Space Policy Edition: A proposal to stifle American science

**Casey Dreier** (0:19)
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 it's 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 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. And if 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/rulesdashchange.
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 Genexy. 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 and 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, casey at planetary.org. And now, Liz Genexy.