Comment from Rebecca Price

I am an NIH-funded researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. My department has been the top-funded Psychiatry department in the nation for decades. For the entirety of my career, my colleagues and I have been empowered to pursue answers to scientific questions that impact the nation's mental health, through our highly fruitful partnership with the federal government via NIH and NSF funding mechanisms. The proposed new OMB "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance" threatens to utterly destroy this successful partnership by introducing political bias and oversight into funding decisions that until now have rested principally in the hands of peer reviewers and fellow scientists. As scientists, we simply cannot operate under the constant threat of arbitrary termination of the grants we worked so hard to obtain, and we cannot hope to find the truly innovative and groundbreaking answers to society's most pressing public health problems if the funding of our grants, institutions, and crucial scientific activities (conference presentations, publications) are subject to political whims and non-scientific agendas. As scientists, we have chosen to dedicate our lives to improving the lives of others and bettering society as a whole, through scientific inquiry. Rather than taking our ideas into the private sector where we could enrich ourselves and line our pockets with corporate profits, we have chosen to devote our careers to the public good, and have been entrusted with taxpayer dollars in order to pursue these goals in an objective, scientific, and unbiased manner. There is absolutely no room for political meddling in this tried-and-true process of federally funded scientific pursuit, which has made the US the global leader in scientific and healthcare innovation and saved the lives of many Americans.