The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) has submitted formal comments urging the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to abandon its proposed rewrite of the Uniform Guidance for federal financial assistance (2 CFR Part 200), warning that the rule would destabilize the nation’s research enterprise and politicize how federal science is funded.
Published on May 29, 2026, the proposed rule would touch nearly every stage of the federal award life cycle. In its comments, AIBS focused on the provisions affecting scientific research: a new pre-issuance review that would let political appointees override independent peer review; expanded authority to terminate active awards midstream when priorities shift; broad restrictions on international collaboration; new limits on conferences, publishing and open access, and professional memberships; and a default prohibition on publication costs that conflicts with existing federal open-access policy. AIBS also noted that the rule was issued with only a 45-day comment period and without any analysis of its costs.
“AIBS shares OMB’s stated goals of transparency, accountability, and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” the comments state. “We are deeply concerned, however, that this proposed rule, taken as a whole, would cause lasting and largely preventable harm to the U.S. research enterprise—harm that would outlast any single administration.”
The comments argue that the rule runs counter to the Trump Administration’s own Executive Order on Restoring Gold Standard Science (EO 14303), which calls for science that is “reproducible, transparent, collaborative, interdisciplinary, subject to unbiased peer review, and free of conflicts of interest.” Instead, AIBS writes, the rule “would replace unbiased expert review with review by political appointees, restrict the international collaboration that is a cornerstone of how science advances, and tie funding to administration priorities that may change at any moment.”
AIBS urged OMB to abandon the rule in its current form and to approach any future major revisions to federal grantmaking policies with appropriate stakeholder consultation and analysis.
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