On Monday 13th July the deadline passed for stakeholders to comment on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposal to “revise the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance to improve government-wide policies and requirements related to the management of grants, cooperative agreements, and other forms of assistance”. Sounds kind of benign, but it has caused outrage across the industry.
To summarize the proposed rule changes, the managing of U.S. government grants by federal agencies is to change. These rule changes will exert political control over grant review, effectively block some international collaborations and enforce limits on the use of funds for things like conference attendance, society memberships and publication costs.
That this proposal has caused consternation across the higher education and scholarly communications sectors is understandable, both for political and practical reasons. However, it is worth taking time to set these reasons out and put them in the context of what the implications could be for academic journal publishing.
Clear and present danger
The OMB proposal has ultimately attracted over 340,000 comments, and while the US government wades through this mountain of input, it is worth remembering where we started off. While many people in recent years had called for more oversight and checks on some grant funding practices by national agencies in the US, few anticipated the (literal) chainsaw approach that has been taken so far by the Trump administration. In his second term, Trump seemed determined to pick fights not only with NIH and other agencies in threatening funding, but also with some of the principal beneficiaries of their funding, namely Ivy League and other top research-intensive colleges. This led to standoffs with the likes of Harvard, while researchers and funders alike waited uncomfortably to see how things would pan out.
While many of the initial attacks on universities either led to pulling back of DEI programs and largely doing as Trump indicated he wanted or fighting back and going through the courts in other cases, things had seemed to die down in 2026. That was until the OMB proposal was published, and many realized it would mean opening the door to politicization of grant funding. One of the many responses came from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), which laid out its concerns as twofold: one provision proposes to disallow expenses related to journal subscriptions, while a second targets publication costs. From a librarian’s perspective, this reduces significantly their longstanding role in managing research publications.
View from abroad
Of course, any such provisions that threaten to limit expenditure on journal subscriptions and article publication charges (APCs) will also concern publishers, who like librarians have also been up in arms with regard to the proposed changes by the OMB. In The Scholarly Kitchen, various responses have been put forward, some focusing on some of the minutiae of the proposal, others encouraged stakeholders to fight back, and some looked at the bigger picture. The broad gist was delivered pithily by TSK Chef Roy Kaufman: “Those who rely on the research, including businesses and universities, will suffer”.
For those like me, who sit shaking their head from afar at yet another series of seemingly bonkers events occurring in the US, there is an overwhelming feeling of camaraderie for those thousands of individuals who stand to suffer negative consequences of poorly thought through legislation. Empathy is strong for those of us witnessing this outside the US, as we all encounter frustrations with our governments and institutions, and share the feeling of sheer helplessness when confronted with the power of the state. Solidarity across the world matters in these times, as does the hope and belief that things will change for the better in the near future. For the sake of science and its effective pursuit, it simply has to.
