I’m a bit late to the party, but this news is not widely known. I don’t remember seeing it in the MSM, but here are two article about it in Science (first) and then Nature (second). Click each to read.
The National Scienc Foundation (NSF) is an important organization for funding non-medical science, and, as Wikipedia notes:
With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States’ colleges and universities.[4][5] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.
In contrast, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a budget nearly three times as large, but their object is medical research. For some reason, Dick Lewontin (my Ph.D. advisor) managed to get the NIH to fund evolutionary genetics, and so I was supported by the NIH my entire career, with money easier to get, and had only one NSF grant.
Others have not been so lucky, as it’s been harder to get an NSF grant as the years go by, and the application process has gotten more and more convoluted, what with DEI and “outreach” requirements. Thank Ceiling Cat I retired before that was required.
At any rate, Trump is cutting NIH grants right and left, terminating those which seem to have emphasis on DEI, but the administration has also cut jobs at its Alexandria, Virginia headquarters. All in all, given that the NSF is the main government supporter of basic non-medical science, including psychology anthropology and sociology, it’s been a pretty good organization with rigorous standards. Lately, however, it’s shown a penchant for wokeness, and that’s what brought the hammer down on the organization, The upshot, though, is that the administration appears to have used grant titles or key words to deep-six grants (see below), which isn’t exactly a fair way to do it.
On top of the director’s resignation and job cuts, this bodes poorly for research, much of which takes place in American universities.
Click to read the Science piece, which should be free. I’ll give a few excerpts (indented). And have a look at those cuts, which are DEEP
The director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced his resignation today, 16 months before his 6-year term ends, in a letter to staff obtained by Science.
“I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership,” writes Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan, a computer scientist who was nominated to lead NSF by then-President Donald Trump in December 2019 and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2020. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”
Although Panchanathan didn’t give a reason for his sudden departure, orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the agency’s $9 billion budget next year and fire half its 1700-person staff may have been the final straws in a series of directives Panchanathan felt he could no longer obey.
“He was trying so hard to present the agency in a positive light,” says one knowledgeable source who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of their position. “But at the same time, Panch knew that he was alienating himself from the scientific community by being tone deaf to their growing concerns about the fate of the agency we all love.”
Now I’m not sure what that stuff about “alienation” means. Was he supposed to do something about the upcoming slash-and-burn approach of DOGE? As far as I can see, his resignation was the only honorable thing he could do, and it makes a loud statement.
On 14 April, staffers from billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set up shop for the first time at NSF and triggered a series of events that appear to have culminated in Panchanathan’s resignation. Two days later, NSF announced it was halting any new awards for grants that had been recommended for funding by program officers and were in the final stages of approval by agency officials. And NSF said pending proposals that appeared to violate any of Trump’s executive orders—in particular those banning efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, foster environmental justice, and study the spread of misinformation on social media sites—would be returned for “mitigation.”
On 18 April, NSF announced it was terminating what could be more than $1 billion in grants already awarded because they clashed with those directives and “were no longer priorities” for the agency.
You can see a database of the cancelled NSF grants here, and, at least from reading their titles, you’ll see what the Trumpets were aiming at.
As you can imagine, many of my colleagues are sweating blood, not sure that they’ll get their grants. And if you know if you’re in academia, grants are important in keeping your career going. Although the University of Chicago, almost uniquely, does NOT count grants funding as a criterion for promotion or tenure, unless you’re a theoretical physicist who needs just a pencil and paper, it would be hard to get any research don—and research IS a criterion for advancing academically—without outside money.
At any rate Panchanathan’s letter doesn’t mention the cuts or the administration, but reiterates the NSF’s accomplishments and then says this:
I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time for me to pass the baton to new leadership.
I don’t think it’ll be easy to find “new leadership.” That baton is red hot!
Here’s the announcement from Nature (click to read, excerpts are indented):
Staff members at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) were told on 30 April to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” according to an email seen by Nature.
The policy prevents the NSF, one of the world’s biggest supporters of basic research, from awarding new research grants and from supplying allotted funds for existing grants, such as those that receive yearly increments of money. The email does not provide a reason for the freeze and says that it will last “until further notice”.
Earlier this week, NSF leadership also introduced a new policy directing staff members to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities”. Proposals judged not “in alignment” must be returned to the applicants by NSF employees. The policy has not been made public but was described in documents seen by Nature.
An NSF staff member says that although good science can still be funded, the policy has the potential to be “Orwellian overreach”. Another staff member says, “They are butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades”. One program officer says they are resigning because of the policy. Nature spoke with five NSF staffers for this story, all on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
An NSF spokesperson declined Nature’s request for comment.
. . .Uncertainty is also being felt by scientists outside the agency. Colin Carlson, an expert in disease emergence at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, leads an initiative to predict viruses that pose pandemic threats. The project, which involves roughly 50 researchers across multiple universities, is funded by a $US12.5 million NSF grant. The project’s latest round of funding was approved, but Carlson worries about subsequent rounds, and the fate of other researchers. Unless it is lifted, the freeze “is going to destroy people’s labs,” Carlson says.
. . . Cuts to NSF spending this year could be a prelude to a dramatically reduced budget next year. Science previously reported that US President Donald Trump will request a $4 billion budget for the agency in fiscal year 2026, a 55% reduction from what Congress appropriated for 2025. Similarly, the proposed 2026 budget for the National Institutes of Health calls for a 44% cut to the agency’s $47 billion budget in 2025, according to documents leaked to the media. During Trump’s first term, Republicans in Congress rejected many of the president’s requested cuts to science funding, but it is not clear that they will do so again.
These huge cuts are not going to be limited to the “social justice and DEI” category; they have to overlap into basic science. And, as the article notes, this damages not just the expansion of knowledge but the well-being of the country as a whole. Lots of NSF research, even if “pure” research, has led to significant improvements of people’s well being. I don’t think that’s the reason the organization should exist, as pure knowledge by itself enriches humanity, but there’s no denying the salubrious side effects.
. . . . severe reductions to science funding could damage the economy, according to new research. A report by economists at American University in Washington DC estimates that a 50% reduction in federal science funding would reduce the US gross domestic product by approximately 7.6%. “This country’s status as the global leader in science and innovation is seemingly hanging by a thread at this point,” one NSF staffer says.
I’m very glad I’m retired and don’t have to depend on the grant system, but I feel bad for my colleagues who are living in uncertainty.
America seems to be willingly giving up its role as leader for so many initiatives–from USAID, NIH, NSF, CDC and others (not to mention the basics of democracy) that make it a beacon for the world. China and others will happily fill the void, and scientists and others will happily go elsewhere that will continue to fulfil their objectives. Adding tariffs to foreign movies? America seems to be openly working on willingly taking themselves from the playing field. I keep thinking of the Princess Bride when people talk about “democracy” or “freedom” or “rights” and say “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Wow. I can’t see that Panchanathan had much choice but to resign. Unfortunately, this may lead to a Trump crony becoming NSF Director, and ratcheting the agency down even more.
Just a matter of time that Templeton replaces NSF.
This is sickening.
Clearly a focussed sea change in the scope of the NSF mission as that scope has developed over the decades. The great preponderance of cancellations are in the Education Directorate, with some additional cancellations in the directorate covering social and economic sciences, and some in hard sciences and math but these seem targeted at grants with a sociological or psychological focus to them by their titles. I do not see any grants in the hard sciences, math, or engineering listed for cancellation. As opposed to the NASA science cuts which do affect direct discipline research in planetary, helio, and earth science and NIH cuts. The administration is eliminating the NSF spending that it all along has said it has no taste for. I don’t like it, but their distaste and telegraphing of these actions has been clear since before the election. I worry most about the NIH cuts to real medical science and public health.
I agree with Mark that this is sickening. Also agree with Jim the distribution of cancelled grants is distinctive.
The list is a downloadable .csv file and is worth a read. I sorted by directorate. Of the 1069 cancelled grants, only 46 are in Biological Sciences. Those BIO grants with award values >$1M include
“Advancing Indigenous perspectives to address climate vulnerability in the Southwest: research training for and by diverse communities” ($2,998,230; Northern Arizona University)
“Shifting Culture and Mitigating Inequities in Landscape Ecology Through a Collaborative Network of Professional Societies” ($1,359,303; University of Arkansas)
“Implementation of the BIMS Tidal Wave Program” ($1,997,452; Black in Marine Science)
“Broadening participation of marginalized individuals to transform SABER and biology education” ($1,274,120; University of Alabama at Birmingham)
“EVOLVED – Embedding a Vision to Operationalize, Lift up, and Value Equity and Diversity in the Consortium of Aquatic Science Societies” ($1,788,399; Western Washington University, Clemson University)
IOW a large proportion of the cancelled BIO award amounts seem from their titles to be make-work projects that help NSF scratch its social justice itch.
Farther down the list are smaller BIO awards that do seem to have been cancelled because they ran afoul of some clumsy ridiculous DOGE search for woke terminology:
“Assessment of interactions between nectarivorous birds and flowering plants to investigate pollination loss in Hawaiian forests” ($240,000; University of Washington)
“The genetic and molecular rules of trait expression” ($207,000; University of Colorado)
Both of those are multiyear postdoctoral fellowships; they seem to mention diversity or involve a postdoc from an underrepresented group. Cancelling them is wrong.
A similar small number of cancelled grants were from the Geosciences directorate (which funded my supervisor in grad school, and for which I have a soft spot).
By contrast, 266 cancelled grants were from the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate, and 442 grants were from the STEM Education directorate. The EDU grants include some whoppers like
“NSF’S Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Coordination Hub: Harnessing the Power of Liberatory Design for Equity-Driven Systems Change” ($8,162,520; SRI International)
and
“Developing Digitally-rich Urban Teacher Leaders: Fostering and Sustaining a STEM Culture of Belonging, Access, Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” ($2,047,099; University of Rochester)
I think DOGE is a ham-fisted and dangerous way to reduce the size of government, and I’m grateful my country hasn’t gone that route. But if I’d been handed the ban hammer at NSF I’d probably be tempted to cancel those grants myself. One might favour these social justice goals, but should they really be pursued via the country’s basic science research grant programs? The goals aren’t scientific, and the money isn’t spent on research. Instead these grants seem to be largely reparations, but with an NSF cover letter as a fig leaf.
Mike, Thank you for culling out and listing these example titles and funding – I did not have the patience to do that. They are pretty representative of the thousand or so titles and abstracts I quickly glanced through in the overall listing. In particular, I agree with your analysis and opinions in your final paragraph
Those do seem demonstrably a waste of money, save for salaries to round out professor salaries and support of students.
This all startedmany years ago when there was heightened interest in the possibility that dei initiatives within academia could result in increased diversity and improvement of under-represented test scores. Many years ago that was an untested idea, and of course anyone with good intentions would like to see the needle move for populations who tend to be on the margins. So what should have been done was a limited set of test cases, where grants were given to see if dei stuff could result in more “d” and a bit more “e” in college. After all, in the hard sciences, if there is recognition of a new technology area that could result in real societal benefits, limited sets of grants are given to test that. If things don’t pan out, then money is budgeted for something else.
But did that happen? I think it’s well established that dei programs don’t work well. What happened afterward? Were dei based grants phased out? We all know what happened.
Mark, Your (rhetorical) ‘what happened’ question reminded me of something interesting that I’d seen 30years ago as a grad student and then seen again in recent years. Young scholars from backgrounds which fit various DEI fads (even if we didn’t call it DEI 30years ago) get actively dissuaded from honest scholarship by being roped into DEI conformity. They are saying the same kind of thing today that their predecessors said 30years ago. Eg, ‘I was asked what use I am to my people if I am an ivory-tower scholar. My people need me to be an advocate for them.’ In today’s’ language, the only route open to some is that of the activist because anything less than that is considered a betrayal of one’s roots. The view that ‘everything is political’ is increasingly accepted without question. Senior scholars with serious research ‘chops’ in universal science and whose backgrounds fit DEI fads are called ‘traitors’, ‘Oreos’, etc.
The thing is, ‘Equity’ and related key terms have long been required buzzwords for getting favorable reviews in grant applications. So I can see where some of these got entangled in this mess, not because they were really about such things, but because the author chose to use them to spice up the grant title.
That’s an excellent point. We just can’t know.
Add/Edit: I find it comical (ironically so) that the first thing to come to mind when I see “NSF” is Non-Sufficient Funds. I worked in a ma pa grocery store for many years before starting college and we had bad checks taped to the wall behind the cash registers where all the customers could view them stamped NSF.
Many thanks to Mike Hart for looking into the specifics at NSF. Where once obtaining a $1.8 million grant to “Operationalize, Lift up, and Value Equity and Diversity in the Consortium of Aquatic Science Societies” might have seemed awfully clever, it now appears that words like “comeuppance” may be in order. Too bad that the inevitable comeuppance will involve various
cases of collateral damage— including, of course, the proposed general cuts in science funding.
“ unless you’re a theoretical physicist who needs just a pencil and paper, it would be hard to get any research done…”
Do universities like theoretical physicists and mathematicians because they don’t require big grants to do research or do they dislike them because they don’t bring in big grants?
Theoretical physicists can need fancy computers (since computer simulation of some aspect of the physical world is a major way of pursuing theoretical physics), and they can wish for grants to hire postdocs and PhD students, but, yes, they tend to be cheaper than experimental physicists who ask for whole labs full of gadgets.
And without labs for their colleagues to do experiments, theoretical physicists can never be wrong. Surely a weight is being lifted off their collective shoulders.
The old joke is they need pencil and paper and a wastebasket. But philosophers just need pencil and paper (ba-dum — cha!!
US universities dislike them, because they are unlikely to pull in so much grant money. Often they cannot pay their own grad students’ tuition, and (at many places) have special arrangements to be subsidised by the university.
I think that in almost all fields, salaries are by far the largest expense. At least on the sort of grants individual professors write. The typical NSF grants is basically 1 grad student or 1 postdoc, for 3-5 years.
(Outside the US, I do think some poorer countries focus on such subjects because they are cheap. Salaries are local, whereas equipment is not.)
Bold added :
Nature : “Uncertainty is also being felt by scientists outside the agency.”
————
“Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is a manipulative propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling, and cults.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
————
“… propaganda of agitation … is also the easiest to make; in order to succeed, it need only be addressed to the most simple and violent sentiments through the most elementary means. Hate is generally its most profitable resource. It is extremely easy to launch a revolutionary movement based on hatred of a particular enemy.”
Jacques Ellul
1965
Propaganda – The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
Vintage/Random House
————
Science Magazine : “What advice does the [2016] director [France A. Córdova] of @NSF have for graduate students?”
“Embrace uncertainty” ; “don’t fear decisions; embrace them.”
France A. Córdova
Science
26 Feb 2016
Vol 351, Issue 6276 p. 994
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.351.6276.994
This is via a comment on a Linked-In thread, but I gather that having Segregation in an NSF grant, as in chromosomal segregation, is enough to get your grant canned as being woke.
I’m sure you’re right it’s possible this kind of stupid misreading of cell biology as racism is leading to cancelled grants. But I don’t think that’s the case for any of these 1069 cancelled NSF grants. There are 30 occurrences of “segreg” in 20 cancelled grants in that file; most seem to refer to racial segregation in housing etc. None of those 20 grants were from the Biological Sciences directorate; 8 were in STEM education; 10 were in Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences; 2 were in Engineering and specifically referred to race and gender.
One from the Engineering directorate is typical. It emphasizes “privilege” and “intersectional identities”, and even contributes a new “theory”. All for the low, low price of $146,999 to the University of Virginia. The PI’s own self-described research interests:
“Using feminist ethnography, I investigate technoscientific culture and cultivate care, communal resistance, and mutual support in the worlds I study to transform not only who gets to produce scientific knowledge but also to reimagine other ways of knowing.”
PhD in cultural anthropology (not engineering). Author of “Cracking The Bro Code”.
Once again, we are indebted to Mike Hart for unveiling some of the wonders of
recent academic life—such as U. Virginia’s exciting voyages of Feminist ethnography and reimagining other ways of knowing. Our own counterparts of Lysenkoism have been active for decades, and will take considerable time to subside, if they do.