A draft ruling on how research is funded in the Unites States aims to keep the scientific community on a very short leash.
On 29 May, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a 412-page rule that would place scientific research largely under the supervision of political appointees. Peer review – the mechanism by which the United States has allocated research funding since the Second World War – is to be reduced to an ‘advisory’ role, with the appointees, not scientists or program officers, personally approving every discretionary grant.
Moreover, those appointees would be expressly forbidden to defer to the experts they replace. Awards must ‘demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities’, and ongoing grants could be cancelled at any moment, without any finding of fraud or failure, simply because an appointee had decided they no longer align with the administration’s aims.
The OMB’s new rule can be viewed as further evidence of the political capture of previously nonpartisan institutions. The preamble denounces decades of peer-reviewed work as ‘woke’, ‘neo-Marxist’ and ‘anti-American’. Like the Soviet Union under Stalin, there is something unmistakably Lysenko-ist in a state that proposes to decide, by fiat, what will count as truth.
But this interpretation leaves the more revealing question unasked: what kind of politics finds a rule like this attractive? No constituency in American life is clamouring for less scientific research. There is no movement demanding fewer cancer trials, slower vaccine development or dimmer telescopes. The states whose laboratories stand to lose the most are often represented by the very politicians prepared to let the rule take effect.
Trump has shown little interest in how the National Institutes of Health, for example, actually functions. A government that can agree on almost nothing has converged on a plan to hobble one of the few domains in which the United States still enjoys unrivaled global leadership, in response to a demand that scarcely exists.
The explanation is not that anyone wants ignorance. It is that science embodies a relationship to the future that MAGA cannot tolerate. A research grant is a peculiar political object. It is a promise made to a future that no current official will control, evaluated by experts precisely because its payoff lies beyond any politician’s horizon and cannot be commanded into being. The Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium, whose defunding I wrote about in December, spent 26 years pursuing treatments for the deadliest childhood cancers. Twenty-six years is a sentence in a language this administration does not speak. It is the grammar of investment – the act of binding the present to a future one hopes to deserve.
The OMB rule’s most revealing provision, then, is the insistence that grants can be terminated at any time, for any reason, at an appointee’s discretion. The point is not to improve efficiency. Rather, it is to make clear that nothing funded by the state may outlast the ruler’s preferences. The same logic governs the rule’s lesser-noticed clauses, which bar federal support for the dissemination of findings, for conference attendance and for membership in professional bodies. These are not incidental economies. They are the channels through which knowledge is propagated in a community that outlives any administration. Severing them is of a piece with making grants revocable on a whim. In both cases, the aim is to ensure that nothing the state funds can take root in a future it does not control. The future is no longer something to invest in. It is something to keep on a very short leash.
Seen this way, the rule fits a broader pattern. The defining feature of MAGA politics is not nostalgia but hostility to long-time horizons. Alliances, civil-service expertise, environmental stewardship, basic research and public-health infrastructure: all ask citizens to bear costs now for benefits that may become visible only years later.
A movement organised around restoring an imagined past cannot easily build for a world it does not wish to inhabit. It dismantles more readily than it sustains, because sustaining requires accepting that tomorrow may differ from yesterday. Science poses the sharpest challenge because it institutionalises such uncertainty. Every experiment assumes that reality, not power, will have the final word. Every grant is a wager that knowledge not yet possessed may someday prove valuable. Science is not merely a body of facts; it is a social commitment to an open future. An independent scientific community is a rival authority over truth, answerable to evidence, not to political leaders.
It is here that the MAGA coalition’s two forces converge. One looks backward; the other, concentrated in Silicon Valley, claims to look radically forward, certain that AI will soon outpace the slow, collective labour of research. The visions appear opposed, yet both reject the same thing: a self-governing scientific community that answers to evidence rather than to power.
The nostalgist has no use for a future that departs from the past he seeks to restore. The accelerationist has no use for the institution itself – the peer review, the deliberation and the patient building of consensus – which he regards not as the discipline that makes knowledge trustworthy but as a guild protecting its own authority. In its place, he offers the disruptor who is right against the experts, and a machine that delivers answers no laboratory could. Each in his own way wants truth to issue from a single will, rather than from a community no one controls. Disruption comes pre-owned, a surprise whose ending is already known – not an open future but one foreclosed by another route.
In both cases, the future arrives pre-scripted. It is either behind us or already spoken for. What neither welcomes is an enterprise whose purpose is to keep the future plural, contestable and beyond anyone’s command. That is why peer review must be demoted, why political appointees must override expert judgment and why scientific autonomy itself becomes suspect. Anthony Fauci, the renowned immunologist who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the COVID-19 pandemic, was a threat not simply because he disagreed with Trump, but because he had standing – the authority to be right against him.
The new rule seeks to ensure that such independent standing does not exist again. Its purpose is not to improve science but to domesticate it. The comment period for the new rule closes on 13 July. Silence, too, will be counted.
Copyright Project Syndicate 2026
Stephen Holmes
Stephen Holmes, Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law and the Richard Holbrooke Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, is the co-author (with Ivan Krastev) of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Penguin Books, 2019).