Seven of the nation’s top computing and data science organizations filed comments with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) expressing deep and urgent concern about OMB’s proposed “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance” (Docket No. OMB-2026-0034), published in the Federal Register on May 29, 2026 (91 FR 32198). The public comment period closes today, July 13, 2026.
This proposed rule would constitute the most consequential rewrite of federal grant-management policy since the Uniform Guidance (2 C.F.R. Part 200) was established, and touches every institution that receives funding from NSF, DOE, DARPA, NIH, and dozens of other research agencies.
The organizations – Alliance for Data Science and AI (ADSA), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Association for Computing Machinery – US Technology Policy Committee (USTPC), Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), Computing Research Association (CRA), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and United States Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) – representing the full breadth of computing, computer science, computer engineering, data science, artificial intelligence and related disciplines across academia, industry and the nonprofit sector, each expressed alarm about provisions that would:
- Require all discretionary awards to receive pre-issuance approval from a senior political appointee, demoting peer review to a merely “advisory” role, and introducing ideological filters that have no place in the evaluation of scientific merit.
- Treat lower indirect cost rates as a preference factor in competitive award selection, mischaracterizing F&A rates as administrative waste rather than the essential infrastructure that world-class research requires.
- Chill legitimate scientific exchange by imposing overboard foreign collaboration restrictions.
- Impose new prior-approval requirements for conference and publication costs that run contrary to established norms in the computing, CS, CE, RCD and IT research community, forcing researchers to lock in publication and conference plans before the science has unfolded and the most valuable interactions and findings have happened.
- Create unacceptable legal uncertainty for researchers working on such research topics as algorithmic fairness and bias mitigation, among many more legitimate research questions.
- Reclassify the Uniform Guidance from “guidance” to “regulation, eliminating the notice-and-comment processes that have historically grounded grant policy in operational reality.
These organizations recognize the federal government’s legitimate interests in transparency, accountability, and stewardship of public funds and support thoughtful reforms that advance those goals. But this proposed rule, taken as a whole, would simultaneously reduce scientific rigor, disadvantage the institutions best equipped to conduct frontier research, and impose sweeping administrative burdens that the computing and data science communities are ill-equipped to absorb. We individually call upon OMB to withdraw the proposed rule and engage in a more deliberate, evidence-based process with the research community. Each organization’s comments or calls to action are available here:
- Alliance for Data Science and AI
- Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
- Association for Computing Machinery – US Technology Policy Committee
- Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation
- Computing Research Association
- Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
- US Research Software Engineer Association
All seven organizations are committed to working with OMB, Congress, and the federal research agencies to ensure that the framework governing federal research grants supports both accountability and scientific excellence. The computing research community stands ready to engage constructively toward that end. But they cannot support, and urge OMB to withdraw, a proposed rule that would do serious and lasting harm to one of the most productive research enterprises in human history.