Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance

Proposed OMB rule revising the Uniform Guidance for federal financial assistance (2 CFR, including §200.205 and §200.340) that commenters describe as shifting grant review and funding decisions from independent expert peer review toward political appointees, adding ideological conditions on awards, and restricting allowable costs.
OMB Docket: OMB-2026-0034
🎯 How accurate is this? → A language model assigns every position on this page, and it is sometimes wrong. We labelled 200 comments by hand to measure it — see the score, the corrected split, and every judgement we made. 📖 Read the Rule → Browse the proposed rule text section by section and see which comments cite each §200.xx — colored by whether they support or oppose.
Overview
167,864
Total Comments
41,965
In 770 Campaigns
8,629
With Attachments
May 29, 2026 to August 17, 2026
Date Range
Position
96%
Oppose (161,637)
3.1%
Support (5,228)
0.6%
Unclear (999)
Topics
68,581
Peer Review
10,048
DEI
9,667
Vought / Administration
355
Joint / Coalition Letter

Who Submitted

130,488
Individual/Other
22,829
Researcher/Academic
10,144
Patient/Family/Public Health
2,470
Nonprofit/Advocacy Organization
715
University or Research Institution
603
Scientific/Professional Society
422
Industry/Business
193
Elected Official

Top Concerns

Oppose Support Click a concern to filter the table
Politicization of grant decisions
123,070 · 100% oppose / 0% support
Undermines peer review / merit-based funding
108,702 · 100% oppose / 0% support
Scientific integrity and independence
82,234 · 100% oppose / 0% support
Chilling effect on researchers / careers
71,681 · 100% oppose / 0% support
Harm to U.S. scientific leadership / competitiveness
70,149 · 100% oppose / 0% support
Harm to public health and medical research
57,343 · 100% oppose / 0% support
Ideological / viewpoint conditions (DEI, 'woke')
47,448 · 99% oppose / 1% support
Administrative burden or unworkable requirements
45,883 · 100% oppose / 0% support
Separation of powers / rule of law
35,770 · 100% oppose / 0% support
Restrictions on allowable costs
29,426 · 100% oppose / 0% support
Waste, fraud, abuse, and accountability
12,085 · 61% oppose / 39% support

Form Letter Campaigns

41,965 comments (25%) detected across 770 form letter campaigns using text similarity analysis. Bar color shows each campaign's aggregated member stance. Click a bar to see the canonical version.

Oppose Support
#1 Dear Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, I urge OMB to preser…
7,901 similar (3 exact)
#2 Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance Regulation OMB-2026-0034-0…
6,245 similar (855 exact)
#3 I support the Office of Management and Budget's proposed reforms to st…
4,083 similar (3,800 exact)
#4 [200.205, 200.340, 200.341, 200.432, 200.454, 200.461] I am writing in…
3,528 similar (619 exact)
#5 Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance Regulation OMB-2026-0034-0…
1,106 similar (855 exact)
#6 I urge OMB to withdraw its proposed rule on federal financial assistan…
1,015 similar (73 exact)
#7 The United States was built on the principle of independence. The beau…
902 similar (735 exact)
#8 RE: Regulation for Financial Federal Assistance, Docket ID OMB-2026-00…
709 similar (3 exact)
#9 I oppose this proposed rule, because the Trump administration shouldn’…
676 similar (607 exact)
#10 As a Volunteer Advocate with the American Foundation for Suicide Preve…
642 similar (568 exact)
#11 I am writing in opposition to this proposed rule. I support NASA and s…
485 similar (427 exact)
#12 Comments on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Notice of Propos…
478 similar (3 exact)
#13 Dear Mr. Vought, As a member of the American Academy of Neurology, I'd…
422 similar (4 exact)
#14 I am writing to express my staunch opposition to the Office of Managem…
377 similar (244 exact)
#15 I oppose the proposed OMB rule that replaces scientific peer review wi…
363 similar (219 exact)

+ 755 smaller campaigns

CFR Sections Referenced

Top 15 of 161 cfr sections cited across comments. Bar color shows the oppose/support split of citing comments. Click a bar to filter the table.

Oppose Support
200.205
26,070
200.340
23,442
200.432
13,813
200.461
12,287
200.454
10,189
200.220
7,092
200.202
7,023
200.300
5,918
200.341
4,802
200.206
3,807
200.218
3,235
200.450
2,327
200.421
2,267
200.204
1,472
200.343
1,124

Comments

Download everything

Click any row to see full details. Showing 167,864 comments. “Download CSV” gives the columns and rows currently shown; “Download everything” gives every comment with every field, including the original regulations.gov columns (gzipped CSV).
Generated
August 17, 2026 at 03:34 PM
Model
gpt-5.4-nano
Total Comments
167,864
Date Range
May 29, 2026 to August 17, 2026

Comments were classified with an LLM (gpt-5.4-nano) plus a second-pass verification, and near-identical form letters are grouped into campaigns. Automated classification may contain errors.
Built with generic-comment-analyzer · source on GitHub

Changelog
  • 2026-08-17Updated to 167,864 comments (+99 new).
  • 2026-08-15Corrected the position shown on 161 comments, and audited the rest. A reader pointed out that the Data Foundation's comment — which asks for more time to review the proposal rather than backing or objecting to it — was marked as supporting the rule. Two definitions caused it. “Unclear” had been reserved for comments that were off-topic or unreadable, so a comment that engaged with the subject but took no position had nowhere to go. And “Support” counted agreement with the rule's goals, so wanting less waste or more oversight registered as supporting the rule even when the comment never mentioned it. Both were rewritten: “Unclear” now covers comments that are procedural, that only describe the rule, or that argue for something the rule claims to address without endorsing it; “Support” now requires endorsing the rule or one of its provisions. Every comment labeled Support was then re-checked against its own text and re-run where the two disagreed, moving 161 comments — support falls from 3.23% to 3.11%, oppose is unchanged at 96.29%. A separate check of 2,500 comments labeled “Oppose” found about 1.2% that do not appear to oppose the rule, which would be roughly 1,900 comments across the docket. Those have NOT been corrected: with 161,000 comments carrying that label, re-running all of them to fix a 1.2% error was not worth the cost, and we could not find a cheap way to identify which ones to re-check. Keyword screens were tried — the best flagged 9% of comments to catch only 41% of the errors — because plenty of genuine opposition never uses words like “oppose” (for example, “Do not let political appointees determine what scientific research is funded”). So treat individual “Oppose” labels as roughly 99% reliable rather than exact. Method, figures, and the audit tool: METHOD-stance-audit.md in the repository.
  • 2026-08-15Updated to 167,765 comments (+10,107 new).
  • 2026-08-14Updated to 157,658 comments (+82,715 new). OMB released the backlog: most of these were received on 13 July, the day the comment period closed.
  • 2026-08-14Updated to 74,943 comments (+2,742 new).
  • 2026-08-13Updated to 72,201 comments (+200 new).
  • 2026-08-12Updated to 72,001 comments (+571 new).
  • 2026-08-12Updated to 71,430 comments (+816 new).
  • 2026-08-12Updated to 70,614 comments (+205 new).
  • 2026-08-11Updated to 70,409 comments (+3,018 new).
  • 2026-08-10Updated to 67,391 comments (+1,982 new).
  • 2026-08-07Corrected the “Identified As” name shown on some comments. Comments with identical wording are analyzed once and the result shared across them, but that analysis also saw the submitter's name — so when several people submitted exactly the same text, one of their names could appear on the others' comments. A name (and any state inferred from it) is now kept only when it actually appears in that person's own submission. This corrected about 5,700 comments; positions, concerns, and campaign grouping were not affected.
  • 2026-08-07Updated to 65,409 comments (+1,000 new).
  • 2026-08-07Updated to 64,409 comments (+2,294 new).
  • 2026-08-05Updated to 62,115 comments (+590 new).
  • 2026-08-04Updated to 61,525 comments (+280 new).
  • 2026-08-04Updated to 61,245 comments (+827 new).
  • 2026-08-01The comment table now lists every submission. It previously collapsed identical comment texts into one row, so the table showed 52,511 rows against 60,418 comments — its row count, its filters and its CSV download all quietly undercounted, and anyone who sent a form letter could not find their own comment. Near-identical letters are still grouped and summarized as campaigns.
  • 2026-08-01Added a "Download everything" button. The existing Download CSV button gives the table as filtered on screen; the new one gives every comment with every field — the original regulations.gov columns (submitter, city, state, ZIP, dates, tracking number, attachment files) alongside everything this tool derives (position, concerns, entity type, campaign, quotes, rationale), one row per submission. Both buttons now explain themselves on hover.
  • 2026-07-31Updated to 60,418 comments (+703 new).
  • 2026-07-30Updated to 59,715 comments (+1,640 new).
  • 2026-07-30Stopped reading duplicate copies of the same attachment. regulations.gov stores a submitter's original file alongside a PDF rendition of it, and both were being read, so around 700 comments had their attachment text counted twice. Each upload is now read once, preferring the format least likely to need optical character recognition. One comment's stance was corrected as a result.
  • 2026-07-29Recovered the text of ~130 attachments that previously extracted to nothing — scanned PDFs with no text layer, text drawn as vector outlines, and files whose fonts carried no readable character map. Comment count unchanged; the text behind it is more complete. One comment was reclassified from oppose to support once its 21-page attachment could be read.
  • 2026-07-29Updated to 58,075 comments (+1,086 new).
  • 2026-07-28Updated to 56,989 comments (+879 new).
  • 2026-07-27Updated to 56,110 comments (+1,056 new).
  • 2026-07-23Updated to 55,054 comments (+897 new).
  • 2026-07-23Updated to 54,157 comments (+154 new).
  • 2026-07-18Corrected a data-processing error that had mislabeled the largest support form-letter campaign (~2,400 comments) as opposed. Root cause: the regulations.gov export assigns the same Document ID to a few different comments, which crossed some classifications during a data rebuild. Fixed by matching each comment's classification to its own text, and hardened so duplicate IDs are handled automatically going forward. Stance totals restored to 94% oppose / 5% support.
  • 2026-07-16Updated to 54,003 comments (+822 new).
  • 2026-07-15Improved form-letter grouping: very short, generic one-line comments are no longer counted as coordinated campaigns, and campaigns whose text lives in an attachment are now labeled by the attached letter instead of “See attached file(s).”
  • 2026-07-15Updated to the latest set of public comments (53,181 total).