According to this article at politico, there was an all-hands meeting at NSF today (at least for the engineering directorate) where they were told that there will be staff layoffs of 25-50% over the next two months.
This is an absolute catastrophe if it is accurately reported and comes to pass. NSF is already understaffed. This goes far beyond anything involving DEI, and is essentially a declaration that the US is planning to abrogate the federal role in supporting science and engineering research.
Moreover, I strongly suspect that if this conversation is being had at NSF, it is likely being had at DOE and NIH.
I don't even know how to react to this, beyond encouraging my fellow US citizens to call their representatives and senators and make it clear that this would be an unmitigated disaster.
Update: looks like the presidential budget request will be for a 2/3 cut to the NSF. Congress often goes against such recommendations, but this is certainly an indicator of what the executive branch seems to want.
16 comments:
The same happened with all other NSF directorates today. Brush up on your Chinese.
I thought this was all about DEI. Could these individuals possibly have lied?
I think the tremendous danger is that these people don't really know or care to understand what NSF does and what the possible short-term repercussions are for the nation, its security, and its competitiveness. Not unexpected for over-educated but functionally stupid 20-something-year-olds.
Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or unfathomably naive.
Unreal. Incredibly short sighted even for the Trump administration.. without NSF funding, the efforts to expand US presence in research targets matching administration priorities fall apart. The semiconductor industry, energy, QIS, AI, ML, cyber security architecture, space science, even the military industry all fall apart.
I've been predicting an incoming American brain drain for a few years. I was hoping it wouldn't be sparked until after I graduate so I don't have to fight quite so hard to find positions, but I'm quickly losing optimism.
Anon@8:07, that is almost certainly sarcasm.
Prof. Natelson, doesn’t the Texas congressional delegation care about this?
And to add to this, there are initial moves to starve the department of education to death
I suppose the tree needed a shake, it will be interesting to see what falls out! Something clearly had to be done to deal with bloat, and the system is hugely inefficient…
Even if we agree with your premise, “shaking the tree” and “depopulating our scientific infrastructure” ought to be different activities.
It is a virtual certainty that mass layoffs in these agencies are illegal under all established precedents and laws. With that said, it is sadly not a safe assumption that precedents and laws will withstand the attacks the administration is making on our civil service. NSF, DOE, and NIH just within the science domain, but also DOJ, CIA, USAID and more elsewhere in the government.
As for what Anon @1:05 said, if you want to fix bloat (and I reject the premise there), pass a law to change things. This is not the answer.
Hi Doug and fellow readers. It seems the NIH has set university overhead to 15% (see https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/new-nih-policy-will-slash-support-money-to-research-universities/). I would expect NSF, DOE, and DOD agencies may follow suit.
One could argue that ~60% overhead at some schools is too high, but an abrupt change like this will be a disaster. On the other hand, Canadian universities (for example) typically charge low overhead (though I forgot how much). Doug, as a department chair, what do you foresee as the impact on the American research program?
It appears the overhead at a few Canadian schools is about ~30-45% depending on funding source. So the 15% NIH cap is _very_ low.
Frank, I’m not chair anymore, but I am assoc dean for research in natural sciences here. I also was briefly interim VP for Research for 3 months back in 2022. If all the agencies follow suit, and they will be under huge pressure to do so, it will be very bad. A crude estimate for scale suggests this would cut MIT’s annual budget by more than $130M, depending on their effective overhead rate right now. (Their rate is about 60%, but not all grants charge that because of foundations and off-campus work, so it’s not immediately clear what their effective averaged rate is.).
By the way, I need to look into the legality of this. The indirect rate is set by negotiations between a university and the feds. It’s not obvious to me that the agency can just declare a new rate any time they want without an act of Congress. One possible response would be universities now trying to charge certain costs as direct costs (e.g., imagine a line item on your grant of $1200/yr for electricity, and $500/yr for plumbing, and $1000/yr for accounting services by the university,etc.). Again, I don’t know off the top of my head whether that would be permitted without congressional approval.
See here for a previous post about indirect costs.
As a professor at a research 1 university, I am highly supportive of the work DOGE is doing and the recent cuts to the NIH overhead rate. I think I am in the minority among my colleagues, but I think 15% should be enough to cover electricity, plumbing, etc. I don't have access to the accounting books of my university, but fairly certain a lot of that 65% overhead can be cut without detrimental effects to research especially if the cuts are accompanied by more streamlined administrative processes so more time can be spent doing science. Elon Musk is the farthest thing from anti-science. He said multiple times how his degree in physics helped his career immensely. His experience building successful companies inspires DOGE and wouldn't be possible without a scientifically educated workforce. The goal for these cuts is to improve science. We may disagree that these cuts will accomplish that but as Peter Thiel famously said "Never bet against Elon Musk."
Anon@9:48, I appreciate your civil tone. I am going to write a post explaining why I think you are likely very much mistaken about what this means and what its long term effects will be. Are there inefficiencies in the historic system? Of course. That said, I think you drastically underestimate the true costs to universities of supporting research at a high level. What do you think the effectively overhead rate is in private industry? Certainly when I was at Bell Labs, at a time when they were viewed as doing well, it was close to 100%. Is there any reason to think that universities can be 7x more efficient at *anything* than profit-motivated private industry?
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