Cutting the National Science Foundation in Half Does Not Leave Us With a National Science Foundation
The administration is threatening America’s science and technology research infrastructure. They may not succeed. But it’s a threat that should be taken seriously.
Science and scientists are under attack.
Review panels halted at the National Institutes of Health.. Paychecks missed for early career scientists funded by the National Science Foundation. Papers by CDC researchers withdrawn from submission.
Each of these represent unprecedented disruptions to how science operates. In some circles the word ‘disruption’ has a positive connotation. But what is happening here does not involve constructing alternatives or better ways to support the science-innovation ecosystem. Instead, the Trump administration is threatening the basic functionality of America’s science and technology research infrastructure. They may not succeed. But it’s a threat that we - in and out of science - should take seriously.
The most evident example? The Trump administration is now reportedly targeting the National Science Foundation with ~50% budget cuts and allegedly planning to lay off between ‘a quarter and a half of its in in the next two months’.
If you are a scientist you understand what this means. If implemented, this would be catastrophic. If you are not in science, let’s do a quick rundown because you really do not want to dismantle the National Science Foundation.
What is the National Science Foundation (NSF)?
The NSF is an independent federal agency, established in 1950 by Congress to fulfill three goals (verbatim from nsf.gov – check it out while you can):
· Promote the progress of science.
· Advance the national health, prosperity and welfare.
· Secure the national defense.
How do they do this? If you’re not in the science world, you might imagine the NSF runs a series of laboratories, setting up experiments, running expeditions, and supporting many tens of thousands of employees. America does have a network of federal labs (which may be a future target). But, the NSF works differently.
In their words, they ‘fulfill [their] mission chiefly through grants’.
In a nutshell: the NSF sets priorities – in consultation with stakeholders in and out of government – to identify core & emerging topics in the national interest. They transform these priorities into calls for proposals. Finally, they administer highly competitive programs to identify teams of researchers across multiple disciplines across all 50 states and US territories to do the work.
In total, in 2024, the NSF had an approximate $9 billion budget, of which the majority went to research ($7B+) and STEM education ($1B+). The NSF is an efficient agency with <2,000 employees whose program officers are themselves highly skilled experts dedicated to enabling the advancement and progress of science in the nation’s service.
Can it be improved? Sure – so can any organization. And if you talk to scientists, you will find that all of us can think of something we’d like to see more of (or less of) at NSF. But we typically have these suggestions because we care and believe in the overall mission.
Cutting the NSF in Half – What Could Go Wrong Other than Everything?
There are some things that can be cut in half and retain their original function. For example, planarians are flatworms that can regrow a full organisms from a bisected individual. Cut one planarian in half and wait… you will eventually have two planarians. Even more radically, this is how some planarians reproduce, by ripping themselves apart into a head and tail and then growing back to normal. That is to say the head grows a tail and the tail grows a head! This might seem impossible – precisely so, studying planarians teaches us something fundamental about cellular and tissue regeneration in ways that are of relevance to organisms far different than planarians, i.e., us. And yes, this kind of work is funded by the NSF.
But the planarian is the exception that proves the rule. Typically, you cannot chop an organism in two and expect it to survive (Solomon knew this in the ancient parable). Likewise, you can’t slice an institution in two and expect it to work. Institutions involve experts – and at the beating heart of the NSF are expert program officers. The program officers serve in many ways from developing new research programs, to administering review panels, to making the difficult decisions on awards informed by confidential peer review, to managing the evaluation of annual reviews for awarded grants, and to informing scientists both the good (awarded!) and bad (declined!) news when the time comes.
Cutting the NSF in half will not make it more efficient. Doing so will fundamentally undermine NSF’s ability to carry out its mission. Perhaps the administration might frame this reduction as ‘cost-saving’. A few billion here and a few billion there and soon we are talking about real money in the nearly $7 trillion dollar annual federal budget. As such, we should keep in mind that the NSF costs the federal government a little more than a penny for every $10 it spends. But the incredible thing is that the NSF is almost certainly revenue positive when taking the near- and long-term view.
The US is classified as a ‘innovation-driven economy’ by the World Economic Forum. As recently as 2022, the World Economic Forum ranked the US as #2 (only following Switzerland) in the list of the ‘The Most Innovative Countries’. And we are innovative at scale… or used to be. The investments in fundamental research are the basis for innovations that have outsized impacts on the way we live and work.
Today, the NSF distributes research funds to teams of researchers across the US and collaborates on projects of global impact. Some of these studies are high-risk and may not necessarily lead to a new breakthrough – but that’s precisely why the NSF has a portfolio of projects. But some work spectacularly. As but one example, one of the founders of Google, Larry Page, was supported by a NSF grant at Stanford as part of a ‘Digital Library Initiative’ and another, Sergey Brin, was supported by a NSF Graduate Fellowship. Together they figured out how to use links between web pages as a means to ‘rank’ the importance and relevance of web pages to search requests.
As they say, the rest is history: https://new.nsf.gov/news/origins-google
There are countless other examples. But if we don’t have a funding program to begin with and stop funding innovative science, the synergistic effects start to disappear. Experts leave. Research groups shrink. Brin and Page perhaps never meet. Or if they do, the equivalent of Brin and Page meet somewhere else… in another country. The open and creative environment that fuels discovery in the US starts to dry up. And then, we fall behind. Perhaps in the mind of Twitter/X’s owner, reducing X’s workforce was a net positive. The platform propagated what others have identified as false information about the election that nonetheless spread to far more people than the fact-checks spread by election officials. But the NSF is far more than a digital website intended to accumulate clicks and influence.
The Message
The message - whatsoever unfolds - is simple: the current administration does not support what it takes to maintain American leadership in a global marketplace of ideas. They are actively taking steps to undermine one of the most important assets in the R&D pipeline of our innovation economy. We will be worse off if this plan succeeds. We won’t be left with ‘cost savings’, instead we will be left behind.