Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought is the originator of a new OMB rule that would give U.S. President Donald Trump and his political appointees unprecedented control over the ~$1 trillion in federal funds issued each year via grants and contracts. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
The fate of the new White House Office of Management and Budget rule was on the House, so to speak. And on Tuesday, the House decided by a 370 to 48 vote to agree with what the Senate had decided a month ago—delay the implementation of the new OMB rule at least until December 11. This new OMB rule, which was originally scheduled to go into effect in October, would give U.S. President Donald Trump and his political appointees unprecedented control over federal grants and contracts—and as a result potentially unprecedented control over whoever and whatever organizations might want such funds.
The Midterm Elections Will Help Decide The Fate Of The New OMB Rule
If you haven’t figured it out yet, December 11—besides being National Noodle Ring Day and National Stretching Day—comes about a month after the mid-term elections. Therefore, this continuing resolution from Congress essentially kicks the can down the road. How resolved Congress will be to block this new OMB rule from going into effect beyond December 11 will likely depend heavily on who gets elected to be in the Senate and House of Representatives.
And how resolved Congress ends up being will depend on how resolved Congress will be to represent what Americans actually want. If you want to see public opinion about the new OMB rule, you could go to a website set up by two former federal employees—Abigail Haddad, PhD and Christopher Marcum, PhD—who have been using artificial intelligence to track the comments that were submitted during the public comment period for the new OMB rule. According to the website, a whopping 96 percent of the over 167,000 public comments were in opposition to the new OMB rule.
Will The Trump Administration Ignore What Congress Has Decided About The New OMB Rule?
Now that the continuing resolution has been resolved in both the House and Senate, it will next go to Trump for his signature. Of course, the continuing question is how much the Trump administration will even listen to Congress, despite that whole, you know, U.S. Constitution checks-and-balances thing. The Trump administration could choose to simply move ahead with the new OMB rule despite the objections of Congress.
After all, that’s what the Trump administration has already essentially done on multiple occasions already. On example has been the Trump administration halting the grant-funding activities of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, as I described recently in Forbes. That’s even though Congress had allocated money for AHRQ to give out such grants to people doing healthcare safety and quality research.
The New OMB Rule Would Politicize Federal Grant And Contract Making
I have been covering in Forbes how this new OMB rule seems to be part of a larger Trump administration plan to substantially reduce the role of external scientific peer-review in the whole federal grants- and contracts-making process. This would subsequently significantly boost the control that Trump and his political appointees have over these processes. The new OMB rule would also allow the Trump administration to terminate federal grants and contracts at practically any time if they don’t “effectuate program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest.” whatever that might mean.
Having such greater control over the around $1 trillion in federal grants and contracts issued each year would give the Trump administration an ever bigger stick to wield. And it’s not as if the Trump administration hasn’t been waving such a stick already. I have covered in Forbes how the Trump administration has withheld federal funding from universities such as Harvard and the University of California in attempts to force such institutions to comply with Trump administration directives.
The White House Appears To Have Removed 42 Of The Public Comments About The OMB Rule
By law, the White House OMB was required to post its proposed OMB rule for public comment for a period that ended July 13. The White House OMB is supposed to keep all of these comments up on the governmental website so that the public can see them. However, the previously mentioned AI efforts of Haddad—who had worked as a machine learning engineer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—and Marcum—who had worked as a senior statistician at the White House OMB—detected that the White House OMB had since taken down 42 of those comments without really clarifying why. The only explanation offered was labelling each of those comments as “Withdrawn” and being removed “per policy,” without explaining what that specific policy is.
This can have legal ramifications since such comments would help support any resulting legal action should the Trump administration chooses to move ahead with the new OMB rule. The White House’s OMB Director Russell Vought has indicated that the Trump administration doesn’t plan on moving forward on the new OMB rule until December anyways. I will continue to reach out to contacts in the federal government for comment and will provide updates accordingly.
Congress is supposed to have the power of the purse—meaning the ability to determine what federal agency gets what proportion of taxpayer dollars for what reason—rather than the President. And Congress, in theory, is supposed to represent what taxpayers want. What happens between now and December 11 could help determine whether any of these things hold.
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