National Foundation of Sciences Detained with Funds
The National Foundation of Sciences was told to freeze the outgoing financing days after NSF’s leadership introduced a new policy that requires subsidies to be projected for “alignment with agency’s priorities”
JHVEPHOTO/Alamy Stock Photo
They were told to the members of the staff of the National Foundation of Sciences of the USA. Nature.
Politics prevents the NSF, one of the world’s largest supporters for basic research, granting new research subsidies and providing funds assigned for existing subsidies, such as those that receive annual increase in money. The email does not provide a reason for freezing and says that it will last “until again notice.”
Earlier this week, NSF’s leadership also introduced a new policy that ordered personnel members to evaluate subsidies proposals for “issues or activities that may not be aligned with the agency’s priorities.” The proposals tried not “in alignment” must be returned to the applicants by the employees of NSF. Politics has not been made public, but was described in documents seen by Nature.
About support for scientific journalism
If you are enjoying this article, consider support our journalism awarded with Subscription. When buying a subscription, it is helping to guarantee the future of shocking stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape our world today.
A member of the NSF staff says that although good science can still be financed, policy has the potential to be “orwellian overreach.” Another staff member says: “They are cursed with the golden gold merit review process that was established in NSF approximately decades.” A program officer says they renounce due to politics. Nature He spoke with five NSF employees for this story, all under anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the media.
A NSF spokesman rejected NatureRequest for comments.
Continue agitation
The changes are reaching an agency that is already in crisis. In the last two weeks, the NSF has finished approximately 1,040 subsidies that would have granted US $ 739 million to researchers and their institutions. The director of the agencies, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned last month.
Scientists also feel uncertainty outside the agency. Colin Carlson, an expert in disease emergency at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, leads an initiative to predict viruses that represent pandemic threats. The project, which involves approximately 50 researchers in multiple universities, is financed by a NSF subsidy of $ US12.5 million. The last project of financing of the project was approved, but Carlson cares about the posterior rounds and the destiny of other researchers. Unless you get up, the freezing “will destroy people’s laboratories,” says Carlson.
The financing for the NSF, as for all other federal agencies, is established by the United States Congress. To date, the agency has received only around a quarter of the funds that Congress appropriated it for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30.
More cuts along the way
It is not clear that White, a financing deficit, is promoting the last freezing of the subsidy. But Matthew Lawrence, a specialist in Administrative Law at the University of Emory in Atlanta, Georgia, says that, according to a 1974 law, called the Payment Control Law, the NSF must give a special notice of the subsidy Congress, which would otherwise be badly.
NSF spending cuts this year could be a prelude to a dramatically reduced budget next year. Science He previously informed that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, will request a budget of $ 4 billion for the agency in fiscal year 2026, a 55% reduction of what the Congress was assigned by 2025. Similarly, the proposed budget of 2026 for the National Health Institutes requires a 44% cut for agencies of $ 47 billion in 2025, accessories to the documents to the documents to the media. Duration Trump’s first mandate, Republicans in Congress rejected many of the cuts requested by the President to scientific financing, but it is not clear that they will do it again.
In the long term, severe reductions to scientific financing could damage the economy, the cordination of new research. A report by Economists from the American University in Washington DC estimates that a 50% reduction in the federal financing of science would reduce the gross domestic product of the United States by approximately 7.6%. “The state of this country as a world leader in science and innovation is apparently hung from a thread at this time,” says an NSF employee.
NSF staff expects hundreds of subsidies more on Friday.
This article reproduces with permission and laundry. First published May 1, 2025.
]