Comment from Anonymous

I am totally opposed to the proposed "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance." This rule would make awards of research grants dependent on political criteria, and put politicians in charge of making grant awards. I am a university researcher myself (full professor, R1 university), and have had NEH and NSF grants, and have also served as a reviewer of individual grants, as well as a panelist on a grant review panel which reviewed multiple grants to make final awards, so I have intimate professional expertise with both writing and reviewing federal grants. It takes a great deal of professional experience to adequately understand and review grants in any scientific or academic field. No one other than experts in the field should be going basic review, and final review should be done by scientists and experts with broad competence in research. No political appointee should be involved in reviewing grants. They simply do not have the expertise, and will likely end up making poor decisions that will waste many millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Likewise, making funding align with administration policies and priorities would bring a political element into what should be a scientific process. It risks excluding many valuable research projects, and also risks forcing other research projects to include meaningless elements just to appear to align with political policies, but which will largely be wastes of time and money -- but again, only a trained scientist in the field would recognize such meaningless elements for what they are. Politicians can easily be fooled by this type of scientific "folderol". So please let scientists do research, unimpeded by politics, and please let scientists be the ones who judge what is worthwhile research or not. Otherwise, we'll end up with over-priced, second-rate research, and will fall behind nations like China that are spending much more than us on research.