Comment from Jeffrey Segall

Comment on 200.205 I am a Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I have performed cancer research for over 30 years, receiving grants, publishing over 100 papers, training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The proposed change to 200.205 has the potential to severely damage US research and prosperity by having political appointees review all grants and override study section rankings. This will lead to long delays as the appointees evaluate grants for political correctness. The use of AI to speed up review will increase the danger of error due to the unreliability of current AI. In addition, it will reduce innovation since AI is likely to focus on work that is more mainstream. Or AI may hallucinate and approve or disapprove due to complete errors. Even if AI is not used, the function of political appointees is almost by definition to advance the President’s agenda, and thus will judge grants based on political correctness rather than scientific quality. Even if the political appointee is a scientist, they will only be expert in a narrow field and be unable to evaluate most grants except through judgement of political correctness. For all of these reasons, the proposed changes to 200.205 should be retracted.