NEWSROOM

DPH member Brenda Berkman spoke with WBAI radio in NYC about the OMB rules and efforts to encourage public input to oppose them.

Hundreds of thousands of scientists, including Nobel laureates, warn that changes to the way federal grants are approved would greatly damage American science -- with comments from Coordinating Committee member Elizabeth Jacobs along with representatives of multiple scientific and public health organizations.

Defend Public Health member Andrew Hardaway discusses proposed rule changes at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that would put funding decisions in the hands of Trump appointees. Hardaway discusses the potential grave impacts from delaying scientific developments to the local economic impacts of removing funding.

The Trump administration's attempts to control scientific research began early in the administration and have now ratcheted upward with new grant rules proposed by OMB, with comments from DPH member Melinda Rostal, who notes, “This is the wake-up call that everyone needs to pick their heads up and say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is me that they’re targeting.’"

This national radio show interviews DPH member Melinda Rostal about the damage that proposed OMB funding roles could do to science and medical research. In the interview, she notes something most national media have missed: Restrictions on scientific communications, including scientific conferences, will result in wasting vast sums of money on duplicative efforts.

With colleges and universities alarmed at the impact of proposed OMB funding rules on both research grants and education funding, Inside Higher Ed focuses on the efforts by DPH and others that have generated massive numbers of comments to OMB about the rule, quoting DPH member Melinda Rostal.

DPH Coordinating Committee member Bruce Mirken writes about the devastating possible impact of proposed OMB funding rules on Hawaii. He notes the islands' policies like fighting climate change and traditions of respecting diversity, including gender diversity, and notes, "All of this represents reasons that vital funds — money from federal taxes we all pay — could be suddenly and arbitrarily cut off."

DPH Coordinating Committee member Bruce Mirken takes on the proposed OMB rule for federal grants, explaining, "it makes every federal dollar that our state and local governments and private institutions receive subject to the partisan and ideological agenda of whatever administration is in the White House."

Researcher and DPH member Nancy Krieger, who has already fought with the Trump administration for daring to study the impact of discrimination on health, lays out the consequences for science of proposed OMB rules on federal grants: "Having all funding for federal grants of any type subject to the political rules and biases of a politicized agency led by a policy czar who has zero real-world knowledge about any of the topics at issue is a recipe for disaster."