What is at stake is society’s right to ensure that decisions affecting its health, land, water, forests, food and future are grounded in knowledge that can be tested, debated and revised
Some news reaches us from far away and yet should concern us far more than may seem reasonable at first sight…
On 29 May, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget published a proposed reform of the rules governing federal funding for projects, agreements and public grants. At first glance, it might appear to be just another administrative document—one of those dense texts that interest only lawyers, university administrators and people with an admirable tolerance for bureaucracy, which some of us decidedly lack.
But it is not.
Behind the promise of “improving transparency, accountability and oversight” of public funds lies a profound transformation in how decisions are made about which research deserves funding, how long it may remain alive and how far it may go. And, of course, about who will have the final say.
The proposal would allow peer-review recommendations to be treated as merely advisory and would enable senior political appointees to intervene directly in grant approvals. It would also broaden the ability to terminate already-awarded projects whenever they are deemed no longer aligned with the priorities of the administration in office. Not on the basis of the quality of the project, the results obtained, or commitments made to students, technicians, local communities or collaborating institutions. Solely on the basis of the political priorities of the moment.
Some may think this is normal. After all, governments set budgetary priorities. And that is true: they should. But it is one thing for an administration to define broad objectives for public funding, and quite another for it to decide, case by case, which research deserves to continue after it has been assessed by independent specialists. Those of us who work in this field know that peer review is far from perfect. It is slow, biased, sometimes conservative; it may reward the familiar and at other times make serious mistakes. Yet it remains far preferable to replacing scientific judgement with the ideological, electoral or communicative convenience of those who temporarily occupy an office. This is so, among other reasons, because ecological science does not operate according to electoral cycles. Climate change cannot be studied through projects that may disappear when the political colour of an administration changes. Decades-long datasets on biodiversity, fire, pollution, migration, biological invasions or ecosystem dynamics cannot be sustained if every funding call carries a clause of political uncertainty. You cannot ask a researcher to build a long-term monitoring network while warning her that her work may be interrupted because someone has decided that its findings no longer fit the government’s preferred narrative. Colleagues in Andalusia (Spain) know, unfortunately, what I mean.
And no, nature does not alter its processes to adapt to electoral calendars.
Nor do environmental problems recognise national borders. Biodiversity loss, pollutant flows, invasive species, emerging diseases, fires and climate change all require international collaboration. Restricting or obstructing such collaboration does not protect the public interest: it merely reduces our capacity to understand problems that, precisely because of their scale, no country can solve alone. One only has to think about it for a moment…
The proposal also introduces additional restrictions and controls on publication costs and attendance at scientific meetings. Here, it is difficult not to notice the contradiction: society is told that science must be useful, while the very mechanisms through which science is discussed, scrutinised, corrected and made public are made more difficult. Research that cannot meet, debate, publish or collaborate freely does not become more efficient. It becomes more fragile, slower and… more dependent.
This should not concern only U.S. scientists. The United States supports a decisive share of the infrastructures, research networks, databases, monitoring programmes and international collaborations that underpin much of global ecological knowledge. When the independence of its scientific system is weakened, the consequences do not remain on the other side of the Atlantic.
But surely we can agree that scientific autonomy should not be defended as though it were a corporate privilege for those of us who work in universities and research centres. What is at stake is not scientists’ right to conduct research without inconvenience. What is at stake is society’s right to ensure that decisions affecting its health, land, water, forests, food and future are grounded in knowledge that can be tested, debated and revised—not in whatever happens to be politically convenient at a given moment.
Science can be uncomfortable. Indeed, it often is when it accurately describes problems we would rather not confront. But turning it into a tool subordinate to the convenience of power will not make those problems disappear. It will only ensure that we arrive too late to understand them.
The proposal is open for public comment until 13 July 2026. Those who work in, collaborate with or have ties to the U.S. scientific system can take part in this process. So can scientific societies, universities, environmental organisations and anyone who believes that publicly funded research should answer to evidence before obedience.
Dear fellow citizens, this is neither a minor battle nor one confined to North America. It is a debate about what kind of society we want to be when scientific knowledge contradicts what some would prefer to believe.
And that debate concerns all of us…
