the alarm. She is a 32-year-old clinical psychologist and Emory University researcher who founded Stand Up for Science last year specifically because someone had to. This week, Scientific American named her one of five young scientists "making waves" and praised her for showing the next generation of researchers how to participate in democracy. Great honor. Brutal timing.
What did she find on the Hill? Largely indifference and dismissal. One unnamed veteran House Democrat told her flat out: "You're just protesters," and that "the executive branch should have the right to cancel grants." A Democrat said that. A member of the party that is supposed to be the institutional firewall against exactly this kind of authoritarian consolidation of power looked a scientist in the eye and told her she was just a protester.
She left "flustered," which feels like the most controlled possible response.
The Clinical Trial That Made Her Cry in an Airport
While waiting to board her flight home at Reagan National Airport, Delawalla was reviewing a list of research that would be ended by the rule. One item stopped her cold: a clinical trial studying suicidal ideation in parents following infant death. It includes international collaboration, which the rule prohibits. Under Vought's proposal, that trial stops.
She has a two-and-a-half-year-old son. She cried in the airport.
That's not sentiment for sentiment's sake. That's the actual human cost of what this rule does, condensed into a single moment. Real research into real grief experienced by real parents, killed because it involves scientists in other countries and therefore somehow threatens American values. This is what "advance the president's policy priorities" looks like when it hits the ground.
The Fight That's Left
The public comment deadline on the rule is July 13. As of last Thursday, nearly 31,000 comments had been submitted to the OMB page. Stand Up for Science is urging anyone with a pulse to add to that number, and has posted guidance on their website for how to do it effectively.
Delawalla is also preparing legal challenges. She held a virtual meeting last Friday with around 50 attorneys across the country to map out strategies should the rule pass. That's not a protest. That's an organized legal defense of the American research infrastructure, being built by a clinical psychologist in her spare time because the institutions that should be doing it are either captured, defunded, or telling her she's just a protester.
The OMB rule is framed as administrative reform. What it actually does, as Delawalla told the Guardian directly, is create a $1.5 trillion slush fund under direct political control. "The purpose of the rule is fascism," she said. She meant it.
The Dingo Take
Let's be precise about what's being proposed here. The Trump administration wants to require that every piece of federally funded research in America demonstrably advance the president's personal policy priorities. Not scientific merit. Not public health value. Not national security. The president's priorities. A man who has spent the better part of a decade publicly hostile to vaccines, climate science, and expertise in general would have veto power, through his appointees, over which cancers get studied and which ones don't.
The fact that nearly half of active NIH clinical trials could be killed by this rule is not a side effect. It's not an oversight. It is the point. Dependent institutions don't push back. Scientists who can't get grants don't publish inconvenient findings. A research community that has to clear every project through a political loyalty test is not a free research community. Ginexi called it unprecedented. Delawalla called it fascism. Both of them are right, and the only people who would dispute that are the ones writing the rule.
The July 13 comment deadline is real and it matters. So does calling your member of Congress, even the ones who clearly haven't read the thing yet, especially those. A veteran Democrat who looks a scientist in the eye and says "you're just protesters" needs to hear from constituents who understand what's actually at stake. Because the rule is moving. The clock is running. And the people fighting hardest to stop it are a 32-year-old clinical psychologist and 50 volunteer lawyers, which is a hell of a thing to need when $1.5 trillion in research funding is on the line.
