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Our nation鈥檚 鈥� and New Mexico's 鈥� scientific enterprise is a crown jewel that drives innovation and public health and safety. However, in addition to proposing major budget cuts, taking an intentionally ignorant approach to topics such as global climate, and devaluing the role of expertise, the Trump administration is attempting to bring basic research under political control.

A proposed regulation would insert political appointees into the approval process for basic research grants. The stated purpose is to ensure alignment with administration priorities and to ensure 鈥淕old Standard Science鈥� practices. Objectives include things like improving transparency, eliminating fraud, 鈥渨okeness,鈥� and anything having to do with 鈥渋llegal (diversity, equity and inclusion).鈥�

As a former professor at a research university, my experience with federal grants is mainly with the National Science Foundation. To obtain an NSF grant, an investigator develops a rigorous proposal that demonstrates command of the current state of knowledge, identifies gaps in understanding, develops clear hypotheses to address those gaps and describes a plan to test those hypotheses. The proposal is then subjected to peer review and consideration by a panel of experts who assess its scientific merit. NSF program managers, who are also trained researchers, use those deliberations to make recommendations for which grants are funded. The process is highly competitive, rigorous and conducted with the highest ethical standards to avoid issues such as conflicts of interest. Up to this point the process is confidential because the proposals contain intellectual property, but once a grant is awarded its information is publicly available at the NSF鈥檚 website. Thus, the process is already transparent. Addition of political appointees to the decision process will not help.

Funds are not simply sent as a check to the investigator. Instead, they go to a separate system at each university that administers the budget to assure compliance with regulations and ethical standards. Often the single largest chunk of a research grant goes to supporting students who receive their training by participating in the projects; these students graduate to careers in industry, government and academia. In my view it would be extremely difficult to commit fraud with such funds, and no evidence has been provided by the administration that supports its contention of widespread waste and abuse.

The administration does not need to enforce 鈥淕old Standard Science鈥� because it is something that the scientific community already strives for. Reproducibility and transparency are fundamental values for us and something that we work to instill in our students.

Wokeness is a vague term used by a certain subset of the population, although the regulation states without evidence that woke does 鈥渘ot reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public.鈥� How does one decide if a proposal is woke? Another stated reason for the regulation is to rid grants of DEI, yet most research grant-related DEI efforts that I am familiar with are aimed at removing barriers to support people of all sorts who have talent and merit.

Regarding aligning research with administration priorities: Science takes time, much more time than typical political cycles. It would not benefit the public for the scientific community to be forced to drop ongoing research and switch to a new set of priorities every four years.

Consider this: One may agree with the current administration鈥檚 priorities to steer basic research, but what if the next president is from a different political party and has very different priorities? Basic science should be apolitical.

Now is the time to submit comments on the proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance online at the Federal Register by July 13.

Greg Valentine is a retired professor of earth sciences who conducts research on volcanoes. He lives in sa国际传媒官网网页入口.