Comment from Rachel Clohan
Rachel ClohanOpposeAcademic
Summary: A health economist argues that the proposed regulations would compromise scientific integrity by prioritizing political agendas over scientific validity. The commenter contends that the restrictions on collaboration, publication, and research goals will undermine the ability to conduct rigorous research and damage the United States' standing in the global scientific community.
As a health economist who has worked on grant funded research, the proposed changes put our scientific work at risk. By allowing these changes, grants would no longer be awarded based on scientific validity and contribution to our collective knowledge. Instead, we would simply be rewarded for following an agenda instead of creating new knowledge. Pushing knowledge forward requires that we are allowed to ask hard, creative, and sometimes uncomfortable questions. It requires collaboration, sometimes internationally. It requires recognizing differences in outcomes without being considered DEI or another banned topic. By combining science and politics, not only would we lose our standing as a scientific community with other nations who have robust peer review and scientific processes, but as researchers we would be subjected to the whims of whoever is currently in power. Restrictions and conditions on organizational affiliation, grant eligibility, program goals, OMB oversight, conference attendance, publication costs and open access fees, and public communications go strictly against the competition, expertise, collaboration, transparency, and automony needed to do rigorous and valid scientific research. All of the proposed changes would make America the laughing stock of the scientific community.