Today the AAMC submitted a comment letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) regarding a proposed rule that seeks to overhaul the Uniform Guidance, a framework that governs federal financial assistance awards including all federal research grants.
In its letter, the AAMC emphasizes its deep concern about the impact of these proposed regulations on science, patients, and the academic medicine community. The association strongly urges the OMB to rescind the proposal in its entirety.
“American science survives changes in politics because of the guardrails Congress and the executive branch have historically left in place,” wrote David J. Skorton, MD, AAMC President and CEO, in a recent STAT First Opinion article. “I have never seen a threat to those guardrails like the one now sitting on the table at the Office of Management and Budget.”
As a whole, the proposed rule fails to demonstrate how the revisions would meaningfully improve the current system for the awarding, oversight, and management of federal financial assistance, and in fact, would introduce ambiguity and instability into processes on which recipients and the American public currently rely. The OMB proposal could:
- Hinder agencies’ ability to fund the most promising scientific research.
- Disincentivize researchers from proposing groundbreaking science for fear the research could be terminated at any time.
- Disrupt existing and future research-accelerating collaborations.
- Threaten enrollment in clinical trials or leave patients without options if the research is terminated.
The full AAMC comment letter is available here
- I’ve spent 40 years in research. I have never seen a threat to science like the new grantmaking rule | STATFirst Opinion, June 12, 2026
- Grantmaking overhaul threatens U.S. research | Axios, June 25, 2026
- OMB proposed rule to revise the Uniform Guidance | aamc.org
- How to submit a comment: Protect the science-driven process for advancing American research | aamcaction.org
Past AAMC press releases and other media re
The AAMC is a nonprofit association dedicated to improving the health of people everywhere through medical education, clinical care, biomedical research, and community collaborations. Its members are all 163 U.S. medical schools accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education; 13 Canadian medical schools accredited by the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools; nearly 500 academic health systems and teaching hospitals, including Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers; and more than 70 academic societies. Through these institutions and organizations, the AAMC leads and serves America’s medical schools, academic health systems and teaching hospitals, and the millions of individuals across academic medicine, including more than 210,000 full-time faculty members, 99,000 medical students, 162,000 resident physicians, and 60,000 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the biomedical sciences. Through the Alliance of Academic Health Centers International, AAMC membership reaches more than 60 international academic health centers throughout five regional offices across the globe.
