The paper describes the perspective of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services on special education research. The process for reviewing research proposals is explained, along with procedures for selecting experts in the field for creating registers of reviewers. Also discussed are the number of points allocated to different criteria in the proposal review process, the difficulty in communicating federal government intentions to researchers, budgetary concerns, continuation proposals, and priority areas in special education research. The transcript of a question-and-answer session is appended to the paper and focuses on how research priorities are established, the balance between directed competitions and field-initiated competitions for federal grants, and ways in which feedback on proposed priorities is acquired is discussed. (JDD)