Better late than never - please read.

This is a post I drafted back on July 12 and just now realized I never posted. So I'm posting it now hoping it will get read - certainly more than it would if I backdated it to the 12th. I'll leave it to the text to explain what it's about - so if I'm going to do that, I should get to it. What follows, then, is that July 12 draft.

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I finally submitted my comments on the proposed federal rule that would concentrate control of federal research grants in the hands of a hand-picked presidential political team while requiring, among other things, that grantees act as if trans people don’t exist. One advantage of my slowness is that I got to notice how may comments had been submitted - as of about 11pm on Sunday, it was a touch under 279,000. A good rule of thumb is the greater the number of comments, the greater the opposition. [I learned later that the final total was near a half-million, a truly extraordinary number, and preliminary estimates were 80% of them were in opposition to the rule.]

Personally, I would not be the least surprised if the royal court of The Orange Overlord just said “We don’t care, we’re doing it and this was just for show, anyway.” But hope springs and all that and at least one proposed rule during TOO’s first term - about imposing transphobia on emergency housing met enough opposition that it was never acted on and the Biden administration withdrew it. (They’re trying again.)

I did have some weird moments. For one,I submitted the comment and got told it exceeded the allowable limit. Okay, but until then, no limit had been mentioned. When I edited it enough to fit, I got a notice that it contained “invalid characters.” No indication as to what they were. And everything was regular characters unless they wanted to call braces (used in editing a quote) “invalid” which is weird. To top it off, I submitted just a two-sentence summary plus a .doc file (okay, actually a .wpd file ‘cause yes, I use Word Perfect if only not to use Microsoft) for the full text - which uploaded with no problem. Still don’t know what the issue was.

Anyway, here is the text of my comment.

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I write to oppose in full the proposed rule “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.”

I expect much of what I say has already been said amid the over 200,000 comments submitted so far but the importance of opposition must be emphasized.

This proposed rule would replace robust, open, scientific inquiry and “promoting the general welfare” with a weaponized, politicized approach centered on advancing the prejudices and political purposes of whoever happens to occupy the White House. Indeed, it says so in just those words, saying that “activities performed under Federal awards [must be] consistent with ... policy” - which is already defined as “the President’s policy priorities” - and must “demonstrably advance” those interests.

So contrary to what is claimed, this has nothing to do with “improv[ing] transparency, accountability, and oversight for Federal awards” but rather intends to establish centralized control over essentially if not all discretionary federal grants across a wide range of agencies overseeing an even wider range of programs, with such control being held by a small group of hand-picked agents of the president, who are free to overrule any and all scientific and other expert judgement regarding the requested funds. That is not about transparency, that is not about accountability. That is about power.

What’s more, the proposal makes no secret that those “priorities” include continuing and further entrenching the current administration’s racial/ethnic and gender biases, as the White House seeks to redefine any efforts to uplift marginalized communities as discrimination against people who aren’t members of those communities. This is visible in the number of provisions that go far beyond anything to do with “transparency, accountability, and oversight” to set rules for what is and isn’t acceptable in grant requests, rules that serve to strip funding for anyone doing work to support, or do research relating to, those very communities in the greatest need of attention.

For example, the (again hand-picked) presidential appointees performing the “pre-issuance review” are explicitly instructed to screen for and block awards for anything that might “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate ... racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination.” This amounts to a blanket rejection of any and all funding related in any way to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) or similar or related programs, as the administration has repeatedly labeled DEI programs in exactly those terms.

This proposal effectively demands that any grant applicant act as it racism does not exist. An administration that cut refugee admission slots by 94% and reserved most of the 7,500 remaining for white Afrikaners “fleeing” a non-existent “white genocide” in South Africa and then added 10,000 more, all of them for Afrikaners, may embrace that concept. Rational humans do not. This denial of social reality in the proposal must not be accepted.

For another, those same apparatchiks are supposed to scan for any hint of “[g]ender ideology [including] theories or ideologies that deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans, or endorse or advocate for the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic.” Meanwhile, the proposed rule refers to gender transition as “so-called,” bars all gender-affirming care for anyone under 19, and calls standard, well-established, medical treatment protocols as “chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”

This, bluntly, is attempting to write pseudoscientific nonsense with no greater grip on reality than that held by Holocaust deniers into the federal regulatory framework. It must not be allowed.

But there is yet another danger here. The regulation explicitly instructs the political appointees to screen for “denial by the recipient of the sex binary, etc.” Note: not a denial in the grant or grant application, but by the recipient. I am prepared to assume that those who drafted the proposed rule are aware of the meaning of their words, and if the intent had been to limit the screening to the grant request, it would have been easy enough to say so. But it doesn’t. It says “recipient,” clearly suggesting that the entire institution, organization, research center, or other entity making the request must be expunged of such unacceptable “ideology” or be denied funding.

So just as some entities must behave as racism does not exist, those here must behave as is transgender people do not exist, must not be mentioned, even by suggestion, even indirectly, even from areas unrelated to the funding.

Enough. This proposed rule change is not about “transparency, accountability, [or] oversight.” It is about writing racism and transphobia into federal regulations while giving a cabal of hand-picked presidential acolytes the power of near total control over discretionary federal grants and the control of scientific research that provides. It is unconscionable and must be rejected.