Federal Grants Should Not Be Experiments In Thought Control

Washington DC - January 15, 2025: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs holds a hearing to examine the nomination of Russell Vought, to be Director of Office of Management and Budget.

​The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposes to change how the federal government distributes research grants. Debates over this proposal remind us, once again, how deeply Washington’s fingers are embedded in activities that put tax dollars behind speech.

As Chad de Guzman reports in Time, the OMB proposal would put senior political appointees in charge of a “pre-issuance review.” Appointees would screen awards to ensure that they do not “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” a list of disfavored ideas. Moreover, they could cancel a grant “for convenience” the moment it stopped serving this or the next administration’s “policy priorities.”

The OMB draft also places unnecessarily burdensome restrictions on where and how researchers can publish their research. 

To be fair, OMB is reacting to years of federal grants being made to NGOs that are, beneath the surface, decidedly partisan, ideological, and political in intent. But this proposed rule is an overcorrection, one that is sure to encourage precisely the kinds of government-subsidized speech it is meant to correct.

This 400-page proposal should be revised to allow genuinely independent experts – the post-war arrangement that let scientific merit decide what gets studied. On matters of hard science, their opinion should carry more weight than a role that is merely “advisory.”

The government is, of course, allowed to choose what it pays for. It can fund cancer research and not astrology. But there is a line, and it’s one Justice Robert H. Jackson drew plainly in 1943:

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

A summary of that case, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, is worth revisiting today. So is Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion in a 2013 case about the moral assumptions around combating HIV/AIDS. In that instance, policy requirements tied to U.S. funding went too far, he wrote, effectively requiring grant recipients “to pledge allegiance to the Government’s policy ...”

Most importantly, Roberts ended the opinion by grounding it in the First Amendment. A policy requirement that compels affirmation of certain kinds of beliefs flatly “violates” the First and “cannot be sustained.” And for good measure, the Chief Justice used the same quote from Jackson.
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There is time for OMB to sharpen its proposal so that it tries as best as humanly possible to remove partisanship and enforced viewpoints out of grantmaking altogether.

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