For decades, physicists wrestled with a fundamental mystery of the universe.
They wanted to know why certain particles — like the protons in atoms — have mass, while particles of light do not. Whatever the reason was, it was crucial to understanding the origins of planets, galaxies and life itself.
The leading theory stated that particles got their mass from interacting with an invisible field, later dubbed the Higgs field, but no one had ever been able to prove it existed.
Doing so would require one of the most ambitious international collaborations in scientific history. Starting decades ago, thousands of scientists from dozens of countries worked side by side, even though some of their nations considered one another adversaries. The United States contributed a quarter of the workforce 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 Higgs field theory. The achievement was so significant that two of the physicists behind the theory won the Nobel Prize.
Under a new rule proposed by the Trump administration, American scientists might be forced to watch similar discoveries from the sidelines. The proposal would restrict international collaboration and give political appointees the ability to decide the most important research to fund, and the power to pull the plug at any time, for any reason.
As soon as he learned about the proposal, one of the U.S. scientists who took part in the landmark project rushed to file his objection with the federal government.
“These experiments take decades to build and require sustained, cooperative international investment,” University of Chicago physics professor 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 step aside.”
The rule’s implications reach far beyond physics. Proposed by the Office of Management and Budget, a little-known but powerful part of the White House that guides federal spending, it would give the administration’s political appointees across dozens of federal agencies significant discretion over how grants are awarded and terminated. The appointees don’t have to know anything about science or the subjects of the grants they’re reviewing.
Russell Vought, who runs the office and has made expanding presidential control over federal spending one of his signature goals, has put the philosophy into practice over the past two years, helping to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and, in another controversial move, blocking funds already allocated by Congress. Vought’s decision last year to cancel 284 Department of Energy grants drew renewed criticism after an agency lawyer recently admitted in 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 grants, touching everything from food stamp benefits and housing assistance to small business loans and funding for the arts. Many cities, states and nonprofits rely on federal grants in their annual budgets. Representatives of domestic violence organizations and museums and the attorneys general of 22 states are among those who have objected to the rule.
Vought’s office wants the final version of the rule to take effect on Oct. 1. Before that happens, the OMB must consider the nearly 500,000 public comments that have flooded in since the rule was announced in late May and address or respond to substantive critiques.
An OMB spokesperson told ProPublica that the “proposed rule will ensure spending is aligned with current law, Executive Orders, and agency priorities.” This is “fundamentally about accountability to the American people and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. It will not disrupt major scientific research or supplant the peer review process — any claims to the contrary are based on spurious assumptions.”
But thousands of public comments come from scientists, who warn that the rule, as written, would severely curtail their work treating pediatric cancers, improving maternal health and advancing fundamental research.
The United States’ world-renowned system of funding science entrusts decisions to subject-matter experts who choose grantees based on a rigorous, merit-based peer-review process, with minimum political interference. Physicists vet proposals from other physicists; oncologists, those of other oncologists. Larger projects get steady funding through multiple years, so that researchers can hire staff, design and purchase equipment, and make commitments to other involved institutions or people, such as patients undergoing treatments.
Few discoveries better illustrate what that system made possible than that of the Higgs boson, considered one of the most significant scientific triumphs of the 21st century.
Miller took ProPublica inside the endeavor, highlighting ways the new rule could imperil 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 ways 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 went to public schools. Neither of his parents went to college. His mother was the first female paramedic hired by the Chicago Fire Department. His father, a firefighter, did construction work on his days off. Miller liked building stuff in his dad’s workroom. He made shelves for his bunk bed and etched his own circuit board in high school.
At the University of Chicago, where Miller enrolled after winning a full-ride scholarship for students whose parents worked as police officers or firefighters, he chose to study physics and soon became interested in questions such as: Why do things with mass behave differently from light? Why is there more matter than anti-matter in the universe? Miller said his dad used to sit in his firehouse, clipping newspaper stories on dark matter and black holes to send to his son.
As an undergrad, Miller began doing research at CERN, an international physics laboratory near Geneva that was founded after World War II to facilitate ambitious experiments and build bridges between countries that had recently been adversaries. He took a job there after graduation as a research technician.
Working in a cavern 300 feet underground, he crawled through tunnels, connecting power cables and screwing pieces of steel together. He was helping build the machinery needed to test a theory scientists had been chasing since the 1960s.
Physicists had long theorized that an invisible field of energy gives mass to particles like protons while leaving particles of light — photons — massless. To test the theory, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, would smash hundreds of billions of protons together at nearly the speed of light. Miller had been building one of the massive, intricate cameras needed to detect the Higgs boson created by colliding protons. Later, he worked to disentangle the messy data.
Miller was one of nearly 2,000 scientists from the U.S. who worked on the initiative. Three U.S. national labs built components for the collider in-house before shipping them to CERN. Federal agencies invested $531 million into construction and other services. Additional grants went to individual scientists. Miller’s technician role 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 main government agencies that supports basic scientific research.
Federal grants can’t be canceled without cause, and the reliability of that funding was crucial, Miller said. But the new OMB rule would allow termination with minimal explanation or opportunities for appeal.
That threat “is a tool for political coercion,” Miller wrote in his opposition to the rule. “It tells every scientist in America: your funding is safe only as long as your work, your institution, or your public statements remain acceptable to the current administration.”
An additional threat comes from the rule’s prohibition of researchers using federal funds to “support certain foreign collaborations involving covered foreign countries or covered foreign entities.” The rule accounts for limited exceptions, including collaborations allowed by federal statute 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 covered countries or respond to ProPublica’s questions about how the provision would be enforced.
More than 60 nations contributed to the Higgs boson discovery. Engineers from India tested superconducting magnets used in the collider. Russian scientists collected spent artillery shells from World War II to source the huge amounts of brass needed for one of the particle detectors. Various countries are contributing to ongoing upgrades for the collider, including special magnets from China, crystals from Italy and cast-iron shielding from Pakistan.
Some of the scientists working at CERN come from countries like China that the Trump administration has already restricted researchers from collaborating with. And it’s unclear how easily others might find themselves listed as adversaries. Since the beginning of his second term, President Donald Trump has picked public fights with a long list of leaders from U.S. allies, such as the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain and Canada.
Strict limits on international partnerships fly in the face of how science has worked for centuries, said Chris Llewellyn Smith, a former CERN director who is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Oxford. The Royal Society of London, a scientific academy founded in the 1600s, appointed a foreign secretary to correspond with scientists from other countries nearly 60 years before the British government appointed a foreign secretary to oversee international relations, he noted.
Global conflict has already degraded the collaborative atmosphere at CERN, Llewellyn Smith said. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, CERN’s governing body voted to ban scientists affiliated with Russian labs — a move that has harmed the careers of Russian scientists and deprived CERN of the hardware and labor Russia could contribute to future experiments.
If the U.S. also retreats due to limits on working with foreign scientists, Llewellyn Smith warned, it “could jeopardize the whole future of high-energy physics.”
That may feel abstract to many Americans. But the technological developments required to study particle physics lead to unexpected discoveries.
A CERN engineer pioneered a touch screen in the 1970s while building research instrumentation. The World World Web was invented by a scientist at CERN who was trying to share data between different institutions. Smaller particle accelerators are used for manufacturing and cancer therapies.
The practical applications may take generations to surface. Take the GPS technology that powers the maps on 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 down the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity.”
The OMB says the rule is necessary to prevent waste, fraud and ideological bias.
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank whose work the OMB cites, praised the proposed changes in a recent column. Empowering political appointees establishes the “kind of adult supervision” that ensures “the taxpayer is funding the activity that he votes for at election time,” the columnist wrote.
But critics say the changes aim to solve problems that either don’t exist or don’t require such a blunt-force tool.
The rule repeatedly cites “woke” funding decisions under President Joe Biden’s tenure as a reason 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 links to a 2024 report from Senate Republicans that summarized — based on a keyword search of terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture” — $2 billion in National Science Foundation grants they said were supporting “radical political perspectives.” ProPublica’s reporting found that many of the projects simply referenced existing social inequities or involved unrelated terms flagged by the committee’s crude methodology. One was a study of the evolution of mint plants.
Fraud in federal science funding does exist, but it’s relatively rare. Investigators at the National Science Foundation have recovered about $54 million from fraud cases involving universities, nonprofits and small businesses over the past 10 years, according to a spokesperson from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. That’s an average of $5.4 million a year — a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars the NSF gives out in grants every year.
Even if the administration believes those problems warrant reform, legal experts question whether the OMB has the authority to impose this solution. The final rule will almost certainly be subject to litigation, they say.
Lawsuits will challenge the 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 and intellectual property law. “This is a hall of famer move by Russ Vought” to expand the power of that office, as the proposal allows the OMB to override existing congressional statutes that govern agency spending, she said.
For instance, the proposed rule’s prohibition of DEI appears to conflict with a statute that directs the National Science Foundation to broaden “participation of underrepresented populations,” especially women, Black and Hispanic researchers, in science, technology, engineering and math, Murray said. Federal physics funding has been less of a political target than grants related to health disparities, racial inequities and LGBTQ+ communities — areas the administration derides as “woke” or “illegal DEI.” But at least several grants designed to support early-career physicists from underrepresented backgrounds have been terminated.
Any change through litigation could take time; lawsuits can’t be filed until the final text of the rule is published.
The next presidential administration could undo it through a formal rulemaking process. That process, too, could take years.
Pressure from congressional leaders, particularly Republicans, might be the only way to compel the OMB to make serious revisions before it releases the final version of the rule this fall. Democrats in Congress have registered their opposition. So has Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who sent a letter to Vought asking the OMB to withdraw parts of the rule “that would unduly burden scientific and biomedical research and small communities.”
Collins took particular issue with the provision that would allow political appointees to review grant proposals, noting that it would undermine the goal of awarding funds “based on scientific merit and value, rather than political ideology.”
This story originally appeared on ProPublica
