Aimed at “responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” the White House wants political appointees to have final say on grant review.
Visitors hike the Mist Trail toward Vernal Falls on Aug. 31, 2025, in Yosemite National Park, California. (Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
The roughly 400-page document is framed as a backlash to “a ‘woke’ policy agenda,” which it claims guided the Biden administration’s federal funding initiatives. Grants designed to advance “unlawful identity-based ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’” policies are called out, alongside “anti-American ideologies in education,” “labs engaged in gain-of-function research” — a broad term referring to scientific studies of virology — and “wasteful spending” by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.
The Office of Management and Budget declined to respond on the record to KQED’s questions about the proposed rule.
The affected departments, as listed in the draft rule, are wide-ranging, from Health and Human Services to Interior to Education, Labor and Homeland Security.
So far, members of the scientific community have raised alarm at the proposal and its potential to hollow out the peer review process for federal grants.
That could have a major effect on the nation’s public lands, said Jesse Chakrin, executive director of the San Francisco-based Fund for People in Parks. Typically, he said, nonpolitical subject matter experts from a range of departments would all chime in on a proposal to ensure it is rigorous — and any termination decisions would be made based on performance metrics, agreed to when a contract is signed.
“That is being replaced with political review,” he said. “This is a dangerous arena to get into, where the forever business of NASA, NOAA or NPS are all now on the whims of political appointees and the shifting political tides. This is not how things were intended to be done.”
Chakrin said he’s also worried about the effect of more stringent workforce restrictions proposed for groups that work on public lands, including nonprofit “friends of” organizations that ally with local and national parks to fill funding gaps, conservation groups, scientific research institutes and trails associations and crews “that work in a good faith effort to increase the capacity to meet the visitor experience requirements, demands, needs of the public, and they did so through federal grants and contracts,” he said. “This is really, really concerning.”
Jordan Marbury, a spokesperson for Friends of the Inyo, an advocacy group for public lands in the Eastern Sierra, told KQED by email they work directly with federal agencies on conservation, wildfire and watershed work — all of which could be vetoed under this proposed rule.
“Our stewardship work, and the resilience of the public lands millions of people depend on, would be on the chopping block,” he wrote.
Some agencies have already seen the consequences of defunding due to similar policy from the Trump administration. Redgie Collins, vice president of legal and government affairs for CalTrout, a San Francisco-based conservation nonprofit, said that as part of early 2025 Department of Government Efficiency cutbacks, the organization lost $4.2 million in federal grant money — likely due to its work on biodiversity and with local tribes. Nearly a third of the organization’s general budget comes from federal grants, he said, to fund restoration projects that not only further their ecological mission, but also provide jobs and assistance to farmers and ranchers.
“The concern here is that even agencies that do want to support rural economies, that do want to see construction jobs in rural areas throughout the country — they could get flagged based on buzzwords that don’t actually implement even what this OMB order wants,” he said. “So, there’s just more confusion and concern for really anyone that touches federal funding in the conservation space, especially.”
Collins said he’s not just worried about conservation groups like his: “Everyone who gets funding from the federal government should be concerned,” he said.
Public comment on the rule change is open until July 13. More than 5,000 people have already commented on the rule, as of Thursday.
Many in the comments decried the proposed rule for its sweeping nature. One, from a wildfire expert and volunteer firefighter, raises concerns about the effects of the rule on international collaboration and the potential that long-term studies, funded by grants, may be canceled due to the rule.
“Terminating grants mid-project would waste taxpayer investments, disrupt data collection, eliminate employment opportunities for researchers and technicians, and reduce the reliability of scientific findings that inform land management decisions,” they wrote.
Another commenter stated, simply: “NO to politicians deciding what is best for the American public. Let the public decide.”
Chakrin said he hopes the public shows up to comment and protest the rule.
“I hope that they are not okay with this,” he said. “It’s un-American to decide that some Americans are American enough and some Americans are not. I hope people are disturbed, and I hope they make their voice known.”
