DRP response to OMB Proposed Revisions
Recent proposed revisions to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has drawn a significant amount of attention, and justified ire. This summary of key change highlights just how sweeping these proposed changes are, and how significantly they could shape scientific research in America.
There is still time to provide a comment on the changes - and you can join the nearly 300,000 (!) already provided! There are some wonderful resources out there - but in case you need help getting started, here is what we submitted as the Data Rescue Project. Be sure to edit this to your own voice - that is important!
We are grateful for the opportunity to provide feedback on proposed regulation FR 2026-10817. We represent members of the Data Rescue Project, a community dedicated to ensuring public access to publicly-funded data. Our membership includes, but is not limited to, data librarians and other data professionals. Our work and the research of the patrons we support depend on continuing access to data, including data generated through grants funded in whole or in part by federal agencies. We firmly believe that access to publicly funded data is the right of the American population that has funded this research.
We would like to highlight three provisions in this proposed rule that concern us as data stewards. First, [200.336] specifies that data collection, transmission, and storage methods must keep data within the United States. This requirement is impractical for how research data is actually managed today. Cloud-based platforms — including Amazon Web Services, Google Drive, and Microsoft Teams — typically distribute data across multiple data centers for redundancy, and many standard institutional contracts do not guarantee single-country storage by default. A strict US-only requirement would force researchers and universities to renegotiate contracts, forgo the geographic redundancy that protects data against loss from natural disasters or system failures, and take on new compliance burdens to verify and document data location — costs the proposed rule does not appear to account for.
We are also concerned with [200.340], which would allow federal agencies to terminate an active discretionary award whenever it "does not effectuate program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest as they exist at the time of termination" — without a minimum notice period or an appeal process. This threatens the integrity of data collected during the course of a grant. Properly managing research data — including depositing it into a publicly accessible repository — takes significant time and cannot be done well on short notice. Because these grants are funded by the American people, they should be able to access the data these projects generate; abrupt, discretionary termination risks making that data difficult or impossible to preserve in usable form. This concern is compounded by [200.205], which requires a politically appointed reviewer, rather than scientific peer reviewers, to determine whether an award "demonstrably advance[s] the President's policy priorities" — reducing scientific merit review to an advisory role subordinate to political judgment.
Finally, and relatedly, we are concerned with [200.421], which restricts using federal grant funding for public communication and outreach about scientific findings from the grants. Results and data produced by federally funded research are of public value and, in effect, belong to the American people. Limiting researchers' ability to communicate their findings undermines the return on the public investment that funded the research in the first place.
Due to these concerns, among others, we urge OMB not to finalize this rule.
Thank you again for considering our feedback.
The Data Rescue Project
