NSF Slashes Research Programs to Support New Tech Initiative, Insiders Say
Unexpected shift in funds has meant sharp drop in grants this fiscal year.
Originally published on science.org by Jeffrey Mervis.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is trimming this year’s budgets for hundreds of its traditional basic science programs by 20% to 30% or more even though its overall budget is down just 3%, Science has learned. NSF has not publicly explained the drastic cuts. But sources within and outside the agency, who did not want to be named, say they suspect the goal is to free up funds for a new $1.5 billion initiative, launched last month, meant to turn NSF-funded discoveries into new products and industries.
Last month, when NSF announced plans to give perhaps a half-dozen “X-Labs” as much as $300 million each over 6 years, it did not explain where the money would come from. Rumors have circulated for months that NSF was withholding $1 billion or more of the $8.1 billion Congress approved earlier this year for its eight research directorates. An internal memo obtained by Science documents, for the first time, the extent of those cuts in some fields.
Julia Phillips, a former member of NSF’s now-defunct National Science Board, is troubled by both the cuts to basic research and the applied focus of the new initiative. “NSF’s mission is to support discovery research, which is also the basis for any new technology,” she says. “This sudden change in direction reflects a total lack of understanding of how science is done.” NSF declined comment.
The 18 June memo, from the head of a unit within NSF’s math and physical sciences directorate, told program managers the unit’s budget for this fiscal year, which ends on 30 September, has been cut by 30% from its FY 2025 level of about $260 million. “This [cut] will unfortunately affect all [core] programs as well as centers, facilities, and other initiatives. … We are sorry to share this bad news right before the [Juneteenth] holiday weekend.”
The memo also helps explain why the foundation has handed out so few new grants this year compared with last year at this time—just one-eighth of the FY 2025 total through 15 June, the watchdog group Grant Witness has calculated—despite a research budget that is only $220 million less than in FY 2025. “We just learned about our section budget for FY26,” the memo explains. Program managers are cautious about recommending proposals to fund until they know how much money they have to spend. The memo indicates that this year, some units did not learn their actual budgets until mid-June, 5 months after Congress had approved the agency’s FY 2026 appropriation…