Space Policy Edition: A proposal to stifle American science

Casey Dreier: Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, welcoming you to the show that explores the policies and processes that enable space exploration. This month we have a slightly deeper dive or more bigger picture approach to a fundamental aspect of American scientific work and research, which is a set of proposed rule changes to how the US federal government manages grants that fund science. Now, don't turn this off, don't be afraid. This is actually a huge deal. So big that we are doing a last minute record here that is talking about unusually for us a very relevant topic. On May 29th, the White House's Office of Management and Budget released a 400 page set of proposed rule changes that affect the entire gamut of how the United States distributes congressionally appropriated funds that enable fundamental scientific research.

We're talking about grants that fund NASA research, people who want to study data from the Mars rovers, we're talking about people who operate missions, we're talking about even beyond that, to fundamental biomedical research, community block grants, housing assistance. Everything in terms of what the government does. The proposed rules are vast. The changes are vast. They egregiously, I believe, change fundamental aspects that restrict the idea of free inquiry and also the effectiveness of public investment in science. If nothing else, adding layers of punishing bureaucracy, centralizing control, and using forms of financial intimidation to restrict freedom of association and free speech.

If this sounds hyperbolic, it reasonably does, but honestly, it's right there in the page. The government claims procedural rules to cancel and terminate contracts or grants at any moment for any reason without having to provide justification. They now would require political review instead of merit-based peer review of all grant awards and even grant opportunities. That means a intentionally, and this is specific, a partisan operator from the White House, whether it's this one or a future one, would have the say and actually be encouraged to not defer to the merit-based review process, and who to award grants to.

It actually would add risks and punishments of being in certain institutions, membership organizations that the White House considers anti-American or against administration priorities. It allows the immediate termination for associating or even speaking on issues unrelated to your grant. This is a recipe for the suppression of scientific inquiry in the United States. The Planetary Society at its fundamental level is a scientific organization. We believe in the scientific exploration of space. We want to have science influence and direct how and where we go with robotics and with humans. As we create a system in this country that is controlled by fear or uncertainty or capricious application of unaccounted, heavy bureaucratic partisan operations on fundamental scientific investment, we will not have an effective scientific space program. We will not have an effective science program in this country. This is being pushed through a very dry and procedural process in terms of the federal rules and registers.

Basically, the federal government formally saying, "This is how we interpret congressional statute." There is an opportunity for you, anyone, you included, whether you're a professional scientist or not, to provide feedback to these proposed set of rules changes. The Planetary Society has made it easy to do so. You can check the show notes for this page or at planetary.org/actioncenter. We give you the link there. Background materials, additional analysis. Again, this is much larger than our normal discussion of space policy. This is fundamental science policy in this country. How we enable our fundamental scientific investments to function, and that they function efficiently. To help work through some of these issues in detail, I've done two things. First, there's a new dashboard, planetary.org/rules-change. You can see comparisons, lines removed, lines added, for every proposed rule change. You can follow along with that. Second is that our guest this month is Liz Ginexi.

She's a former program officer at the National Institutes of Health, she has a fantastic Substack where she has raised some of these issues and provided some of the initial commentary on this. She's very insightful, again, through her experience in actually applying and managing these grants for the National Institutes of Health within the US federal government. She joins me now to go through these issues. Before we do that though, I just want to mention, this may sound more partisan than normal, but I also want to emphasize that this is not a partisan issue. Even if you are disposed to some of the critiques of the scientific communities ways that they've been funding grants in the last few years or don't care for DEI activities, there are more fundamental issues at stake, and the claims and changes to these rules are broader and more substantial and more detrimental to science beyond any single issue here.

There are ways to address the prioritization of science without muzzling scientists, without taking away freedom of association and freedom of speech, without adding political review, which again would persist across administrations unless the future administration decides to change this. So I want to keep that in mind as we go forward with this discussion. If you have any questions, you can always email me, [email protected]. And Liz Ginexi. Liz Ginexi, thank you for coming on the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio at the last minute.

Liz Ginexi: Yes. Well, thanks for having me.

Casey Dreier: You've been quite busy, so I want to thank you again for your time, but get right to it. What is, in a sense, the federal register and federal rules that we're looking at, and why is this important that we see a number of proposed changes to how grants are managed by the federal government?

Liz Ginexi: Yes, I mean, I think maybe a little step back. Before that, is the Congress passes legislation every year, and they are the body that allocates money to different programs, all kinds of federal programs, science programs, social service programs, health programs, transportation, you name it. And when they allocate the money, some of that money is distributed to the states and communities via grants. And that grant money gets allocated out through an office in the executive, the White House, called the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB for short. And I think most Americans don't really pay attention to that office because it just hasn't really been on our radar, and just makes the money get pushed out that Congress wants to get pushed out. However, the way that that money gets pushed out is governed by some internal rules, if you will. And it's this rather lengthy, boring procedural document that in the past was titled as guidance.

So because there's so many agencies and they all have different missions and different constituencies and services and so forth, this was an overarching document that the Office of Management and Budget used to provide grant making guidance, so that the agencies could effectively and lawfully and efficiently dispense that money that Congress has asked them to dispense.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. So this would be like... It's like filling in the gaps from what the statutory law says, right, just in terms of the practical aspect of how you give the money out.

Liz Ginexi: Exactly. The idea being that because the money flows through the Office of Management Budget and gets pushed out to the different agencies, they can play an organizing and helpful role in giving the agency leadership the guidance they would need to efficiently get that money out. Now, when everything's working well, we don't need to know any of that, because it just happens. But what we have right here is the current Office of Management and Budget Director, his name is Russell Vought, and he's also one of the prominent authors of the Project 2025 document that many of your listeners might be familiar with. He has a different vision for how this should all work. If you read Project 2025 and some of his other readings and see interviews with him, he doesn't really believe that what Congress says in the legislation should be spent, needs to be spent.

In his view, the president can veto all of that if they don't really agree. They've tried over the past year to cancel programs and grants that they didn't like and they had some pushback in the courts. In many cases, they were told they're not allowed to do that. So this is another tactic along those lines from the current Office of Management and Budget, where they decided to take these procedural guidance rules and turn them into a heavy-handed regulatory document.

And you can tell that by when I did my analysis of this 400-page rule. In every instance where the word guidance used to appear, they will be proposing to replace that with the word regulation, and they are centralizing control about the decisional authorities about the dispensation of all this grant money at the OMB itself rather than the way it usually was and the way Congress intended it, the decisional capacities would be held within each of the agencies who all have leadership. So that's what's going on right now and why there's a little bit of a concern that one office would be in charge of deciding all of the grant making for every single agency.

Casey Dreier: So before we go into the exact details, because as you said, this is a huge document. It's one of those things where I think almost intentionally designed to overwhelm easy readthrough summarization of what it's doing. It's doing a lot of proposed changes. Before we get to some of the more irrelevant and egregious ones that I think in terms of what we're worried about, you and I and others are worried about it for American science, I want to fixate on this idea of changing the overall structure from guidance to regulation. So you used to work at the National Institutes of Health as a program officer. When you would see a guidance versus regulation, maybe just kind of give an example, how does that change what we're talking about here? Why is that important as a fundamental context here before we go down to these other specific changes that are proposed in this?

Liz Ginexi: That's right. So how that works within each agency, and I worked for the National Institutes of Health, so I know it the best so I can use that as my example, but each agency typically will have some presidential appointees, but they'll also have leadership that are not presidential appointees. In the case of a science agency, they're oftentimes scientists who are leading the different offices. In the case of the NIH, we only had two presidential apointees, pretty unique for an agency. We had the NIH director and the NCI director. And all of the rest of the staff by statute was designed to be scientists. So each of the heads of the 27 institutes and centers were all preeminent scientists in their respective fields, the staff underneath them, people like me as a scientific program officer, I'm also a scientist, and the entire agency was staffed with scientists and budget people and analysts to properly dispense the money, but the leadership had all the discretion to make those decisions.

So at the NIH, the way the decisions were made on which grants to fund, and this was by law, we have a scientific peer review process. They call them study sections. So the science grants come in and they get reviewed by a panel of scientists for each of the disciplines for which that application pertains. And they will rank and score the applications in terms of their scientific readiness and merit. And then a second level review occurs, which is done by what's called advisory councils. So each institute and center has external scientists who are appointed for several year terms to help advise the NIH on the science.

So they take a look at the grants also that were just reviewed. They sort of do a second level review of what the peer review said, do they agree, do they not agree. And then after that's all done, the institute directors in each office, institute, center, then has the authority to pay a grant. And that's how business was going. So we never really concerned ourselves with OMB really at all. The decisional capacity was given to the NIH through statute to make these decisions based on science. So I never knew about this document, for example.

Casey Dreier: Right. So that's interesting, right? Yeah, you never had to know about it. It was almost because it was guidance, but it also just was broadly practical that it says... I mean, it says, take these things into consideration. I mean, there's also fundamental... You can't pay non-citizens, you can't pay it for illegal purposes, et cetera, et cetera, basic aspects. But at the core here is that Congress gives money, the scientific organization, NIH, in your case, it works the same at NASA, convenes a bunch of experts in the field who review the proposals for grants. They rank them in a sense by merit. But there must have been at some level of priority in terms of what are the areas of science that they want to be funding to. And is that purely congressional or is there discretion within, at least at the NIH to say, "This particular area needs some focus so we'll open up grant funding for this"?

Liz Ginexi: That's right. So at the NIH, it's both. Sometimes Congress will earmark particular types of funding or topical areas of concern. So some recent examples, Vice President Biden, under President Obama, they started what was called the Cancer Moonshot, which had a goal of accelerating some cancer cures in a specific amount of time. So sometimes there are things like that. We have the BRAIN Initiative, which was really launched many years ago to elucidate the mystery of the brain. So those are some examples of congressionally earmarked. But the rest of it comes from the advisory councils. They can give guidance about what the hot topics are or the gaps, as well as people like me. So I was a program officer, so our job was to be up with our particular field of study to survey the portfolio, look at overlap, look at gaps, look at areas that we weren't focusing on.

And within each institute and center, every year we would do brainstorming, sometimes we'd issue a request for information from the public, we might hold workshops. So it was really a consensus-driven democratically informed process through the scientific community to figure out if there were other highlighted areas. And then pretty much 80% of what comes in to the NIH is just what we call investigator initiated. Meaning you're a health scientist, you're a biologist, you're a biochemist, you're an oncologist, whatever, and you have a great idea, you don't have to check with us, just send it in and we'll take a look at it.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. Yeah, and again, very similar with NASA. You have missions going out to Mars or to Jupiter, they'll have funding for, okay, I want to work with this data, try to figure these issues out, develop new instrumentation. You pitch that basically and then it's reviewed by your peers. But I think the core here is that there is a merit-based selection process using expertise that is largely, and I think this goes back to the very establishment of this whole national investment and basic R&D starting in the late 1940s, early 1950s with the National Science Foundation, Vannevar Bush's Science: The Endless Frontier document that I've talked about on the show before as well, that the intention was that the government provides resources and the scientific community helps set the priorities in order to have the most efficient... Are we investing in valid and meritorious areas of research, correct?

Liz Ginexi: That's right. And it has been for the past 80 years, an amazing system. It has led to pretty much every technological and medical breakthrough that you can think of here in this country. Many of the things that we all take for granted today. The cell phone that you use every day, the internet that you use, clearly any of the pharmaceuticals that are curing conditions that you are getting treated today. Every single one of those was developed through basic science that came out of the NIH. And in fact, the NIH is an economic boon for the country. The estimates are that for every $1 in expenditure at the NIH, it returns approximately $2.57 in economic impact. So that means job growth, that means innovations, patents, drugs, surgeries, cures, treatments, and just health impacts. So it's been a great system and it's produced from the NIH over I believe 174 Nobel laureates discovering basic science and medical breakthroughs. So it really has been quite a wonderful system, the peer review and merit.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. And we're talking NIH, what, 35-ish billion per year? 30 To 40?

Liz Ginexi: 48 billion.

Casey Dreier: 48. Okay.

Liz Ginexi: Mm-hmm.

Casey Dreier: So NASA is a much... I think NASA gets about 1.2 billion per year out the door. Smaller, a little more obviously niche areas of research compared to fundamental biology and human health and medicine. Most of these scientists depend on this to also have their livelihoods, that this universities, this all kind of feeds this system. So what does these set of rules then pertain to change? You could just choose the top hits. Because it's hard to express, because I think I'm trying to lay the groundwork a bit for how it works now, but it's hard to express how radical these changes are, because they're dressed up in this dry procedural document. But you've had some really great writing about that. We'll pitch your Substack here on the show notes and here at the end. But you were highlighting some of the most substantial changes, and they're substantial, right?

Liz Ginexi: Yes. And in some sense it is a dry document, but it is unusual. I just want to put a pin in that. From the moment I started reading it, it was alarming, because it's not like any usual government document. It begins with this rambling preamble, and it is filled with lots of mis and disinformation. So I just want to encourage readers, I just posted a little bit about this today, but I'm going to try and touch on that a little bit more in future Substacks, but there is a mis and disinformation campaign going on around what this really is about. So I want to set that aside.

But when you take away the cloud of what they are claiming to do and you look at the actual words on the page of what they plan to do, I was able to take a look at this document from the standpoint of... First I read it, but then I also was in touch with a former OMB staffer who provided me with a tool that shows you the marked up document as it looks now, and compared to what it would look like if these new changes are implemented. So the old stuff, if it's crossed out, it's redlined, and if it's new, it's in green. And-

Casey Dreier: Very similar to the tool that I threw together, it sounds like.

Liz Ginexi: Exactly, exactly.

Casey Dreier: Yes, which will be linked to in the show notes here.

Liz Ginexi: Exactly. And what you quickly learn when you take a look at that side by side, is that this document is essentially taking existing sections that had a particular purpose, and turning them on its head into a 180. And I would say that one of the worst examples of this, is there is a section which is 200.300, which was designed to tell the agencies that in their grant making, it would be unlawful to exclude anyone from being eligible for grants based on their demographic characteristics. You can't say, at NASA, "I'm only going to give grants to white men or to Chinese people, or to non..." You know what I'm saying? You can't do that. You have to make these grants non-discriminatory. The process needs to be fair. And what this new revised section does, is essentially crosses that out. So the language as it used to say was, "In administering awards subject to a federal statute, prohibiting discrimination based on sex, the federal agency must ensure..." da, da, da, da, da, da.

So you can't discriminate based on one sex. They've crossed that out. And now they're using it to argue that anything that is equity focused or quote, "DEI focused" is in and of itself a form of discrimination, which is bonkers. So a section that was designed to protect people from discrimination has been converted into a section that prohibits programs designed to serve those exact people, right?

Casey Dreier: Or even acknowledge it, it seems like.

Liz Ginexi: Yes. It's very diabolical.

Casey Dreier: Some of the other major changes in addition to that... I mean, so this is coming from a lot of the... I'd say, to even jump back, the language I really resonate with you on in terms of how... It reads like a partisan political document in what should otherwise be a relatively dry procedural changes document.

Liz Ginexi: Yes. Yes.

Casey Dreier: It's representing very strong opinions, partisan opinions on, as you said, DEI, a lot of the issues that kind of formed in the Trump campaign going forward. But I'd say it even more core to what we just talked about in terms of how the US invests in fundamental scientific research, this whole merit and peer review process that you talked about is basically neutered. It takes that out completely.

Liz Ginexi: Exactly. And what they did in the document in that section about the peer review, and there was a specific guidance on this on 200.205D, it basically takes the section about peer review as being... In the old rule, it said that peer review is the foundation of the existing merit review system. And that's what we've been talking about. It has been the engine, the fuel of advancement. And instead they've crossed that out, and that now says peer review recommendations remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as defacto binding by senior appointees or their delegates.

And on top of that, an additional provision is now taking control of those granting decisions. In this document it says, Federal agency heads must designate one or more senior appointees, so that's political appointees, to conduct a pre-issuance review of all awards. So what this means now is that the NIH director or the NASA director or any of the leadership of these two agencies, or any agency for that matter, if they really feel strongly about a grant, they do not have the authority to fund it anymore without asking OMB first. OMB will be the ultimate decider.

Casey Dreier: And intentionally adding a partisan political appointee as that deciding factor.

Liz Ginexi: Correct. Correct.

Casey Dreier: So that-

Liz Ginexi: They won't be scientists.

Casey Dreier: Not even not just scientists, but expressly representing a partisan position.

Liz Ginexi: Correct. They'll work for the Trump administration.

Casey Dreier: And so I think the other word there was that they won't even routinely defer. It almost encourages not following peer review, on these grant awards and the-

Liz Ginexi: Right.

Casey Dreier: ... way That I read that-

Liz Ginexi: Yeah. And it almost sounds like, we're going to continue the peer review process as a charade, in essence. So NIH will still have its many study sections and grants will come in and get a score or what have you, but the process will be relegated to-

Casey Dreier: Somewhat meaningless, by statute. Or not by statute, but by these procedural documents.

Liz Ginexi: Yeah. And that's the thing, that the way the statute for NIH is written, the study sections are supposed to be the reason. So these parts of this document are... I really don't think that they jive with law. So I think if it is implemented, there are a lot of grounds here for lawsuits, because this doesn't seem legal to me.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. There's another aspect of this that I want to hit on, which is that this also creates a choke point for actually... So issuing awards and then approving awards of grants throughout the government. I mean, NIH, as you said, gives out on the order of 40 billion a year. That's a lot of awards to process.

Liz Ginexi: Yes. Yes.

Casey Dreier: So one or two people are going to review individually every single one of those four, quote unquote "Alignment with presidential priorities," whatever that means.

Liz Ginexi: Yes. We're talking upwards of 45,000 awards a year.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. Just for NIH. And the president's priorities probably don't touch on very detailed technical areas of research and investigation, right? Assuming they don't touch some of these more partisan areas of, now we know what they call DEI and so forth. And that's where I see a huge issue, it's in and of itself, an intentional bureaucratization of this process-

Liz Ginexi: That's right.

Casey Dreier: ... that Slows down intentionally by adding layers of centralization of bureaucracy.

Liz Ginexi: That's right.

Casey Dreier: And then also adding huge opportunities for, I don't know, funny business. Like, who is this person and why are they... If there's no merit-based review process and it's kind of this amorphous priorities thing, maybe that individual, "Oh, this grant's coming from this college that rejected me when I applied to college." Well, sorry, you're not getting that one. Or, "Hey, these people are like... You know? They've said nice things about me or the president, or something, and they get this one." It seems like it adds a huge opportunity for abuse and fraud and waste. The kind of the very things that they're saying that they don't want.

Liz Ginexi: Right. The accusation is often a confession here. It certainly gets rid of the transparency, it will mean the erosion of any trust in the agencies, it opens up for corruption and cronyism and self-dealing, and it's really troubling.

Casey Dreier: We'll be right back with the rest of our space policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short Break.

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Casey Dreier: There's other aspects and then we're just going to highlight a few of the most egregious. And I'm going to combine these two because I think they're related. The formalizing that any active grant that you have been awarded or a PI has been awarded, a principal investigator, can be terminated at any time for any reason.

Liz Ginexi: That's right.

Casey Dreier: I mean, that's basically saying, "I have..." What's an average grant size at NIH? Just for an example, 10 to 20 million?

Liz Ginexi: The typical bread and butter RO1 grant for many years was capped at $500,000 per year, and with permission, sometimes you could get it up to 700,000 a year. Center grants and things like that are a lot more, but let's just say 500 [inaudible 00:31:54].

Casey Dreier: 500. So you're hiring with that money, you're saying, okay, for three years, let's say I have a grant. That means I can hire a postdoc, I can hire lab technicians, I can buy this piece of equipment, I can pay rent, for three years. The person I'm hiring knows that they'll have a job for three years. That's how I can get them to come work for me and so forth. This says at any moment that money can disappear and you suddenly can't pay your staff.

Liz Ginexi: That's right. And last year we saw a cancellation of lots of grants, and you may have-

Casey Dreier: I tracked it for NASA side, yeah.

Liz Ginexi: ... seen about it. And the courts stepped in and said, "No, no, no, no, you can't do that." So I think this is really just another stab at that. It is another try that they got struck down in the courts for the most part, and so now they're trying to do at OMB is put that into this rule, that OMB has the right and the rule says so, that we may cancel your grant for any reason at any time. And that could be retroactively. So it could be a grant that you have had already for two or three years and you've been collecting your data, and you have maybe one more year to go, but we're going to cancel the whole thing. And let me just remind people. If you cancel a five-year grant in year three or four, that does not save money, that wastes money. That wastes all of the prior money. Because now the data can't be completed in its collection perhaps, they may not get the money to finish the study. It's really foolish.

Casey Dreier: And if you're canceling for any reason at any time, what if you expressed an opinion on the administration, or were at a protest, or did any... I mean, that's also kind of the implication here, right? And this goes into the other item I wanted to highlight. You have sets of risk factors that are usually used as guidance when awarding... You know? So usually you don't want to give a large award to somebody who is known to have been committed fraud in the past, to the US government, or any number of things. This expands that to say, based on what your organizational affiliations are. If you are part of a quote, "Anti-American organization," whatever, or so forth, or issue advocacy organizations are banned.

Liz Ginexi: That's right. And there's actually, just in case, they've kind of built in some redundancies in that. So they could cancel a grant and they don't have to tell you why. So you'll never know the reason why. They might tell you, they might not, but they don't have to. But they've also added some sections into this code to prohibit certain viewpoints. I think this is also highly likely to be illegal because we do still have a First Amendment in this country. But if you look at section 200.450, it tries to say that if you message about anything, any social issue, political issue, or public policy issue that is objectionable to them, or you engage in any voter registration activities outside of your work, you may no longer be allowed to get a grant from the federal government. And I can see an immediate legal problem with that.

Casey Dreier: One would think. Or just lose your grant as it is.

Liz Ginexi: That's right.

Casey Dreier: For doing any, and I think the emphasize, unrelated, right?

Liz Ginexi: Unrelated. Right. And the other thing is if they do cancel these grants, people's only recourse really is to sue, and that takes a long time.

Casey Dreier: And I believe there's a shift here that this pushes actually all legal action into not a judiciary, but into a settlement. There's a term for this, but it tries to handle that by putting it into arbitration.

Liz Ginexi: Right, like a claims court. Yeah.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Liz Ginexi: So this is going to be a mess, to force every grant to go case by case to try and protest the cancellations. And in the meantime, you're not getting your money, you're probably laying off your research assistants, your staff, you're going to cut off your study. So it could destroy, especially in the case of NIH, clinical trials. You can't stop the clinical trial in the middle of it and then hope to resume a year later. It doesn't work like that. So it'll basically effectively ruin any research that is canceled.

Casey Dreier: There's an additional aspect set of rules here that forbid, if I'm understanding this correctly, publishing your work in scientific journals, and attending conferences. Is that true?

Liz Ginexi: Yes. And again, here's something that I found really remarkably bizarre. Because not too long ago, Congress actually passed a law mandating that if you receive federal dollars for science, you must publish your work and you must register it. At the NIH, people are required to register in the PubMed Central. This is a condition of your award, that you are to present your findings because we want your findings to get out there. The taxpayers paid for it, the findings should get out there. So here's a case where you're required by law to publish, and then yet now this new rule says you can't use any money to do the publication. And well, publication's not free. So we're going to have a clash here between this rule and existing law. Again, I don't know how that can possibly be implemented.

Casey Dreier: I was just surprised. I mean, if nothing else that you're not allowed to pay for, again, open access, that enables anyone without a journal, a professional journal's subscription, which are expensive, to read your work.

Liz Ginexi: That's right. And you can see the old version of this rule specifically said... And this was again, the guidance document said that publication costs for electronic and print media, including distribution, promotion, and general handling are allowable. They have crossed that out, and they've said, nope. Now it says unallowable. And the same thing for conference attendance. Paying for conference attendance, the current rule says it's a standard allowable cost under existing rules. Period. That's it.

Casey Dreier: I mean, and the goal is that you want to disseminate your findings. To jump back here... I mean, so I'm trying to think about this in a way to not... For somebody, let's say, who's listening, who's maybe sympathetic to say, "Oh, all of this stuff, we read about all these things that I didn't like, or sounded ridiculous in terms of how government funds science. We need a stronger hand. The scientists, they're just allowing themselves to do crazy things," or even not even going the most extreme way, and just saying, "Why shouldn't there be stronger oversight? Why should we default to conferences where conference event organizing just enriched themselves off of US government funding? Why shouldn't there be a stronger hand here?" Even if you agree, or philosophically, "I don't think they should be doing, quote unquote 'Woke science', or DEI. We should have a presidential priorities." What would you say even in terms of, is there a fundamental things that even people who are sympathetic to the political outcomes, that should be very worried about this type of proposed rules for American science in general?

Liz Ginexi: Yes. I think what I could say is that our system has been great, but it hasn't been perfect. There are peculiarities about the system that we could debate and think about reforms. A perfect example is publications and conferences. They've gotten more and more expensive over time. And one might say, "Why should these expensive publication costs be paid by the taxpayers?" Well, that's a problem that we could try and isolate all the issues and work on that as a problem. But we don't have to cancel all grants and all of science to fix that one problem. We can fix that problem while we still have the system in place, acknowledging that that's a problem. And the analogy I give to people is, if you have a leak in the roof of your house, is the solution to burn your house down? No, let's work on the leak. So we can have reform, and smart people can come together and propose solutions to these things, but they're using these potentially wedge issues to justify deletion of the entire system, and that's what's wrong here.

Casey Dreier: I mean, I would add to that that this represents an extreme power grab by a small office within the White House that is ill-equipped to, in good faith, execute what it's claiming its responsibilities are in terms of approval and controlling the funds. And the limits on membership, on publication, but also on adding arbitrary termination, creates... A sense it curtails free speech, free association, free inquiry, which is critical for science. By adding non-merit review, it almost guarantees misallocation of funds, because you're no longer investing in the most promising scientific areas of research. But it also suppresses Stymie's actual dissemination of information to the people who are nominally paying for this, the American public. I mean, regardless of I think how one feels about the politics of what science does, all of these extra rules changes show that there's more going on here than just trying to align focus of science. This is about subduing a perceived group in American society by threatening their livelihood if they speak out in ways that any administration doesn't like.

Liz Ginexi: And maybe some of the listeners haven't read Project 2025. I have. And if you read it, you can see the philosophy here. This is an extreme version of a libertarian philosophy. I don't think that Russell Vought and people like him believe that the taxpayers' money should be used to pay for any federal programs, except maybe the military. So at a philosophical level, they don't believe that NASA programs should exist or that NIH science should be funded by the taxpayers. And they represent a minority of our population, but they happen to have the levers of power right now. And I would like to think they know that their ideas are not popular, so that's why they're trying to ram these things through. It's not a coincidence that this rule is being pushed through before the midterm elections.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. So what can people do?

Liz Ginexi: So we don't have the Republicans in Congress on our side, unfortunately, at least not at this point. But I would encourage everyone, especially if you have a Senator, two Senators, and/or a representative, and they happen to be Republican, you have even more power than I do. I live in an area where all of mine are Democrats and they're already on board. I've already confirmed that. So one thing you can do is you can write or call your representatives and express outrage and concern over this new rule. Because Congress actually does have the power to block this rule. That would be the most expedient way for us to deal with this, because this rule was created under what's called the Congressional Review Act, which has reporting requirements. It means Congress can just pass a joint resolution of disapproval and the whole thing reverts back to what it is now. So that's number one.

Casey Dreier: And then I think just to build on that, there may be some... I wouldn't quite put it quite as strongly as all Republicans are against it, but the leadership is going to be... You have to be in the leadership to even schedule this for a vote, right?

Liz Ginexi: That's right. That's right.

Casey Dreier: And so, if leadership isn't on board, even if there are a handful or even a small plurality or whatever of Republican members of Congress, it's unlikely that vote will be scheduled, which makes it very difficult for Congress in this current situation to react against it.

Liz Ginexi: Exactly. Exactly. So they have control of what bills and ideas come up for a vote. So the leadership would have to agree, and right now I don't see that happening, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try and effectuate that.

Casey Dreier: Yes.

Liz Ginexi: So definitely call. And then the other thing is because this is a rule and rulemaking has a process, every rule that gets changed gets published in what's called the Federal Register, and there is a comment period. Now this is a 45-day comment period, and anyone who cares about this is allowed to comment. You don't have to be a scientist. You could be a concerned citizen, you could be a patient who has benefited from cancer research, you could be someone who loves science and loves space and loves anything, right?

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm.

Liz Ginexi: It doesn't matter. Or as I've written on my Substack, I believe this will affect pretty much any grant program in the United States. We spend about $1 trillion a year, so this could be your local Head Start programs-

Casey Dreier: Community block grants. Yeah.

Liz Ginexi: Community block grants, grants that you might get to fix up your local park, you name it. If Russell Vought decides that your community is too woke or that you, insert reason, doesn't like you, they could target the grants in your community for deletion, and they will not have to give you a reason why. So this rulemaking, it sounds pretty boring, writing a comment. And because I had special understanding of the Federal Register based on my work at NIH, I've counseled people on how to submit comments to the Federal Register before. I figured, you know what? People probably don't know how to do this. Let me write a quick primer and put it up on Substack, and make it free for everybody. So if you go to Substack, if you've never done anything on the federal registry before, I have a step-by-step, here's how you do it, here's the link.

But the key here, is when you submit your comment, you don't want to cut and paste a form letter. Because if everyone writes the same thing, it will count as one comment. And they are required to read and reply to every single comment. So what we really want to do here is have as many unique and valid objections as possible logged into this system. I'm working with a lot of advocates on this and we'd like to see a record broken here if possible. If everybody who loves science alone did this, I think we could easily break the record.

And the most recent record that I'm aware of in terms of a contentious rule that was passed by OMB unfortunately was the Schedule F or the Schedule CP, which is taking away civil servants rights, and they just implemented it yesterday. That rule, when it went through, I believe got just about 40,000 comments. And what I'm hoping is we can break that record by a lot. Because if we do, it will send a very strong signal to Congress that they should step in and do something. It will signal an overwhelming objection to ruining science, ruining grants for our country.

Casey Dreier: If every listener of this episode submits that, I think we can get very close to that record, just on that. And I think you are seeing a lot of people picking up on this, and Liz, you've been doing an amazing job keeping us informed, keeping me informed. Can you just pitch your Substack URL? Will link to it as well, but I recommend folks follow your writings here.

Liz Ginexi: Sure. So you can just look up my name, Liz Ginexi on Substack, and I've been writing about all these issues, and I've also been fielding lots of questions. People have been DMing me, so if you have questions, feel free to send them, I'll do my best to [inaudible 00:48:23].

Casey Dreier: We appreciate it. And again, I think that the key here is that even if sympathetically you are aligned with some of the critiques of science that we've seen from the administration, this goes so far beyond it, and fundamentally undermines the very practice and ability of American scientists to even share the results. This is a fundamentally destructive and restrictive set of rules that will be challenged, but we do need to speak up in terms of just, do we want to have free inquiry with American science?

Liz Ginexi: One last thing I would say, is a lot of people are afraid to comment.

Casey Dreier: Well, clearly, right? Yeah.

Liz Ginexi: You can comment anonymously, and I would say that an anonymous comment is better than no comment, okay? So go ahead and click the button on the page that says, anonymous. That's fine. And every single comment will go into the historical record. And if this rule is implemented, the lawyers that will sue will have that record on their side. So you want your voice heard. If we have to take this to court, we want as many dissenting comments in there as possible.

Casey Dreier: Very good point. And thank you for mentioning that. Liz Ginexi, thank you so much for your time. Super helpful, I recommend everyone follow her Substack. We'll link to it. There's also an action that The Planetary Society has put up to help facilitate submissions to this and do that kind of unique writing that she mentioned. And best of luck with this, we have until July 13th to provide these submissions, and we'll go from there.

Liz Ginexi: Thanks so much.

Casey Dreier: We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, but we will be back next month, with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration. Help others in the meantime learn more about space policy and The Planetary Society, by leaving a review and rating this show on platforms like Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or wherever you listen to this show. Your input and interactions really help us be discovered by other curious minds, and that will help them find their place in space through Planetary Radio. You can also send us, including me, your thoughts and questions at [email protected]. Or if you're a Planetary Society member and I hope you are, leave me a comment in the Planetary Radio space in our online member community. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers of the show. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor.

Me, Casey Dreier and Merc Boyan, my colleague, composed and performed our space policy edition theme. The Space Policy Edition is a production of The Planetary Society, an independent nonprofit space outreach organization based in Pasadena, California. We are membership based, and anybody, even you, can become a member. They start at just $4 a month, that's nothing these days. Find out more at planetary.org/join. Until next month ad astra.