Comment from Taylor Rubin

[200.300, 200.218] To the Office of Management and Budget: I am a PhD student in biology at CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College, studying how urban scavengers influence disease dynamics through their interactions with human food waste. I comment on §§ 200.300 and 200.218 based on firsthand experience with the mentoring and access work these provisions would restrict. § 200.300 — Restricting "DEI" funding would undermine ordinary access and mentoring work I came to CUNY in part because of its reputation for a diverse student body in age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and career path, and because my advisor is dedicated to supporting students with nontraditional or underrepresented backgrounds — a commitment I try to embody myself. My lab includes four undergraduate researchers and two high school interns, five of whom are women or girls, all contributing to my dissertation research; I have personally mentored four lab members through their first fieldwork experiences. I also serve as Secretary of the Board for Birdability, a nonprofit making birding and outdoor spaces accessible to people with disabilities. None of this work involves race-based selection criteria or preferences. It reflects ordinary, individualized mentoring aimed at ensuring capable students — regardless of background — get access to hands-on research experience many would not otherwise have. The proposed § 200.300 would bar federal funds from being used to "fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate" DEI or DEIA practices, using terms the rule does not clearly define. Because the standard is vague, it risks reaching legitimate mentoring, accessibility work, and broad-participation efforts like mine that are not preferences based on protected characteristics, simply because they use language ("diversity," "inclusion," "access") that could be flagged under an undefined standard. Researchers should not have to guess whether standard mentoring practices are prohibited. § 200.218 — Barring disparate-impact analysis would limit basic scientific and evaluative tools The proposed § 200.218 would prohibit federal awards from being used to fund disparate-impact studies or related litigation. Disparate-impact analysis is a standard statistical method for identifying unintended, unequal effects of a policy or program — not an accusation of intentional discrimination. In my own work mentoring a high school student investigating low youth participation in conservation initiatives, we found that young people were often excluded from project design and expected to join initiatives built without their input; that finding reframed our entire approach, from asking why youth don't participate to asking how to let them design their own initiatives. That kind of finding is a disparate-impact-style observation: a gap in outcomes that pointed to a fixable design flaw, not a legal claim. A blanket prohibition on this analytical method would remove a basic evaluative tool from fields like conservation, public health, and education research, making it harder to identify and fix unintended barriers to participation, regardless of their cause. I urge OMB to withdraw both provisions. Thank you for the opportunity to comment.