The proposed 'Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance' uses formal Administrative Procedure Act rulemaking to install political review of federal grants in a durable legal form.
On May 29, the Office of Management and Budget did what a year of court reversals had prevented the Trump administration from doing by other means: it began locking political oversight of federal science grants into durable law. The vehicle is a proposed "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," published in the Federal Register as document 2026-10817 and now open for public comment. Its mechanism, not its text, is what makes it different from everything the administration tried in year one.
The administration's first-year science-policy playbook ran almost entirely through executive action. Research-adjacent federal civil servants were fired. Scientific projects were terminated at an unprecedented scale. Universities were pressured to drop DEI and health-disparities programs. On a Friday evening, the government tried to push through a sweeping change to how it reimburses universities for research overhead (STAT+). Federal courts rapidly challenged each move, and in multiple cases the administration had to walk policies back because they ran afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal statute that governs how agencies issue binding rules (STAT+).
The new OMB rule is structured to survive that pattern. By choosing formal notice-and-comment rulemaking under the APA, the administration converts each disputed policy lever into a procedurally durable instrument. A final rule, once published, can only be undone through the same formal rulemaking process, by Congress, or by a court order on the finalized record. A future administration cannot reverse it by memo, guidance, or executive order. A peer-reviewed characterization of NIH grant terminations in 2025 measures the prior disruption this architecture would entrench, or that a future administration would have to litigate anew to remove.
Andrew Twinamatsiko, who directs Georgetown's Center for Health Policy and the Law and runs a health-care-litigation tracker, frames the distinction this way: the first year delivered "tempests that we could weather," but the durable shift creates "ways of reverting back to the baseline that we used to have" (STAT+). The new instrument, in his framing, is the second kind. It does not just add restrictions. It changes who decides what counts.
Inside Higher Ed and NPR describe the rule as establishing political oversight of grant terms and conditions. The American Astronomical Society has published a legal breakdown showing how the rule reaches grant conditions, oversight, and review. CNN reports that researchers say the rule could "destroy American science as we know it," and Forbes catalogues the institutional and public concern flowing into the comment window. Those characterizations are clearly attributed to researchers and commentators; the rule itself remains a proposal.
The mechanism is the consequential part: formal rulemaking converts political oversight of science funding from a court-vulnerable executive action into a procedurally durable legal baseline. Science funding moves from independent and merit-based to politically conditional, and the procedural machinery to enforce that conditionality is now in formal rulemaking. Reversing it requires a future administration to write, defend, and finalize a counter-rule, or for Congress to act.
The next trigger is the comment window's close on the date specified in the Federal Register notice, and the categories of filers the record shows. Universities, scientific societies, state attorneys general, and individual researchers will together determine the friction a final rule has to absorb.