Last week the NSF issued a new memorandum describing the changes that they plan to make in agency programs and operations to implement the Golden Age of Science ideas advocated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. It has been reported (Science, Nature) that many scientists are concerned about what is in the memo. The first words of the Science article: “For many U.S. scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the agency they know and loved died on 10 September.” I will try to lay out why some people feel that way.
The memo outlines changes to operations that will fundamentally alter the character of the agency. Generally most of the ideas are not a priori bad if the agency were in an environment with greater resources, when experimentation with alternative funding schemes and evaluations was not a less-than-zero-sum proposition. Instead, these ideas are being put forward at a time when the NSF is underspending (for no obvious reason by the non-technical people in leadership roles) its appropriation for FY26 by around 18%. This self-imposed budget austerity takes a bad situation (great uncertainty for everyone, drastically reduced staffing, delayed/eliminated/consolidated programs) and makes it considerably worse. Now this memo outlines plans to take resources away from historically core programs and redirect them to new, untested initiatives, and to do so in ways that don’t always seem internally consistent.
The memo talks about trying to fund certain investigators for longer periods (e.g. five-year awards) with minimal goal direction (so that PIs are free to explore where ever the spirit moves them – across all of NSF’s portfolio, or only in chosen administration priority areas?), but there is no adequate discussion of how those people will be chosen. At the same time, there is talk of “golden tickets”, where individual reviewers in an already stripped-down review process can earmark some proposals for elevation, again with little explanation of how this will work. Without careful safeguards, this combination seems problematic, and the assertion that this will lead to higher risk/higher reward research unsupported. The memo also talks about short-duration, small budget awards for really risky proof-of-concept ideas. This isn’t crazy and the EAGER program has been good, but the idea that the key to enabling success in high-risk research is to reduce the budget and the timeline doesn’t make much sense to me.
There is a through-line that the agency is trying to treat workforce development as separate and distinct from funding research projects. As the Science article says, “Traditionally, most graduate students and postdocs are funded through a research grant to their adviser or lab chief. But that will no longer be the case. Instead, the memo says, ‘Talent development funding opportunities may be coordinated with [research]-focused activities, as appropriate, but will be distinct and goal-oriented efforts.’” The memo mentions nurturing talent through the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship program and proudly talks about how this was just renewed. What it doesn’t tell you is that it was renewed at a considerably lower level than in previous years, which seems completely at odds with the claim of bolstering the program. Similarly, the memo talks about expanding access to shared infrastructure like cleanrooms, etc., but stated targeted funding levels of programs like the NQNI are no higher now than they were 12 years ago, not even accounting for inflation. (I assume they will actually make NQNI awards.) If NSF leadership keeps slashing their own budget, in defiance of congressional appropriations, it won’t matter what their priorities are.
Lastly, let’s talk about “metascience”, the comparative study of different research funding models and practices, with the goal of a “self-improving NSF”. Again, the essential idea of doing careful studies of alternate funding mechanisms and research team structures and practices to improve research outcomes (not a trivial matter to define) is not bad. Doing this well is hard, because of several obvious reasons: How do you define successful research – by scholarly impact, by patents/economic impact, by production of educated scientists, some weighted average of these? On what timescale do you do this evaluation? The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper was hardly cited for decades, and it is now arguably one of the most influential papers of the last hundred years, with enormous impact on quantum science and technology. How do you have sufficiently large samples and sufficiently long constant overall conditions to get reasonable statistics? There are strong practitioners of metascience out there, but when the memo says “These efforts ultimately serve a concrete ambition for NSF to double the scientific productivity and impact generated by each federal research dollar by 2036”, how can one take that seriously? No definitions of productivity or impact, and an implication that there will be optimization and major programmatic changes within less than two cycles of the much-vaunted five-year grants? The word “ambition” is doing all the work in that sentence.
Oh, and while all this is going on, the agency (among others) has now eliminated language from its integrity policy that used to say that political interference in grants and operations is bad. I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about.
There is tremendous uncertainty in funding from multiple agencies these days, and this has resulted in many universities cutting back on doctoral admissions in the sciences and engineering. This guarantees that there will be fewer PhD recipients in a few years across these disciplines. The large majority of PhDs in these areas do not go into academia and instead have formed the base of technical knowhow across diverse sectors of the US and global economy for decades. Cutting the supply like this will definitely have long-term consequences beyond just the halls of academia, affecting US competitiveness in ways that will take years to unravel. Adding to this uncertainty is not helpful to anyone.
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