Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: A proposal to stifle American science

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

The White House's Office of Management and Budget has released a sweeping 400-page proposed rule change that would fundamentally alter how the U.S. federal government manages grants, affecting everything from NASA research to biomedical science and community programs. In this episode, Casey Dreier is joined by Liz Ginexi, a former Program Officer at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, to break down what these changes would mean for American science. Among the most significant proposals: replacing merit-based peer review with partisan political review, allowing grants to be terminated at any time without justification, and restricting scientists' ability to publish their work and attend conferences. Together, Casey and Liz explain how a document dressed up in procedural language could centralize unprecedented control over U.S. scientific funding under a single White House office. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/political-control-over-scientific-grantsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to the space policy edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreyer, welcoming you to the show that explores the policies and processes that enable space exploration. This month, we have a slightly deeper dive or more bigger picture approach to a fundamental aspect of American scientific work and research, which is a set of proposed rule changes to how the U.S. federal government manages grants that fund science. Now, don't turn this off. Don't be afraid. This is actually a huge deal, so big that we are doing a last-minute record here that is talking about unusually for us a very relevant topic.

On May 29th, the White House's Office of Management and Budget released a 400-page set of proposed rule changes that affect the entire gamut of how the United States, destrued distributes congressional appropriated funds that enable fundamental scientific research. We're talking about grants that fund NASA research, people who want to study data from the Mars rovers. We're talking about people who operate missions. We're talking about even beyond that to fundamental biomedical research, community block grants, housing assistance, everything in terms of what the government does. The proposed rules are vast. The changes are vast.

They egregiously, I believe, change fundamental aspects that restrict the idea of free inquiry and also the effectiveness of public investment in science. If nothing else, adding layers of punishing bureaucracy, centralizing control, and using forms of financial intimidation to restrict freedom of association and free speech. If this sounds hyperbolic, it reasonably does, but it's honestly, it's right there in the page. The government claims procedural rules to cancel and terminate contracts or grants at any moment for any reason without having to provide justification. They now would require political review instead of merit-based peer review of all grant awards and even grant opportunities. That means intentionally, and this is specific, a partisan operator from the White House, whether it's this one or a future one, would have the say and actually be encouraged to not defer to the merit-based review process and who to award grants to. It actually would add risks and punishments of being in certain institutions, membership organizations that the White House considers anti-American or against administration priorities. It allows the immediate termination for associating or even speaking on issues unrelated to your grant.

This is a recipe for the suppression of scientific inquiry in the United States. The planetary society at its fundamental level is a scientific organization. We believe in the scientific exploration of space. We want to have science influence and direct how and where we go with robotics and with humans. And if we create a system in this country that is controlled by fear or uncertainty or capricious application of unaccounted, heavy bureaucratic, partisan operations on fundamental scientific investment, we will not have an effective scientific space program. We will not have an effective science program in this country. This is being pushed through a very dry and procedural process

in terms of the federal rules and registers. Basically, the federal government formally saying, this is how we interpret congressional statute. There is an opportunity for you, anyone, you included, whether you're a professional scientist or not, to provide feedback to these proposed set of rules changes. The Planetary Society has made it easy to do so. You can check the show notes for this page

or at planetary.org slash action center. We give you the link there. background materials, additional analysis. Again, this is much larger than our normal discussion of space policy. This is fundamental science policy in this country, how we enable our fundamental scientific investments to function and that they function efficiently. To help work through some of these issues in detail, I've done two things. First, there's a new dashboard, planetary.org slash rules dash change.

You can see comparisons, lines removed, lines added for every proposed rule change. You can follow along with that. Second is that our guest this month is Liz Genexi. She's a former program officer at the National Institutes of Health. She has a fantastic substack where she has raised some of these issues and provided some of the initial commentary on this. She's very insightful, again, through her experience and actually applying and managing these grants for the National Institutes of Health within the U.S. federal government. She joins me now to go through these issues.

before we do that though I just want to mention this may sound more partisan than normal but I also want to emphasize that this is not a partisan issue even if you are disposed to some of the critiques of the scientific communities ways that they've been funding grants in the last few years or don't care for DEI activities

there are more fundamental issues at stake and the claims and changes to these rules are broader and more subduces. substantial and more detrimental to science beyond any single issue here. There are ways to address the prioritization of science without muzzling scientists, without taking away freedom of association and freedom of speech, without adding political review, which is, again,

would persist across administrations unless the future administration decides to change this. So I want to keep that in mind as we go forward with this discussion. If you have any questions, you can always email me, Casey at planetary.org. And now, Liz Genexi. Liz Genexe, thank you for coming on the space policy edition of Planetary Radio at the last minute. Yes, well, thanks for having me. You've been quite busy, so I want to thank you again for your time, but get right to it.

What is, in a sense, the federal register and federal rules that we're looking at? And why is this important that we see a number of proposed changes to how grants are managed by the federal government? Yes, I mean, I think maybe a little step back. before that is the Congress passes legislation every year, and they are the body that allocates money to different programs, all kinds of federal programs, science programs, social service programs, health programs, transportation, you name it, right? And when they allocate the money, some of that money is distributed to the states and communities via grants. grants. And that grant money gets allocated out through an office in the executive, the White House,

called the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB for short. And I think most Americans don't really pay attention to that office because it just hasn't really been on our radar. It just makes the money get pushed out that Congress wants to get pushed out. However, the way that that money gets pushed out is governed by some internal rules, if you will, and it's this rather lengthy, boring procedural document that in the past was titled as guidance, right? So because there's so many agencies and they all have different missions and different constituencies and services and so forth, this was a overarching document that the Office of Management and Budget used to provide grant-making guidance so that the agencies could effectively and lawfully and efficiently

dispense that money that Congress has asked them to dispense. So this would be like, it's like filling in the gaps from what the statutory law says, right, just in terms of the practical aspect of how you give the money out. Exactly. The idea being that because the money flows through the Office of Management Budget and gets pushed out to the different. agencies, they can play an organizing and helpful role in giving the agency leadership the guidance they would need to efficiently get that money out. Now, when everything's working well,

we don't need to know any of that because it just happens. But what we have right here is the current Office of Management and Budget director. His name is Russell Vote. And he's also one of the prominent authors of the Project 2025 document that many of your listeners might be familiar with. He has a different vision for how this should all work.

If you read Project 2025 and some of his other readings and see interviews with him, he doesn't really believe that what Congress says in the legislation should be spent needs to be spent. In his view, the president can veto all of that

if they don't really agree. They have tried. They've tried, over the past year to cancel programs and grants that they didn't like, and they had some pushback in the courts. In many cases, they were told they're not allowed to do that. So this is another tactic along those lines from the current Office of Management and Budget, where they decided to take these procedural guidance rules and turn them into a heavy-handed regulatory document. And you can tell that by when I did my analysis of this 400-page rule, in every instance where the word guidance used to appear, they will be proposing to replace that with the word regulation, and they are centralizing

control about the decisional authorities about the dispensation of all this grant money at the OMB itself, rather than the way it usually was and the way Congress intended it, the decisional capacities would be held within each of the agencies who all have leadership. So that's what's going on right now and why there's a little bit of concern that one office would be in charge of deciding all of the grant making for every single agency. So before we go into the exact details, because as you said, this is a huge, It's one of those things where I think almost intentionally designed to overwhelm easy read-through summarization of what it's doing. It's doing a lot of proposed changes. Before we get to some of the

more irrelevant and egregious ones that I think in terms of what we're worried about, you and I and others worried about it for American science, I want to fixate on this idea of changing the overall structure from guidance to regulation. So you used to work at the National Institutes of Health As a program officer, when you would see a guidance versus regulation, maybe just kind of give an example, how does that change what we're talking about here? Why is that important as a fundamental context here before we go down to these other specific changes that are proposed in this? That's right. So how that works within each agency, and I worked for the National Institutes of Health. So I know it the best, so I can use that as my example.

but each agency typically will have some presidential appointees, but they'll also have leadership that are not presidential appointees. In the case of a science agency, they're oftentimes scientists who are leading the different offices. In the case of the NIH, we only had two presidential appointees, pretty unique for an agency. We had the NIH director and the NCI director. and all of the rest of the staff by statute was designed to be scientists. So each of the heads of the 27 institutes and centers were all preeminent scientists in their respective fields. The staff underneath them, people like me as a scientific program officer, I'm also a scientist. And the entire agency was

staffed with scientists and budget people and analysts to properly dispense the money, but we had, the leadership had all the discretion to make those decisions. So at the NIH, the way the decisions were made on which grants to fund, and this is by law, we have a scientific peer review process. They call them study sections. So the science grants come in and they get reviewed by a panel of scientists for each of the disciplines for which that application pertains, and they will rank and score the applications in terms of their scientific readiness and merit. And then a second level review occurs which is done by what's called advisory councils. So each institute and center has external scientists who are appointed for several year terms to help advise the NIH on the science.

So they take a look at the grants also that were just reviewed. They look at, they sort of do a second level review of what the peer review. you said, do they agree, do they not agree? And then after that's all done, the Institute Directors in each office institute center then has the authority to pay a grant. And that's how business was going. So we never really concerned ourselves with OMB, really at all. The decisional capacity was given to the NIH through statute to make these decisions based on science. So I think for me, I never knew about this document, for example. Right.

So that's interesting, right. Yeah, you never knew, had to know about it. It was almost as a, because it was guidance, but it also just was broadly practical, right, that it says, I mean, says, like, take these things into consideration. You can't, I mean, there's also fundamental rule. You can't, like, pay non-citizens. You can't pay it for illegal purposes, you know, et cetera, et cetera, basic aspects. But, I mean, but at the core here is that Congress gives money, the scientific organization,

NIH in your case, it works the same at NASA, convenes a bunch of experts in the field who review the proposals for grants. You know, they rank them in a sense by merit. And then so, I mean, but there's also, I mean, there must have been at some level of priority in terms of what, what are the areas of science that they want to be funding to, right? And is that purely congressional or is their discretion within, at least at the NIH, to say this particular area needs some focus, so we'll open up grant funding for this? That's right. So, So at the NIH, it's both. Sometimes Congress will earmark particular types of funding or topical areas of concern.

So some recent examples, Vice President Biden under President Obama, they started what was called the Cancer Moonshot, which had a goal of accelerating some cancer cures in a specific amount of time. So sometimes there are things like that. We have the Brain Initiative, which was really launched. many years ago to elucidate the mystery of the brain. So those are some examples of congressionally earmarked. But the rest of it comes from the advisory councils. They can give guidance about what the hot topics are or the gaps as well as people like me. So I was a

program officer. So our job was to be up with our particular field of study to survey the portfolio, look at overlap, look at gaps, look at areas that we weren't focusing on. And within each institute and center every year, we would do brainstorming. Sometimes we'd issue a request for information from the public. We might hold workshops. So it was really a consensus-driven, democratically informed process through the scientific community to figure out if there were other highlighted areas. And then pretty much 80% of what comes in to the NIH is just what we call investigator initiated. Meaning, you're a health scientist, you're a biologist, you're a biochemist, you're an oncologist, whatever, and you have a great idea. You don't have to check with us.

Just send it in and we'll take a look at it. Yeah. And again, very similar with NASA. You know, you have missions going out to Mars or to Jupiter. They'll have funding for, okay, I want to work with this data, try to figure these issues out, develop new instrumentation. You pitch that basically and then it's reviewed by your peers. But I think the core here is that there is a merit-based selection process using expertise that is largely, and I think this goes back to the very establishment of this whole national investment and basic R&D starting in the late 1940s, early 1950s with the National Science Foundation, Van of Our Bush's, Science, Endless Frontier document that I've talked about

on the show before as well, that the intention was that the government provides resources and the scientific community helps set the priorities in order to have the most efficient. Are we investing in valid and meritorious areas of research, correct? That's right. And it has been, for the past 80 years, an amazing system. It has led to pretty much every technological and medical breakthrough that you can think of here in this country, many of the things that we all take for granted today. The cell phone that you use every day, the internet that you use, clearly any of the pharmaceuticals that are curing conditions that you are getting treated today, every single one of those was developed through basic science that came out of the NIH. And in fact, the NIH is an

economic boon for the country. The estimates are that for every one dollar, in expenditure at the NIH, it returns approximately $2.57 in economic impact. So that means job growth. That means innovations, patents, drugs, surgeries, cures, treatments, and just health impacts. So it's been a great system, and it's produced from the NIH over, I believe, 174 Nobel laureates. discovering basic science and medical breakthroughs. So it really has been quite a wonderful system, the peer review and merit.

Yeah. And we're talking at NIH, what, 35-ish billion per year? 30 to 40? 48 billion. 48, okay. So NASA is as much, I think NASA gets about 1.2 billion per year out the door, smaller, a little more, obviously, niche areas of research

compared to fundamental biology and human health and medicine. And most of these scientists depend on this to also have their livelihoods, right? That this, another university, this all kind of feeds this system. So what does these set of rules then pertain to change? You can just choose the top hits because this is, it's hard to express because I think we're trying to, I'm trying to lay the groundwork a bit for how it works now. But it's hard to express how radical these changes are because they're dressed up in this dry, you know, procedural document.

But you've had some really great writing about that. we'll pitch your substack here on the show notes and here at the end. But you were highlighting some of the most substantial changes, and they're substantial, right? Yes. And in some sense, it is a dry document, but it is unusual. I just want to put a pin in that. From the moment I started reading it, it was alarming because it's not like any usual government document. It begins with this rambling preamble.

And it is filled with lots of miss and disinformation. So I just want to encourage readers. I just posted a little bit about this today. But I'm going to try and touch on that a little bit more in future substacks. But there is a miss and disinformation campaign going on around what this really is about. So I want to set that aside. But when you take away the cloud of what they are claiming to do, you look at the actual words on the page of what they plan to do, I was able to take a look at

this document from the standpoint of first I read it, but then I also was in touch with a former OMB staffer who provided me with a tool that shows you the marked up document as it looks now and compared to what it would look like if these new changes are implemented. So the old stuff is, if it's crossed out, it's redlined. And if it's new, it's in green. Very similar to the tool that I threw together. That sounds like. Exactly. Yes, which it'll be linked to in the show notes here. Exactly. And what you, what you quickly learn when you take a look at that side by side is that this document is essentially taking existing sections that had a particular,

purpose and turning them on its head into a 180. And I would say that one of the worst examples of this is there is a section, which is 200.300, which was designed to tell the agencies that in their grantmaking, it would be unlawful to exclude anyone from being eligible for grants based on their demographic characteristics, right? You can't say at NASA, I'm only going to give grants to white men or to Chinese people or to non, you know what I'm saying? You can't do that. You have to make these grants non-discriminatory. The process needs to be fair. And what this new revised section does is essentially crosses that out. So the language, as it used to say, was in administration, award subject to a federal statute, prohibiting discrimination based on sex, the federal agency

must ensure, da-da-da-da-da-da. So you can't discriminate based on one sex, okay? They've crossed that out. And now they're using it to argue that anything that is equity-focused or, quote, DEI-focused is in and of itself a form of discrimination. which is bonkers. So a section that was designed to protect people from discrimination has been converted into a section that prohibits programs designed to serve those exact people, right? Or even acknowledge it. Yes. It's very diabolical.

Some of the other major changes in addition to that. I mean, so this is coming from a lot of the, I'd say, To even jump back, the language I really resonate with you on in terms of how it reads like a partisan political document in what should otherwise be a relatively dry procedural changes document. It's representing very strong opinions, partisan opinions on, as you said, D.I. A lot of the issues that kind of formed in the Trump campaign, you know, going forward. But I'd say it even more core to what we just talked about in terms of how the U.S. invests in fundamental scientific research. this whole merit and peer review process that you talked about is basically neutered. It takes that out completely.

Exactly. And what they did in the document in that section about the peer review, and there was a specific guidance on this, 200.205D, it basically takes the section about peer review as being in the old rule, it said that peer review is the foundation of the existing merit review system, right? And that's what we've been talking about. It has been the engine, the fuel of advancement. And instead, they've crossed that out. And net now says peer review recommendations remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding by senior appointees or their delegates. And on top of that, an additional

provision is now taking control of those granting decisions in this document. It says federal agency heads must designate one or more senior appointees, so that's political appointees, to conduct a pre-issuance review of all awards, right? So what this means now is that the NIH director or the NASA director or any of the leadership of these two agencies, or any agency for that matter, it is, it, If they really feel strongly about a grant, they do not have the authority to fund it anymore without asking OMB first. OMB will be the ultimate decider. And intentionally adding a partisan political appointee as that deciding factor. Correct.

They won't be scientists. Not even not just scientists, but like expressly representing a partisan position. Correct. They'll work for the Trump administration. And so I think the other word there was that they won't even routinely defer. It almost encourages not following peer review on these grant awards and the way that I read that. Yeah, and it almost sounds like we're going to continue the peer review process as a charade in essence, right? So NIH will still have its many study sections and grants will come in and get a score or what have you.

but the process will be relegated to somewhat meaningless. Yeah. Right? By statute, or not by statute, but by these procedural documents. Yeah. And that's the thing that this is the way the statute for NIH is written, the study sections are supposed to be the reason. So these parts of this document are, I really don't think that they jive with law. So I think if it is implemented, there are a lot of.

grounds here for lawsuits because this doesn't seem legal to me. Yeah. There's another aspect of this that I want to hit on, which is that this also creates a chook point for actually, so issuing awards and then approving awards of grants throughout the government. I mean, NIH, as you said, gives out on the order of 40 billion years. That's a lot of awards to process. Yes. Yes. So one or two people are going to review individually every single one of those for, quote unquote, alignment with presidential priorities, whatever that means. Yes, we're talking upwards of 45,000 awards a year. Yeah, just for NIH.

And the president's priorities probably don't touch on very detailed technical areas of research and investigation, right? You know, assuming they don't touch some of these more partisan areas of now, you know, what they call DEI and so forth. And that's where I see a huge issue. It's in and of itself, an intentional. bureaucratization of this process that slows down intentionally by adding layers of centralization of bureaucracy.

That's right. And then also adding huge opportunities for, I don't know, funny business. And like, who is this person and why are they? If there's no, if there's no merit-based review process and it's kind of this amorphous priorities thing, maybe that individual, oh, this grant's coming from this college that rejected me when I applied to college. Well, sorry, you're not getting that one. Or, hey, these people are like, you know, they've said nice things about me or the president or something. And it's just, they get this one. It seems like it adds a huge opportunity for abuse and fraud and waste.

The kind of the very things that they're saying that they don't want. Right. The accusation is often a confession here. It certainly gets rid of the transparency. It will mean the erosion of any trust in the agencies. It opens up. for corruption and cronyism and self-dealing. And it's really troubling. We'll be right back with the rest of our space policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break. Hi, y'all. Lovar Burton here. Through my roles on Star Trek and Reading Rainbow, I have seen generations of curious minds inspired by the strange new worlds explored in books and on

television, I know how important it is to encourage that curiosity in a young explorer's life. That's why I'm excited to share with you a new program from my friends at the Planetary Society. It's called the Planetary Academy and anyone can join. Designed for ages 5 through 9 by Bill Nye and the curriculum experts at the Planetary Society, the Planetary Academy is a special membership subscription for kids and families who love space. Members get quarterly mailed packages that take them on learning adventures through the many worlds of our solar system and beyond. Each package includes images and factoids, hands-on activities,

experiments and games, and special surprises. A lifelong passion for space, science, and discovery starts when we're young. Give the gift of the cosmos to the explorer in place. your life. There's other aspects of that we're just going to highlight a few of the most egregious. And I'm going to combine these two because I think they're related. The formalizing that any active grant that you have been awarded or a PI has been awarded, principal investigator, can be terminated at any time for any reason.

That's right. I mean, that's basically saying I have, what's an average grant size at NIH, just for an example, 10 to 20 million? The typical bread and butter R-O-1 grant for many years was capped at $500,000 per year. And with the permission, sometimes you could get it up to like $700,000 a year. Center grants and things like that are a lot more. But let's just say $500. So you're hiring with that money, you're saying, okay, for three years, let's say I have a grant,

that means I can hire a postdoc. I can hire lab technicians. I can buy this piece of equipment. I can pay rent for three years. the person I'm hiring knows that they'll have a job for three years. That's how I can get them to come work for me and so forth. This says at any moment that money can disappear and you suddenly can't pay your staff. That's right.

And last year, we saw a cancellation of lots of grants and you may have, you know, and tracked it for Nassalside. And the court stepped in and said, no, no, no, you can't do that. So I think this is really just another stab at that. It is another try that they got struck down in the courts for the most part. And so now what they're trying to do at OMB is put that into this rule, that OMB has the rights and the rule says so, that we may cancel your grant for any reason at any time. And that could be retroactively. So it could be a grant that you have had already for two or three years and you've been collecting your data.

and you have maybe one more year to go, but we're going to cancel the whole thing. And let me just remind people, if you cancel a five-year grant in year three or four, that does not save money. That wastes money. That wastes all of the prior money, because now the data can't be completed in its collection, perhaps. They may not get the money to finish the study. It's really foolish. And if you're canceling for any reason any time, what if you expressed an opinion on the administration or were at a protest or did anything? I mean, that's also the kind of the implication here, right? And this goes into the other item I wanted to highlight.

You have sets of risk factors that are usually used as guidance when awarding, you know, so usually you don't want to give a large award to somebody who is known to have been committed fraud in the past, right, to the U.S. government or any number of things. This expands that to say based on what your organizational affiliations are if you are part of a, quote, like, anti-American organization, whatever, you know, and or so forth, or issue advocacy organizations are banned. That's right. And there's actually, just in case, they've kind of built in some redundancies in that. So they could, they could cancel a grant and they don't have to tell you why. Yeah. Right. So we'll never know the reason why they might tell you. They might not, but they don't have to. But they've also added some sections. into this code to prohibit certain viewpoints. I think this is also highly likely to be illegal because we do still have a First Amendment in this country.

But if you look at Section 200.450, it tries to say that if you message about anything, any social issue, political issue, or public policy issue, that is objectionable to them, or you engage in any voter registration activities outside of your work, you may no longer be allowed to get a grant from the federal government. And I can see an immediate legal problem with that.

One would think. Or just lose your grant as it is. That's right. For doing any unrelated. And I think the emphasis is unrelated, right? Unrelated, right. And the other thing is if they do cancel these grants, people's only recourse really is to sue, and that takes a long time.

And I believe there's a shift here that this pushes actually all legal action into a not a judiciary, but into a settlement. There's a term for this, but it tries to handle that by putting it into arbitration. Right, like a claims court. Yeah. So this is going to be a mess to force every grant to go case by case to try and protest the cancellations. And in the meantime, you're not getting your money. you're probably laying off your research assistance, your staff, you're going to cut off your study.

So it could destroy, especially in the case of NIH, clinical trials, you can't stop the clinical trial in the middle of it and then hope to resume a year later. It doesn't work like that. So it'll basically effectively ruin any research that is canceled. There's an additional aspect set of rules here that forbid, if I am understanding this correctly, publishing your work in scientific journals and attending conferences. Is that true? Yes. And again, here's something that I found really remarkably bizarre, because not too long ago, Congress actually passed a law mandating that if you receive federal dollars for science, you must publish your work. And you must register it. At the NIH, people are required to register in the PubMed Central.

this is a condition of your award that you are to present your findings because we want your findings to get out there. The taxpayers pay for it. The findings should get out there. So here's a case where you're required by law to publish. And then yet now this new rule says you can't use any money to do the publication. And well, publication is not free. So we're going to have a clash here between this rule and existing law. Again, I don't know how that can possibly be implemented. I was just surprised. I mean, if nothing else, that you're not allowed to pay for, again, open access. That enables anyone without a journal, you know, professional journals subscription, which are expensive. That's right. To read your work. That's right. And you can see the old version of this rule specifically said, and this was, again, the guidance documents said that publication costs for electronic and print media, including distribution, promotion and general handling are allowable.

they have crossed that out. And they're saying, nope. Now it says unallowable. And the same thing for conference attendance. Conference paying for conference attendance. The current rules says it's a standard allowable cost under existing rules. I mean, the goal is that you want to disseminate your findings. I mean, so I'm trying to think about this and wait to not.

For somebody, let's say, who's listening who's maybe sympathetic to say, oh, all of this stuff, we read about all these things that I didn't like or there sounded ridiculous in terms of how government funds science. We need a stronger hand. Like the scientists are just allowing themselves to do crazy things or even not even going the most extreme way and just saying like, why shouldn't there be stronger oversight? Why should we default to conferences where, you know, conference event organizing just enrich themselves off of U.S. government funding? Why shouldn't there be a stronger hand? here. Like, even if you agree, or philosophically, I don't think they should be doing, you know, quote-unquote, woke science or D.I. We should have a presidential priorities. What would you say even in terms of, is there a fundamental thing that even people who are sympathetic to the political outcomes that should be very worried about this type of proposed rules for American science in general? Yes. I think, you know, what I could say is that our system has been great, but it hasn't been perfect. there are peculiarities about the system that we could debate and think about reforms. A perfect example is publications and conferences. They've gotten more and more expensive over time. And one might say, why should these expensive publication costs be paid by the taxpayers? Well, that's a problem that we could, we could try and isolate all the issues and work on that as a problem. But we we don't have to cancel all grants and all of science to fix that one problem. We can fix that problem while we still have the system in place,

acknowledging that that's a problem. And the analogy I give to people is, if you have a leak in the roof of your house, is the solution to burn your house down? No, let's work on the leak, right? So we can have reform and smart people can come together and propose solutions to these things, but they're using these potentially wedge issues to justify deletion of the entire system. And that's what's wrong here. I mean, I would add to that that this

represents an extreme power grab by a small office within the White House that is ill-equipped to in good faith execute what it's claiming its responsibilities are in terms of a approval and controlling the funds. And the limits on membership, on publication, but also on adding arbitrary termination creates as a sense it's it curtails free speech, free association, free inquiry, which is critical for science. By adding non-merit review, it adds, it's almost guarantees misallocation of funds because you're no longer investing in the most promising scientific areas of research.

research, but it also suppresses and Stymie's actual dissemination of information to the people who are nominally paying for this, the American public. I mean, all of that would be, regardless of I think how one feels about the politics of what science does, all of these extra rules changes, you know, show that there's more going on here than just trying to align focus of science, right? This is about subduing a perceived group in American society by threatening their liability if they speak out in ways that any administration doesn't like. And maybe some of the listeners haven't read Project 2025. I have. And if you read it, you can see the philosophy here. This is an extreme version of a libertarian philosophy.

I don't think that Russell vote and people like him believe that the taxpayers' money should be used to pay for any federal programs. except maybe the military. So at a philosophical level, they don't believe that NASA programs should exist or that NIH science should be funded by the taxpayers. And they represent a minority of our population, but they happen to have the levers of power right now.

And I would like to think they know that their ideas are not popular. So that's why they're trying to ram these things through. It's not a coincidence that this rule, is being pushed through before the midterm elections. Yeah. So what can people do? So we don't have the Republicans in Congress on our side, unfortunately, at least not at this point.

But I would encourage everyone, especially if you have a senator, two senators and or a representative, and they happen to be a Republican. You have even more power than I do. I live in an area where all of mine are done. Democrats, and they're already on board. I've already confirmed that. So one thing you can do is you can write or call your representatives and express outrage and concern over this new rule, because Congress actually does have the power to block this rule. That would be the most expedient way for us to deal with this, because this rule was created under what's called the Congressional Review Act, which has

reporting requirements. It means Congress can just pass a joint resolution of disapproval. And the whole thing reverts back to what it is now. So that's number one. And then think just to build on that, there may be some, you know, I wouldn't quite put it quite as strongly as all Republicans are against it, but the leadership is going to be, you have to be in the leadership to even schedule this for a vote, right? And so if leadership isn't on board, even if there are a handful or even a small plurality or whatever of Republican members of Congress, it's unlikely that vote will be scheduled, which makes it very difficult for Congress in this current situation to react against it. Exactly. Exactly. So they have control of what bills and ideas come up for a vote. So the

leadership would have to agree. And right now I don't see that happening. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try and effectuate that. So definitely call. And then the other thing is because this is a rule and rulemaking has a process. Every rule that gets changed gets published in what's called the Federal Register. And there is a comment period. Now, this is a 45-day comment period. And anyone who cares about this is allowed to comment. You don't have to be a scientist. You could be a concerned citizen. You could be a patient who has benefited from cancer research. You could be someone who loves science and loves space and loves anything, right? It doesn't matter. Or, as I've written on my substack, I believe this will affect pretty much any grant program in the United States. We spend about a

trillion dollars a year. So this could be your local Head Start programs. Community block grants, yeah. Community block grants, grants that you might get to fix up your local park, you name it, right? If Russell Fote decides that your community is too woke or that you, insert reason, doesn't like you, they could target the grants in your community for deletion. And they will not have to give you a reason why. So this rulemaking, it sounds pretty boring writing a comment. And because I had special understanding of the Federal Register based on my work at NIH, I've counseled people on how to submit comments to the Federal Register before. I figured, you know what, people probably don't know how to do this. Let me write a quick

Primer and put it up on substack and make it free for everybody. So if you go to substack, if you've never done anything on the Federal Registry for, I have a step by step, here's how you do it, here's the link. But the key here is when you submit your comments, you don't want to cut and paste a form letter. Because if everyone writes the same thing, it will count as one comment. and they are required to read and reply to every single comment. So what we really want to do here is have as many unique and valid objections as possible logged into this system. I'm working with a lot of advocates on this,

and we'd like to see a record broken here, if possible. If everybody who loves science alone did this, I think we could easily break the record. And the most recent record that I'm aware of in terms of a contentious, rule that was passed by OMB, unfortunately, was the Schedule F or the Schedule C.P, which is taking away civil servants' rights, and they just implemented it yesterday. That rule, when it went through, I believe, got just about 40,000 comments. And what I'm hoping is we can break that record by a lot. Because if we do, it will send a very strong signal to Congress that they should step in and do

something, it will signal an overwhelming objection to ruining science, ruining grants for our country. If every listener of this episode submits that, I think we can get very close to that record. Just on that. And I think you are seeing a lot of people picking up on this. And Liz, you've been doing an amazing job keeping us informed, keeping me informed. Can you just pitch your substack URL? We'll link to it as well. But I recommend folks follow your writings here.

Sure. So you can just look up my name, Elizabeth Genexe on Substack. And I've been writing about all these issues. And I've also been feeling lots of questions. People have been DMing me. So if you have questions, feel free to send them. I'll do my best to have. We appreciate it. And again, I think the key here is that even if, even if sympathetically you are aligned with some of the critiques of science that we've seen from the administration, this goes so far beyond. it and fundamentally undermines the very practice and ability of American scientists to even share the results. This is a fundamentally destructive and restrictive set of rules that will be challenged, but we do need to speak up in terms of just do we want to have free inquiry with American science? One last thing I would say is there a lot of people are afraid to comment.

Well, clearly, right? You can comment anonymously. And I would say that an anonymous comment is better than no comment. okay. So go ahead and click the button on the page that says anonymous. That's fine. And every single comment will go into the historical record. And if this rule is implemented, the lawyers that will sue will have that record on their side. So you want your voice heard. If we have to take this to court, we want as many dissenting comments in there as possible. Very good point. And thank you for mentioning that. Liz Janeksi, thank you so much for your time. I'm super helpful. I recommend everyone follow her substack. We'll link to it.

There's also an action that the Planetary Society has put up to help facilitate submissions to this and do that kind of unique writing that she mentioned. And best of luck with this. We have until July 13th to provide these submissions. And we'll go from there. Thanks so much. We've reached the end of this month's episode

of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. But we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration. Help others in the meantime learn more about space policy and the planetary society by leaving a review and rating this show on platforms like Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen to this show. Your input and interactions really help us be discovered by other curious minds and that will help them find their place in space through planetary radio. You can also send us, including me, your thoughts and questions at planetary radio at

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