Comment from Mary Alice Allnutt
Mary Alice AllnuttOpposeAcademic
Summary: A graduate worker at Yale University who receives NIH funding opposes the proposal to allow a political appointee to override the peer review process. The commenter argues that this change would undermine expert assessment, decrease the quality of US science, and reduce international competitiveness.
The Office of Management and Budget ,I am currently a graduate worker studying key molecular mechanisms driving Parkinson’s disease. This work has been funded by NIH grants throughout my time at Yale. The proposed addition of a political appointee with the power to override our existing peer review processes (§200.205) is an inefficient and dangerous proposal. The current grant approval process requires experts in specific subfields of research to assess the quality of a grant application. Undermining this process with whims of underqualified, uninformed political appointees will be detrimental to the quality of the science produced in the US, and make US science less competitive. Mary Alice Allnutt [ ]