For decades, physicists have grappled with a fundamental mystery of the universe.
They wanted to know why some particles – like protons in atoms – have mass, while particles of light do not. Whatever the reason, it was crucial to understanding the origins of planets, galaxies and life itself.
The main theory held that particles obtained their mass by interacting with an invisible field, later dubbed the Higgs field, but no one had ever been able to prove its existence.
This would require one of the most ambitious international collaborations in scientific history. Decades ago, thousands of scientists from dozens of countries worked side by side, even though some of their countries considered each other adversaries. The United States provided a quarter of the labor and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
The investment paid off in 2012, when the team detected the so-called “god particle” or Higgs boson, confirming the half-century-old theory of the Higgs field. The achievement was so great that two of the physicists behind the theory won the Nobel Prize.
Below a new rule proposed by the Trump administrationAmerican scientists may be forced to observe similar discoveries from the sidelines. The proposal would restrict international collaboration and give policymakers the ability to decide what research is most important to fund, as well as the power to pull the plug at any time, for any reason.
As soon as he learned of this proposal, one of the American scientists who participated in this historic project quickly filed his objection with the federal government.
“These experiments take decades to build and require cooperative and sustained international investment,” professor of physics at the University of Chicago. David W. Miller wrote in a public comment. “The experiments will continue, without American leadership. (…) The United States will not just fall behind. It will withdraw.”
The implications of this rule go far beyond physics. Proposed by the Office of Management and Budget, a little-known but powerful White House arm that guides federal spending, the plan would give administration political appointees at dozens of federal agencies significant discretion over how grants are awarded and terminated. Appointees do not need to know anything about the science or topics of the grants they are reviewing.
Russell Vought, who heads the office and expanded presidential control on federal spending, one of his main goals, has put that philosophy into practice over the past two years, helping to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and, in another controversial move, block funds already allocated by Congress. Vought’s decision last year to cancel 284 Department of Energy grants was drawn renewed criticism after an agency lawyer recently admitted to court records that the terminations were “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state” – in other words, blue states.
The rule would cover at least hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies, touching everything from food stamps and housing assistance to small business loans and arts funding. Many cities, states and nonprofits rely on federal grants in their annual budget. Representatives of domestic violence organizations And museums and the attorneys general of 22 states are among those who opposed the rule.
Vought’s office wants the final version of the rule to take effect on October 1. Before that happens, OMB must consider the nearly 500,000 public comments that have poured in since the rule was announced in late May and address or respond to the substantive criticisms.
An OMB spokesperson told ProPublica that “the proposed rule will ensure that spending is aligned with existing law, executive orders, and agency priorities.” It is “fundamentally a matter of accountability to the American people and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. This will not disrupt major scientific research or supplant the peer review process – any claims to the contrary are based on fallacious assumptions.”
But thousands of public comments came from scientists, who warn that the rule, as written, would significantly curtail their work in treating pediatric cancers, improving maternal health and advancing basic research.
America’s world-renowned science funding system places decisions in the hands of subject matter experts who choose recipients based on a rigorous, merit-based, peer-review process with minimal political interference. Physicists examine proposals from other physicists; oncologists, those of other oncologists. Larger projects receive regular funding over several years, so that researchers can hire staff, design and purchase equipment, and engage with other institutions or people involved, such as patients undergoing treatment.
Few discoveries better illustrate what this system has made possible than that of the Higgs boson, considered one of the most important scientific triumphs of the 21st century.
Miller brought ProPublica into his project, highlighting how the new rule could jeopardize similar projects in the future.
“The United States built the greatest scientific enterprise in human history on a simple idea: fund the best ideas, chosen by the best experts, and get out of the way,” he said in his public comment. “This proposed rule dismantles that principle entirely, and it does so in a way that will cause immediate, concrete, and in many cases irreversible harm to American science. »
Miller, 43, said he owes his entire career to government investments in research and education.
He grew up in Chicago and attended public schools. Neither of his parents went to college. Her mother was the first female paramedic hired by the Chicago Fire Department. His father, a firefighter, did construction work on his days off. Miller loved building things in his father’s workshop. He made shelves for his bunk bed and burned his own circuit board in high school.
At the University of Chicago, where Miller enrolled after winning a scholarship for students whose parents worked as police officers or firefighters, he chose to study physics and quickly became interested in questions such as: Why do objects with mass behave differently from light? Why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? Miller said his father used to sit in his firehouse, cutting out newspaper articles about dark matter and black holes to send to his son.
As an undergraduate, Miller began doing research at CERN, an international physics laboratory near Geneva founded after World War II to facilitate ambitious experiments and build bridges between recently adversarial countries. After graduating, he found a job there as a research technician.
Working in a cavern 300 feet underground, he crawled through tunnels, connecting electrical cables and screwing pieces of steel together. He was helping build the machines needed to test a theory that scientists had been pursuing since the 1960s.
Physicists have long theorized that an invisible energy field gives mass to particles like protons while leaving particles of light – photons – massless. To test this theory, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, would smash hundreds of billions of protons at nearly the speed of light. Miller had built one of the massive and complex cameras needed to detect the Higgs boson created by colliding protons. Later, he worked to unravel the messy data.
Miller was one of nearly 2,000 American scientists who worked on the initiative. Three U.S. national laboratories built components for the collider in-house before shipping them to CERN. Federal agencies have invested $531 million in construction and other services. Additional grants were awarded to individual scientists. Miller’s role as a technician and support for his research when he earned a doctorate in physics from Stanford University were both funded by the National Science Foundation, one of the major government agencies supporting basic scientific research.
Federal grants cannot be canceled without cause, and the reliability of that funding is crucial, Miller said. But the new OMB rule would allow termination with minimal explanation or opportunity for appeal.
This threat “is a tool of political coercion,” Miller wrote in his opposition to the rule. “It says to all American scientists: Your funding is only safe as long as your work, your institution or your public statements remain acceptable to the current administration.”
An additional threat comes from prohibiting researchers from using federal funds to “support certain foreign collaborations involving covered foreign countries or covered foreign entities.” The rule provides limited exceptions, including collaborations authorized by federal law and those in which an agency head “determines that the activity does not pose a risk to national security.” An OMB spokesperson did not provide a list of countries covered or respond to ProPublica’s questions about how the provision would be enforced.
More than 60 countries contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Indian engineers tested the superconducting magnets used in the collider. Russian scientists collected spent artillery shells from World War II p to procure the huge quantities of brass needed for one of the particle detectors. Various countries are contributing to ongoing improvements to the collider, including special magnets from China, crystals from Italy and cast iron shielding from Pakistan.
Some scientists working at CERN come from countries like China, where the The Trump administration has already restricted researcher collaboration with. And it’s unclear how easily others could find themselves on the opponents’ list. Since the start of his second term, President Donald Trump has engaged in public battles with a long list of leaders of U.S. allies, such as the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain and Canada.
Strict limits on international partnerships go against the way science has worked for centuries, said Chris Llewellyn Smith, former director of CERN and emeritus professor of physics at the University of Oxford. The Royal Society of London, a scientific academy founded in the 1600s, appointed a foreign minister corresponding with scientists from other countries almost 60 years before the British government appointed a foreign minister to oversee international relations, he noted.
The global conflict has already damaged the atmosphere of collaboration at CERN, Llewellyn Smith said. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, CERN’s governing body voted to ban scientists affiliated with Russian labs — a decision that damaged the careers of Russian scientists and deprived CERN of the equipment and manpower that Russia could provide to future experiences.
If the United States also backs away from limits on its collaboration with foreign scientists, Llewellyn Smith warns, it “could put the entire future of high-energy physics at risk.”
This may seem abstract to many Americans. But the technological developments necessary for the study of particle physics lead to unexpected discoveries.
A CERN engineer pioneered a touch screen in the 1970s while building research instruments. The World World Web was invented by a CERN scientist which was trying to share data between different institutions. Smaller particle accelerators are used for manufacturing and cancer therapies.
Practical applications may take generations to surface. Take the GPS technology that powers the maps in our phones, Miller said. It depends on century-old equations formulated by Albert Einstein. “I guarantee you that Einstein wasn’t thinking about your ability to find Starbucks this morning when he wrote the theory of special relativity and the theory of general relativity.”
The OMB says this rule is necessary to prevent waste, fraud and ideological bias.
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank whose work cites OMB, welcomed the proposed changes in a recent column. Empowering political appointees establishes a “kind of adult oversight” that ensures “the taxpayer funds the activity he or she votes for at election time,” the columnist wrote.
But critics say the changes are aimed at solving problems that don’t exist or don’t require such a blunt tool.
The rule repeatedly cites “woke” funding decisions during President Joe Biden’s tenure as grounds for reform. “Federal grants were politicized by the last administration to promote a far-left DEI agenda,” an agency spokesperson told ProPublica in an email, referring to initiatives promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.
The rule is linked to a 2024 report by Senate Republicans that summarized — based on a keyword search for terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture” — $2 billion in National Science Foundation grants that they said supported “radical policy perspectives.” The ProPublica report found that many projects simply referred to existing social inequalities or involved unrelated terms flagged by the committee’s crude methodology. One of them was a study of the evolution of mint plants.
Fraud in federal science funding does exist, but it is relatively rare. National Science Foundation investigators have recovered about $54 million in fraud cases involving universities, nonprofits and small businesses over the past 10 years, according to a spokesperson for the agency’s Office of Inspector General. That’s an average of $5.4 million per year, a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars the NSF awards in grants each year.
Although the administration believes these problems deserve reform, legal experts question whether the OMB has the authority to impose this solution. The final rule will almost certainly face litigation, they say.
The lawsuits will challenge OMB’s ability to prescribe the content of individual grants, said Kali Murray, a law professor at Marquette University who specializes in the intersection of administrative law and intellectual property law. “This is a Russ Vought initiative to expand the power of this office, as the proposal allows OMB to override existing congressional statutes that govern agency spending,” she said.
For example, the ban on DEI in the proposed rule appears to conflict with a status that directs the National Science Foundation to expand “the participation of underrepresented populations,” particularly women, black and Hispanic researchers, in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Murray said. Federal funding of physics has been less of a policy objective than subsidies linked to health disparities, racial inequality And LGBTQ+ communities – areas that the administration describes as “woke” or “illegal DEI”. But at least several grants intended to support early-career physicists from underrepresented backgrounds have been cut.
Any changes resulting from litigation could take time; lawsuits cannot be filed until the final text of the rule is published.
The next presidential administration could address this through a formal rulemaking process. This process could also take years.
Pressure from congressional leaders, particularly Republicans, may be the only way to force OMB to make serious revisions before releasing the final version of the rule this fall. Democrats in Congress registered their opposition. The same goes for Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who sent a letter to Vought asking the OMB to remove parts of the rule “that would unduly burden scientific and biomedical research and small communities.”
Collins particularly disagreed with the provision that would allow political appointees to review grant proposals, noting that it would defeat the purpose of awarding funds “on the basis of scientific merit and value, rather than political ideology.”