Comment from Stefan Llewellyn Smith
Stefan Llewellyn SmithOpposeAcademic
Summary: A university professor and department chair opposes the proposed revisions to federal financial assistance regulations. They argue that the changes could allow political appointees to override peer review, potentially jeopardizing research funding, making it harder to recruit graduate students, and undermining the integrity of federal science funding.
[200.205, 200.340]
To Whom it May Concern:
I am a professor in and currently chair of a Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at a major R1 university.
I am writing in my personal capacity to oppose the proposed revisions to sections 200.205 and 200.340 that would undermine the integrity of federal grant review processes and federal science agencies' ability to identify and fund impactful research.
It is unclear to me whether polictical appointees would seek to override peer review and as a result not fund my past awards. My research is fundamental and spans fields from physical oceanography to fluid mechanics to applied mathematics, and may not necessarily strike a political appointee as key to their administration's priorities.
If active grants can be terminated at any time for political reasons, recruiting graduate students will become riskier, since their funding might vanish at any time. I have mentored multiple US citizen graduate students who now work in high-tech industries, althought their PhD subjects were more academic. I might have struggled to keep funding them through their thesis work and even not recruited them if I thought the grants supporting them would vanish.
Beyond the effect on me, this rule does not guarantee that the best science, as judged by peer review, will be selected and funded in a consistent manner. Other countries will not be burdened by this problem, and will move ahead.