Trump Administration’s Science Cuts Come for NSF Funding
The Nationwide Science Basis, which funds key science and engineering analysis, is the newest U.S. company to be disrupted by Elon Musk’s DOGE
Some researchers receiving grants from the U.S. Nationwide Science Basis use its ice core facility in Lakewood, Colorado, to retailer samples.
Jim West/Alamy Inventory Photograph
All new analysis grants have been frozen on the US Nationwide Science Basis (NSF) — an motion apparently ordered by the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE), an initiative by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to chop spending and employees throughout the US authorities.
DOGE can also be now reviewing a listing of energetic analysis grants assessed in February by the NSF for phrases related to range, fairness and inclusion (DEI), and contemplating greater than 200 of them for termination, NSF employees members have informed Nature.
On Monday, three DOGE members arrived at NSF headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. NSF staff say that DOGE has directed a whole lot of analysis proposals accredited throughout a multi-step assessment course of — however not but finalized — be despatched again to NSF programme officers, who’ve been informed to carry out “mitigation work” with none additional particulars. Science first reported the arrival of DOGE on the NSF this week.
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With a price range of US$9 billion, the NSF is likely one of the largest funders of fundamental analysis on the earth. From the beginning of Donald Trump’s second US presidency, the company has gone by means of whiplash-inducing modifications: it froze all grant funds after which unfroze them in February following court docket orders; it fired its probationary staff in February and weeks later rehired half of them. And earlier this month, the company cut its graduate research fellowship programme by half, providing just one,000 positions as an alternative of the same old 2,000.
The NSF has been beneath heightened scrutiny following the discharge of an October 2024 report authored by the workplace of Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas who now chairs the Senate Science Committee. The report alleged that 3,483 analysis grants awarded between January 2021 and April 2024 by the NSF in the course of the administration of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, “went to questionable initiatives that promoted range, fairness, and inclusion (DEI) tenets”, losing $2 billion. At the moment, Democrats within the Science, House and Expertise Committee of the US Home of Representatives released an analysis of the Cruz report. The evaluation claims main flaws with the report, suggesting that it “jeopardizes the financial and nationwide safety of the USA” by “undermining the vital work of scientific researchers, educators, and establishments”.
A spokesperson for the NSF says it “continues to problem awards” and declined to reply Nature’s questions. Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White Home, says that “the Trump administration is dedicated to making sure that federal analysis spending is in step with the priorities of on a regular basis People.” Cruz’s workplace didn’t instantly reply to Nature’s requests for remark.
To raised perceive the scenario on the NSF, Nature spoke to 5 employees members, who had been granted anonymity as a result of they don’t seem to be approved to talk with the press.
DOGE arrives
Whereas DOGE visited different US businesses over the previous two months — in some instances dismantling them totally — NSF staffers held their collective breath.
However on Wednesday, DOGE turned its consideration to the NSF’s grants, the main focus of the company’s mission. Paperwork seen by Nature present that two members of DOGE, Luke Farritor and Zachary Terrell, have been given entry to grant administration methods and used that entry to forestall grants from receiving funding that had been already accredited however awaiting finalization. “That, after all, raises the hairs on the again of our neck in a worrisome means,” an NSF programme officer says.
Analysis initiatives on the NSF undergo a number of steps earlier than approval. Proposals are first submitted to NSF programme officers with experience within the scientific subject they deal with. If the proposals go muster with the officers, these employees members then fee a assessment from impartial specialists outdoors the company. Solely the strongest functions go this step — the standard success fee is between 20% and 30%. Division administrators inside the NSF then give the ultimate approval and ship the grants on for finalization with the Division of Grants and Agreements. That is the place grants are at the moment being despatched again from.
Proposals that obtain ultimate approval are primarily at all times funded — till now, the workers say. Earlier than DOGE’s arrival, new analysis awards on the company had slowed by half, relative to 2024, Science has reported. On 16 April, they stopped utterly.
A report beneath hearth
This isn’t the primary time since Trump took workplace that the NSF has re-examined its grants. In February, the company initiated a assessment of all its grants to make sure that they weren’t in violation of govt orders from Trump on “radical and wasteful” DEI programmes and “gender ideology”. At the moment, it was flagging grants containing any of a whole lot of phrases that the Cruz report claimed had been indicators of left-wing ideologies reasonably than onerous science — reminiscent of “ladies”, “black males”, and “inequality”. Since 1980, the US Congress has mandated that as a part of its mission, the NSF ought to broaden the participation of under-represented teams in science.
The Home evaluation discovered that the report inappropriately flagged grants at minority-serving establishments as a result of the grants referred to the minority standing of the establishment. It additionally discovered that the Cruz report contained a “slew of embarrassing errors”, together with that it flagged grants utterly unrelated to DEI initiatives, such because the genomic range of rice and feminine leopard seals. Moreover, 14% of the three,483 grants had been duplicates, so that they had been double-counted.
Zoe Lofgren, a US consultant from California and the rating Democrat on the Home Committee on Science, House, and Expertise, despatched the evaluation to the NSF earlier right now. “It’s crucial that NSF just isn’t intimidated into accepting these vacuous findings and undermining its benefit assessment course of by substituting the Cruz Report’s slander for skilled opinion,” Lofgren wrote in a letter to NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan.
A lot of the grants, the evaluation discovered, had been flagged as a result of they included language about “broader impacts” of the analysis to society, a compulsory requirement handed unanimously by the Senate in 2010, earlier than Cruz was a senator, after which once more in 2017, after he was.
Anthony Gitter, a computational biologist on the College of Wisconsin–Madison, had a grant about utilizing deep studying for protein modelling flagged by the Cruz report. It contained a single sentence about providing summer time analysis alternatives to underrepresented minorities as a part of the broader affect assertion. The Cruz report “performs into the narrative that universities are these elitist locations that harbour out-of-touch lecturers which can be now not doing science,” he says. “However it’s out of contact with the information.”
This text is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 17, 2025.
