Trump cuts roil National Science Foundation, alarming researchers

The Trump administration is sharpening its attacks on the National Science Foundation, the government agency that is a major funder of basic science, math, and engineering, especially at colleges and universities across the nation.

What’s more, the agency now has stopped issuing any new awards and stopped funding all existing ones, the science journal Nature says. A spokesperson for the NSF, asked about that reporting, declined to comment.

Amidst all this turmoil, the NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan abruptly left last week, saying “I believe I have done all I can.”

Eliminating so much of this agency’s budget would be “a crisis, just a catastrophe for U.S. science,” says Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the largest scientific societies in the world.

He’s optimistic that Congress wouldn’t go along with it, but the budgetary process would likely take months.

Meanwhile, the uncertainty would leave scientists fretting over how to support their labs and the students and early-career researchers who work there.

“That’s created this paralysis that I think is hurting us already,” says Parikh, who says that when he talks to scientists, he’s starting to hear them express an interest in having an “exit plan from these jobs.”

Marianna Zhang, a cognitive scientist at New York University who studies how children form stereotypes and how to reduce those stereotypes, says that she learned her two-year fellowship was being canceled in an email from NSF that she said misspelled the word “priorities.” Her work no longer served those priorities, it said.

“I was just numb,” she says, explaining that she’d gotten the email while driving to a science conference and had pulled over to read it. “It was just shocking. I cried, out there on the side of the road.”

‘Wider and Weirder’

Some of the grants canceled initially involved diversity, equity, and inclusion or looked at misinformation or disinformation. These two categories of research have previously been targeted by Republicans in Congress such as Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz.

But the cancellations did not stop there.

“As it goes on, you see that the reach of it just gets wider and weirder,” says Noam Ross, executive director of a noofit called rOpenSci, who started a database so that people could self-report the cancellations of their grants.

“Just looking at this, there’s a conference on geometry and topology that was cancelled,” says Ross. “Why was it canceled, right?”

He notes that the grant for holding this conference may have mentioned scholarships for students from under-represented communities. In the past, many NSF-funded researchers were encouraged to explain how their work would boost engagement in the sciences.

Many of the canceled grants focus on education — especially at small, mid-sized, rural, or minority-serving colleges and universities.

Take the previously NSF-funded Rust Belt RNA Meeting, for example. “We really emphasize students,” says Charles Hoogstraten of Michigan State University, who notes that NSF had funded it for many years. “The vast majority of our talks and a good majority of our posters are given by students.”

For many poorer students who can’t afford to travel, this is one of their only chances to attend a high-level scientific conference, says Hoogstraten. He and his colleagues are trying to figure out what to do now that funding has been cut.

Amy Hagen, a PhD student at Virginia Tech University, sought out NSF funding for geology work she wanted to do that involved dating some rocks from the Cambrian period.

“I applied, was awarded the grant on Thursday, and then had it canceled on Friday,” she says.

Growing uncertainty

Kathleen Johnson, a geochemist with the UCI CLIMATE Justice Initiative, says their NSF grant was about $1.5 million a year and worked to make geosciences more diverse and inclusive. Now they face the possibility of staffers being laid off and are scrambling to figure out how to support students this summer.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” she says. “It’s been really stressful.”

Asked about the effect of all of these cancellations on U. S. scientists, a spokesperson for the NSF said that “NSF declines comment.”

“Funding for Artificial Intelligence and quantum information sciences research is maintained at current levels,” it says.

But the abrupt termination of grants with little explanation means that all scientists are feeling the impact, says Parikh.

“Even folks who aren’t being cancelled, or aren’t being terminated, are worried they’re going to be terminated,” he says.

Zhang, at New York University, says she’s starting to wonder if her future scientific career is going to have to move outside of the United States.

“It’s quite scary, what’s happening,” she says. “I think it’s also shaken my faith in the short term that all of this is going on — but also in the long term.”