OMB’s Grant Proposal Is a Win for Taxpayers 

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is considering new regulations to crack down on wasteful spending and reassert the people’s control over spending decisions for federal grant-making.   

OMB coordinates policy implementation across the executive branch. As such, it wields great power over the administrative state, including the disbursement of federal funds. Under the Biden Administration, OMB undercut taxpayers with wasteful spending that hurt America’s research capacity.   

The examples of this are, unfortunately, numerous. We can start with the radical climate goals. $42.5 billion was dedicated to a federal broadband initiative that failed to connect a single person, with time and resources instead going to endless red tape. $521 million was spent on electric charging stations, leading to a grand total of 214 being built (it was supposed to create 9,200) by the election.

And the EPA collapsed under its own bureaucratic weight, leaving progress updates and essential documentation uncompleted, resulting in $22.6 billion—or roughly 60% of EPA grants—being at high risk of fraud and abuse. 

Still more of that wasteful spending came in the form of radical DEI or gender ideology mandates. Take the National Science Foundation—arguably the cornerstone of modern scientific research—which spent more than 10% of its budget, or $2.05 billion, on questionable DEI/gender-based initiatives. 

Or, take the Department of Education, which spent $1.006 billion on DEI grants to school districts across America. Or, for some more mundane examples, take the $8 million spent on transgender mice surgery, or $5 million for LGBT affirmation studies, or $1.5 million on DEI in Serbian workplaces—all in the name of science, of course. 

OMB’s proposal would fix these and other related issues. It would put political appointees in charge of the awarding process for grants.

So, if researchers can’t meaningfully explain the reasonable scientific aims of a project, an appointee would be able to cut or refuse to offer such a grant.  

Speaking practically, if a team of supposed “researchers” approached an agency asking for, say, $2 million to support sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala and failed to offer a scientific justification for such a grant, someone accountable to the American people would be able to refuse it.  

The proposal would also adjust the suspension and termination processes for grants, including by putting appointees in charge of those processes as well. So when a new administration enters office to find billions in active wasteful spending, as this administration did, it would be able to stop that funding in its tracks. 

The proposal further targets areas that are especially vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse. It eliminates the use of DEI and disparate-impact theories in grant-making, two tools used by the Biden administration to advance woke ends to the detriment of taxpayers.

It would also explicitly bar funds going towards gender ideology and political advocacy, as well as implement Treasury’s Do Not Pay system and DHS’s E-Verify program for grant recipients. 

Each of these changes make for strong policy, in part because they are commonsense financial management. DEI, gender ideology, and political advocacy take away dollars that could otherwise go to critical scientific research. And foreign recipients—who are also made subordinate to American-based recipients by this proposal—bring opacity to what should be a maximally transparent process.   

As expected, the outrage cycle in the mainstream press has already begun. Both CNN and the New York Times recently ran articles decrying the proposal, fearing it would undercut science and hollow out our democracy.   

But the opposite is the case. Remind me, how does spending 10% of the NSF’s budget on DEI improve our research capacity? It doesn’t.  

Through this rule, OMB is making sure that appropriated funds for scientific research go to actual scientific research, not radical ideological schemes. 

And the irony on the democracy point is all too apparent: How, exactly, does putting bureaucrats in charge of taxpayer money, as opposed to officials appointed by someone elected with a majority of votes from across the country, strengthen our democracy? Again, it doesn’t.  

Those expressing “fear for our democracy” in light of this rule but who also believe that unelected technocrats should have the final say over your tax dollars have a wildly different understanding of American democracy than anyone who can reasonably define the word “democracy.”  

At base, this proposal brings important clarity to what has as of late been a murky process. It would target areas of financial mismanagement and save the taxpayers money, all while reasserting their control over federal spending. OMB does taxpayers a service by proposing it.