Comment from Anonymous

While we appreciate efforts to ensure the funding of rigorous and highly relevant research, the proposed changes by the Office of Management and Budget's Document OMB-2026-0034 are deeply concerning for the following reasons: Shift final authority for peer review: Peer review is a critical part of the review process that ensures that grants are of a rigorous nature and are proposed in a manner that will advance specific fields, produce replicable findings and utilize innovative methodologies. The peer review process allows for experts in specific fields to provide a critical analysis of proposal and provide invaluable feedback to strengthen proposal and ensure the strongest studies are being conducted. Removing this safeguard will allow for less rigorous science to be funded and conducted and therefore waste tax dollars. Allow termination of active grants: The ever-looming threat of canceled grants will cause significant uncertainty and stress within research institutions, especially for pre- and post-doctoral candidates and early career faculty. It will waste funds that have already been invested in experiments, infrastructure and hiring of scientists and support staff. The unexpected cancellation of funding for studies that have already been started will also result in research animals being terminated pre-maturely, clinical trials being ended, resources being wasted and staff and faculty lay-offs Restrict scientific communication: While the cost of publications and conferences are very high, restricting researchers from using funding for these expenses will significantly limit their ability to make their fundings public, especially for pre-and post-doctoral candidates and early career faculty. This will result in only the best funded labs (or labs with institutional funding) being able to publish their data at the exclusion of those without discretionary funding and therefore biasing publicly available data and results.