I'm showing my internet age in thinking that the right image to put at the top of this post is either the Drudge Report emergency light icon or an animated Star Trek "red alert" sign.
This is a funding trajectory that has not been seen since the 1970s. Now, because of budget uncertainties and disruptions last year, there was a big burst of activity late in FY25, and eventually the NSF did end up spending about what it was budgeted. I spoke with one program officer at NSF last month who said that they fully intended to get there again this year, even if it meant he didn't have a vacation until September.
As you may be aware, NSF spending is incredibly low this year. How low is "low"? Check out this graph from grant-witness.
This is a funding trajectory that has not been seen since the 1970s. Now, because of budget uncertainties and disruptions last year, there was a big burst of activity late in FY25, and eventually the NSF did end up spending about what it was budgeted. I spoke with one program officer at NSF last month who said that they fully intended to get there again this year, even if it meant he didn't have a vacation until September.
A lot of people had looked at the trajectory above and worried that we are headed toward some kind of very bad outcome. For example, if NSF is underspent by $3B by August, whether because of direct OMB opposition or because the award office at NSF is told by political leadership not to make awards, then it might be nearly impossible for NSF to spend its budget, at which point there could be a pocket rescission. Basically, the executive branch has wanted to enact 50+% cuts to NSF; Congressional appropriators have said "no", but the executive branch may be trying to get their cuts anyway. This would a terrible precedent. If it happened you might expect Congress to be upset that their appropriations were being ignored. There would likely be lawsuits.
Today, however, this story broke in Science. Supposedly, there are going to be broad cuts to many parts of the NSF, at the level of 20-30% in the present fiscal year, despite the fact that the NSF budget is only down 3% from last year and there is statutory language in the appropriation bill saying that no directorate could be cut by more than 5%.
The article basically says that it is likely that the funds are going to support the X-Labs effort run out of the TIP directorate. What is an X-Lab? I have some inkling because I attended the webinar about the present solicitation a couple of weeks ago.
The idea of X-Labs comes from proposals like this. The basic premise is (1) The present system holds back innovation for some and we need to be more flexible and entrepreneurial. (2) We could bring together teams of people who could be in a position to do something transformative, with definite technology applications, but whose work is at an early stage such that it's too low a technology readiness level to attract VC/angel investors who could support a startup, or is too far off from deployment to be partnered with industry as in the long running SBIR/STTR program. Thus, this team of people would form an X-Lab, where the key investment (say $50M/yr for 3-5 years, in a milestone-driven contracting method) would come from NSF/TIP. This is not a priori crazy - multiple other groups have looked at non-profit startups as a way to fund science. The program was announced at a level of $150M/yr for ten years. (The Science article implies that those in charge want a lot more money now than was in the TIPS appropriation plan for this year. Here is a claim that this is not true, which would make the cuts even harder to understand.)
One big catch: The way the X-Labs are being implemented seems pretty inflexible. An X-Lab has to be its own entirely independent ("autonomous") entity (rather like a company or non-profit), not a subsidiary or an operating unit of a company or university. Any senior personnel involved are required to be 100% full-time associated with the X-Lab. That means that anyone doing this from a company or national lab would have to quit their previous job or go on a complete leave of some kind. Anyone doing this from a university would have to resign their faculty position or go on a complete leave of some kind. Issues like IP and benefits/health insurance seem nontrivial and not worked out. Given the current uncertainties with everything associated with the NSF, this is quite a proposition for established researchers to undertake.
So, here we are, with reporting that there will be large cuts across the NSF, regardless of what the appropriations said. Anyone with first-hand knowledge who wants to chime in, please weigh in in the comments, or drop me a line (presumably from a non-NSF email address).
As bad as this is, the part of the article that truly angered me was this:
Program managers would normally rush to inform potential and current grantees about such dramatic changes. But the memo tells program managers to keep their mouths shut. “This information is highly confidential,” it reads. “Please do not communicate anything to PIs [principal investigators].”
Really?
You know this is not supported by the actual program officers, because this "highly confidential" information was almost immediately sent to a reporter. Daylight is a great disinfectant. Public pressure and Congressional pushing forced NSF leadership to relent on the plan to destroy the Ocean Observatories Initiative. Maybe making this budget cutting known can focus attention on this, rather than having drastically reduced NSF research funding be a fait accompli.
1 comment:
This is an utter disaster for science in the US. The goal seems to mainly fund AI at the expense of everything else, but with some Quantum on the side.
Quantum is a perfect example however of how blue-sky, fundamental physics and mathematics research played a key role in creating and transforming what is now a multi-billion dollar industry.
Two primary technologies in the push towards scalable quantum computers rely on topological ideas that trace their intellectual origins back to string theory. These are topological quantum computation with Ising anyons (Microsoft) and topological quantum error correction using surface code (Google superconducting Josephson junctions, trapped ion efforts like Semeghini and Lukin at Harvard). Both threads are largely due to Kitaev, but Kitaev's work draws heavily on ideas of conformal field theory.
Anyons, braiding, and fusion rules that underpin both technologies were originally developed in the context of classifying rational conformal field theories by Moore and Seiberg. CFT in turn was originally developed as a platform for solving the 4D string by BPZ. This effort failed (as did the hope that classifying rational CFTs would produce a string theory matching our world). However, as a byproduct BPZ produced the formalism to solve 2D classical or 1+1-D quantum critical phenomena. Witten eventually linked topological field theory at the heart of modern QC efforts to CFT, demonstrating that ground state wave functions and 1+1-D edge states are just different quantization schemes for the same 2+1-D topological field theory.
String theory itself was a failed attempt to solve the strong interaction. Regardless of whether SUSY or higher dimensions actually describe some version of our (seemingly de Sitter) universe, these mostly pure intellectual musings eventually lead through the efforts of many, many academic scientists (not just the big names above) to the technological push we have today.
Cutting the division of mathematical and physical sciences to 1970s levels in favor of million-dollar AI start-ups will very likely backfire spectacularly, and the US will pay the price in terms of innovation on the global stage in the long run.
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