Comment from Claire Garfield

Re: Proposed [200.220] — Prohibition of Using Federal Funds for Covered Foreign Collaborations I am a graduate student researcher at the University of Georgia. I am writing to oppose the proposed § 200.220, which would prohibit the use of Federal funds for any bilateral or multilateral collaboration with a covered foreign country or covered foreign entity, including indirect costs allocable to such collaborations. OMB's stated objectives for this rulemaking include reducing recipient burden. § 200.220 contradicts that objective directly. Compliance requires institutions to maintain real-time awareness of covered country designations across multiple sources, develop a methodology for allocating indirect costs to specific foreign collaborations that has never existed and for which no standard is provided, conduct ongoing due diligence on foreign collaborators’ institutional affiliations under an undefined standard, manage exception requests with no timeline or appeal, and certify compliance in every performance report with no guidance on what a compliant certification looks like. This does not reduce burden. It is a new compliance function with no rulebook. OMB cites the Wolf Amendment as the statutory model for this provision. The Wolf Amendment was a targeted congressional response to specific concerns about one agency, one country, and a defined category of activity, with exceptions requiring certification to Congress, FBI review, and annual Inspector General reporting. § 200.220 expands that rationale to every federal agency and every covered country while removing every accountability mechanism. The result is a prohibition that can be enforced selectively without explanation and accepted selectively without scrutiny, with no mechanism for anyone outside the agency to know which is happening. OMB's stated rationale is transparency and reliable reporting on foreign collaboration spending. NIH had already developed a workable solution: NOT-OD-25-104 (May 2025) established a new award structure issuing foreign components as independent linked awards with separate financial reporting, preserving collaboration while improving tracking. The appropriate regulatory response was to require that structure government-wide. Instead, OMB prohibited the costs — leaving the transparency problem unsolved for informal collaborations and creating an indirect cost compliance obligation with no methodology. I also note that on May 14, 2026, Congress introduced the Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries (SIRA) Act, which would achieve the same policy objective (a government-wide foreign collaboration restriction) through legislation, with a defined and publicly maintained restricted entity list and a statutory text subject to congressional oversight. When Congress is actively legislating on the same question, the appropriate response is to support that process, not preempt it through regulation. I urge OMB to withdraw § 200.220 as proposed. If OMB proceeds, I urge it to: (1) adopt NIH's independent-award structure (NOT-OD-25-104) as the government-wide transparency mechanism rather than a blanket prohibition; (2) retain the Congressional certification, FBI review, and Inspector General reporting requirements from the Wolf Amendment model; (3) define "affiliated" with sufficient precision to be administrable and include a safe harbor for good-faith due diligence; (4) establish a wind-down period and grace period when country designations change; (5) provide a methodology for calculating indirect cost allocability to specific foreign collaborations; and (6) defer finalizing this provision pending the outcome of congressional action on the SIRA Act.