Two notes on Senate activities this week (goodish news first).

(1) The Senate is trying to pause the OMB rule change, and (2) a committee voted to hold Dr. Fauci in criminal contempt.

Senate to freeze OMB rule change

We did it (kinda)!¹

The Senate is proposing a Continuing Resolution² that would stop the OMB rewrite of grants rules for the duration of the funding extension (December 11). That means that NSF's rush to comply is definitely premature. I plan to urge NSF to do a first pass at a new PAPPG independent of the OMB proposed changes (and include my comment tracking number for the OMB docket). I will reiterate a few big points from my comment on the OMB docket - mainly that eliminating fixed-cost grants will f@(# everything up.

• Read more about the Senate's proposed CR on the Federal News Network.

If you haven't commented on the proposed NSF PAPPG changes yet, remember the deadline is August 24th. There is a webinar aimed at comment-writing that you will want to have on your radar:

August 18, 1 PM Eastern Time: Webinar led by Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) and science policy expert Kei Koizumi, who has written on the proposal for the Union of Concerned Scientists

You don't want to miss hearing from Kei Koizumei because:

• He served in the Executive Office of the President in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in both Obama's and Biden's administrations.
• Most recently, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy Director for Science, Society, and Policy (and that's after a 10-month stint as Chief of Staff) in Biden's OSTP.
• He is THE authority on the federal budget as it pertains to science and technology R&D spending.

I'll bang the drum again: the Senate only got as far as pausing the OMB rule change, not killing it outright. So if you haven't written to your Members of Congress, this is a good time to add more pressure to permanently reject the OMB rules package. A short letter to your member might look like this:

Dear Senator McComb,

The Office of Management and Budget rule change (docket OMB-2026-0034) would be distastrous for science. For me, personally, it would drastically curtail my experiments in manipulating time---experiments that may one day enable time travel. This kind of scientific achievement is critical for national security, the economy, and even the entertainment industry.

I left comments that go into greater detail on the docket OMB-2026-0034 (tracking number #########) as well as a comment on the related Docket (NSF-2026-OTR-0001; tracking number #########).

The Senate has added a pause to the OMB rule change as part of the continuing resolution that would keep the government funded through December 11, 2026. But the pause expires with the CR, so I urge you to act now to permanently reject the OMB changes.

Your Constituent, Dr. Hans Kleindast

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) holds Dr. Fauci in Criminal Contempt

Given ::waves hands:: everything, the outcome of the vote Thursday morning isn't surprising. But it is consequential: can you imagine any scientist, mathematician, or technical expert being willing to serve as a political appointee if a single member of Congress can mount a vendetta and actually win? If the criminal contempt vote is upheld by the courts, Fauci faces jail time and fines.

Okay, so a few things about the Senate and holding someone in contempt:

• It takes a 3/5 majority of the entire Senate to vote affirmatively to hold someone in contempt
• Rand Paul is the current chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (the successor of the Committee on Government Operations that Senator Joseph McCarthy---yes, that McCarthy---weaponized against the U.S. Army in 1953-1954³) and decided to skip that step and just hold a HSGAC hearing.
• I watched the part of the hearing where the clerk called the roll. There were 8 Republican members, but only 5 of the 7 Democratic members where there (Senators Gallego and Slotkin were missing at the time of the vote).
• No surprise, the vote to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt was split on party lines. At 8 to 5, that is just over 61% of the committee, so the 60% threshold of something was met, where something is the committee membership instead of the full Senate. If Senators Gallego or Slotkin had been present, the committee would have been just shy of 60%.⁴

When the nicely formatted transcript comes out, you'll see quite a bit of back and forth with the Democratic minority trying to stop this, or at least postpone it---here's my unofficial transcript, prepared using the captions. I was a fellow with Senator Peters's HSGAC staff, and I appreciate how hard he was trying to cash in all the goodwill he extended to Senator Paul when he was the chair and Paul was the ranking member. It was frustrating to see how dismissive Paul was.

Anyway! If you like a little drama, Senate-style, you can watch the hearing (I suggest starting around the 19 minute mark; the Fauci part of the business meeting wraps up around the 55 minute mark).