U-M nursing school professor Janet Larson says the government’s proposals will make it harder for junior faculty to build meaningful research programs. | Annie Comperchio
“The scariest things I’ve experienced in my forty-plus years” as a federally funded researcher, says U-M nursing school professor Janet Larson.
The source of Larson’s fear is a sweeping rule change proposed by the federal Office of Management and Budget that may go into effect later this year. If implemented, it would mandate that Trump administration appointees review every federal grant, with complete power over which ones are funded, as well as the ability to stop them at any time, for any reason. Under the new rule, grants would be required to “advance the President’s policy priorities,” and forbidden from promoting “anti-American values,” “racial preferences,” or “illegal immigration,” or denying “the sex binary in humans.”
The U-M received $1.25 billion in federal research funds in fiscal year 2025. Larson’s research on older adults living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other conditions has been funded by the National Institutes of Health with a series of five-year grants. Stopping a grant midstream could render the research “useless,” she says. Larson has also served as an expert evaluator of research proposals, a process known as peer review. “The NIH has the highest level of peer review in the country,” she says. “If you add a political appointee, they’re going to override the scores of the reviewers.”
Related: “Defunding Science” (Nov. 2025)
The rule change would bar scientists from most international collaborations. “I have a PhD student who’s in China now,” says Larson. “She’s faculty at Beijing University. I couldn’t collaborate with her on an NIH grant.”
It also broadly prohibits “issue advocacy or public messaging that promotes or opposes a particular social, political, or public policy position.”
“That really points to a clear disregard for academic freedom, where the faculty are able to advocate on issues of importance,” says U-M social work professor Terri Friedline, president of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “We want faculty to be able to continue to do that, especially as directed by, and backed by, scientific evidence.”
As a whole, the change would “have a chilling effect on junior faculty who’ve just gotten their PhDs and now moved into a faculty role,” Larson says. “It’s going to be much more challenging for them to build and to establish a meaningful and productive program of research with this kind of a cloud hanging over.”
The U-M Office of the Vice President for Research sent the OMB a letter calling for withdrawal of the rule and for engaging stakeholders, but declined our interview request. “There’s nothing more that our office would like to say on the matter,” emails senior director of research communications Don Jordan. The OMB did not respond to emailed questions from the Observer.
By mid-August the OMB had uploaded more than a hundred comments from U-M faculty, students, and staff opposing the rule change. “This proposed action by the OMB will kill my research,” wrote one U-M medical school professor. “One cannot imagine a more devastating collection of rules.” Another wrote that “naked partisan interference to dictate what knowledge we are ‘allowed’ to obtain … is the practice of despots and dictators.”