To the surprise of no one at all, the 2027 presidential budget request is extremely bad for science. Remember, this is largely a political document, and Congress does not have to follow this. In the past year, Congress largely ignored the recommendations and appropriated a much flatter budget (though agency priorities are still set by the PBR for executive agencies). This new request shows that Vought et al. still would prefer to kill much public funding for science.
- NSF: request to cut from $8.8B (FY26 enacted) to $4B, a 56% cut that would eviscerate the agency.
- DOE: request to cut $1.1B from $8.4B (FY26 enacted) Office of Science budget.
- NASA: request to cut $5.6B from $24.4B (FY26 enacted), including $3.7B from science programs and $1.1B from the ISS.
- Commerce: This one shocks me. Request to cut $993M from NIST's $1.184B (FY26 enacted) budget. That would be an 84% cut (!!), seemingly destroying NIST. This needs to get headlines. Either the people making this recommendation have no idea what NIST does (seems plausible), or someone has a personal grudge against the standard kilogram. Update: Dan Garisto on bluesky points out that the enormous cut topline number is not consistent with the budget appendix, which implies a much smaller cut. Unclear what the answer is here - it'd be quite a goof to have a topline number that far off.
- NIH: Proposed $5.5B cut from $47.2B (FY26 enacted).
- DOD: It's very hard to tell, especially since they're proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in additional spending including for missile defense. The proposed DOD increases vastly outweigh the cuts described above.
These cuts are proposed despite constant fretting that China is surpassing the US scientifically. This past year it took aggressive lobbying to ensure that Congress pushed back against these kinds of cuts. For those who favor continued public investment in science and engineering research in the US, the task of arguing against these kinds of cuts begins again now. As I've written before, this is a marathon not a sprint, and this will be an annual exercise under this administration.
4 comments:
A bigger concern of mine is regardless of what goes through, it's clear NSF will only fund certain types research (mostly AI, some QIS) and everything else is pretty screwed. Hope it's not too late to try to get a position in China
I just want to share a piece of news regarding young scientists funding in one province in China.
"Zhejiang has released a draft revision of its Natural Science Foundation rules for public comment. The Young Scientists Fund age limits are proposed to change from "<35 (men) / <42 (women)" to “<33 (men; <35 in medical sciences) / <38 (women)." Officials say the update is to better align with national criteria and address inconsistencies, while accounting for disciplinary differences."
And just to give those who are not familiar with what scientific research is like in China a sense, if one doesn't get these kinds of start-up research grant, it basically means that their research career is basically not far from screwed. And it is very likely to not pass the tenure track. Speaking of tenure track, in one of the universities in the same province, there is even a minimum 20% tenure denial rate university-wise every year. So, things about academia are just harsh in different ways in China or US.
Doug, what are physics depts doing to handle the much lower research funds? Downsizing incoming students? Laying off professors? Or taking loans in the hope that the Trump dictatorship ends in a few years?
the fight against these cuts is ongoing, but I can't imagine it will get reversed in time to undo the damage.
Anon@5:28, it's a tricky issue. There are long timescales involved because grant cycles are usually 3 yrs or more, proposal reviews can take 6 months and often more, and the actual research funds in physics in hand generally have not yet decreased a lot. Most agency total budgets have only gone down modestly so far, and since grants run for a while, it's not like there is an instant financial crunch. Many (most?) physics departments are likely reducing grad admissions out of concern for the future situation. This often happens organically. At many places, the department leadership polls the faculty in say November and asks, how many students do you as a PI expect to be taking on next year? The PIs respond with a range (like, definitely 1 and maybe a second if some resources come in). Many places are aiming their admissions toward the lower end of that, these days. Laying off faculty would be very unusual; slowing down hiring is definitely happening at some schools, esp as the cost of experimentalists' labs continues to rise. Broadly, many research universities are hoping for a return to less fraught times, but I don't see anyone naively assuming that this will all blow over and everything will just revert in a few years. There are going to be long-term alterations in the US research ecosystem. Those of us who think public support of research is a net societal good are working to push that those changes are not a huge reduction in total (public+private+philanthropic) investment.
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