Comment from Rita Hamad

I am a Professor at Harvard and Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Our work is devoted to improving population well-being by studying structural and population-level factors that affect health. As a public health researcher and academic, I am submitting this comment to oppose OMB-2026-0034, which would cause serious harm to scientific research broadly and to work like mine in particular. I urge the agency in the strongest possible terms to withdraw this proposal. If adopted, this rule would radically alter federal grantmaking by injecting partisan considerations, financial volatility, and limits on lawful activities into a system that has historically supported evidence-based work. The proposal would affect critical funding that agencies such as the CDC, NIH, and others provide to state and local governments, community organizations, and scientists. These funds are essential for sustaining evidence-based public health programs, medical research, education, and other initiatives that support health in communities nationwide. Several aspects are particularly problematic: •The rule would enable political appointees—rather than independent scientists and experts—to make grant decisions, allowing ideology to override rigorous scientific evidence. Grant applications could be rejected if a political appointee deems the work inconsistent with “federal agency priorities and the national interest.” Equally worrisome, agencies could weigh a grantee’s membership in or affiliation with organizations that hold legitimate policy positions the administration simply dislikes. For research like mine, which evaluates how policies influence health, the political preferences of the administration in power could determine whether my work is funded, even when it is scientifically sound and warranted. For research more broadly, this would introduce profound instability, as funding could be curtailed or denied whenever political leadership changes. I experienced this instability last year when Harvard grants were temporarily terminated, with major delays in several projects. This proposal would permanently damage the scientific enterprise. •The proposal would substantially weaken protections for grantees by authorizing the administration to cancel or alter awards at any time—even when recipients are fully complying with the approved terms. This would expose grantees to heightened risks of mid-project disruption, cancellation, and financial loss, particularly for large, multi-year projects. For research in general, this would mean that funding could be withdrawn on extremely short notice with each government transition, creating chronic uncertainty. This instability will undermine staffing—because researchers and staff cannot rely on continued support—and will slow scientific progress, which depends on predictable and sustained funding streams. Again, we experienced something similar during our temporary terminations last year, where my team had to lay off a postdoc, and other teams in my Center/Department lost staff who moved on to other jobs. What is being proposed by OMB would magnify these problems across the entire country. •The rule would further prohibit federal support for implementing programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, “gender ideology,” illegal immigration, or foreign collaboration, regardless of the quality or relevance of the supporting science. These provisions would have a deeply negative impact on public health and research by forbidding grantees from pursuing activities that political appointees deem inconsistent with the administration’s priorities, even when those activities are scientifically rigorous and necessary for informing policy design and cost-effectiveness analyses. •The rule would add restrictions on using grants to attend conferences, join professional societies, subscribe to journals, or publish in peer-reviewed outlets without explicit prior approval from the funding agency. These constraints would micromanage researchers’ ability to collaborate and disseminate findings, hinder scientific exchange, and force agencies to spend time and resources reviewing routine line-item spending decisions, rather than focusing on the quality and impact of the science. As a researcher, I often don’t know which conferences will accept my abstracts until a few months in advance, and there is no way to anticipate which conferences I will attend when I am writing a grant. So it is likely that this proposal will shut down attendance at conferences, where scientists go to exchange ideas and learn about the latest science, stifling the exchange of ideas nationwide. Overall, this proposal would have broad damaging consequences for grants and grantees across all agencies, embedding political ideology and financial uncertainty into an independent and stable process. I respectfully but firmly urge this proposal be withdrawn entirely.