What happens now that comments have been submitted on the devastating OMB rules?

On Monday, The Planetary Society submitted its formal comment on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) proposed rule, "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," and the comment period is now closed. We were not alone. Thousands of our members and supporters filed comments of their own as part of a national wave of nearly 500,000 comments.

This impressive turnout in engagement on a federal regulation is a testament to just how damaging these proposed changes would be. The rule would rewrite how every federal agency runs grant and partnership programs. When it comes to space science, these funding mechanisms are how NASA and the NSF support scientists and enable groundbreaking research. A grant is typically awarded on merit, meaning other independent scientists are asked to review the proposals to rank them on how strong and feasible the ideas and methods are. Career agency staff, who are also experts, then use those rankings to decide what gets funded based on overall science priorities informed by Congress and independent oversight committees. Over the last 80 years, this process has provided the best science for the taxpayer’s investment and steered the U.S. to lead the world in scientific discovery.

The new OMB regulations would change all of that. Instead of scientists deciding the merits of grant proposals, the regulations would have political appointees make those decisions and override input of experts, Congress, and independent reviewers. The regulations would let agencies cancel any grant at any time, for almost any reason; there would be no appeals process. And it would make it much harder to publish results and share them with the public. 

The Planetary Society and the American public rely on open access to research to learn about new discoveries. Scientists build research groups that depend on their grants not disappearing halfway through an investigation. A ban on international work would break partnerships that are producing important results right now, including research aboard the International Space Station and future missions to Mars. And new limits on science communication, conferences, and even who is allowed to apply for grants would place a boundary between publicly funded science and the tax-paying public.

This rule hits everyone who cares about American science: the student deciding whether the field is stable enough to build a career in, the small or rural university without the staff to handle new regulatory paperwork, and the everyday person who just wants to learn about the worlds their taxes help us explore.

That is why the bipartisan pushback has been so strong. Once this rule is final, it binds every agency and every future presidential administration until someone changes it. Whoever wins the next election would inherit the same power to overrule scientists, cancel grants on a whim, and block international work. Senator Susan Collins, the top Republican on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, asked the OMB to drop the worst parts of the rule and extend the comment period. Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate asked the administration to scrap it entirely.

Despite the bipartisan pressure, the OMB has decided not to extend the comment period — so what happens now? First, the OMB will be required to respond to each of the unique concerns raised in the comments and justify its stance. There are then three ways this could go:

1. OMB delays and/or backs down and withdraws the rule, or its worst parts, after reading the record. If it can’t fully address each comment by early September, it will need to postpone or rescind the proposal.
2. The courts step in once the rule is final, with lawyers using the submitted comments as a basis for blocking the harms that the rule would cause. Of course, the courts may ultimately decide to uphold the rule.
3. Congress overrides it by passing legislation to restore merit-based peer review and other standard protocols that enable scientific discovery.

However it plays out, the public record we built is what keeps every one of these options open. We have beaten cuts to NASA science before by being informed and engaged at every step of the process. Follow The Planetary Society's Save NASA Science campaign to see what comes next.