Trump Administration’s Science Cuts Come for NSF Funding
The National Science Foundation, which funds key science and engineering research, is the latest U.S. agency to be disrupted by Elon Musk’s DOGE
Some researchers receiving grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation use its ice core facility in Lakewood, Colorado, to store samples.
Jim West/Alamy Stock Photo
All new research grants have been frozen at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) — an action apparently ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to cut spending and workers across the US government.
DOGE is also now reviewing a list of active research grants assessed in February by the NSF for terms associated with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and considering more than 200 of them for termination, NSF staff members have told Nature.
On Monday, three DOGE members arrived at NSF headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. NSF employees say that DOGE has directed hundreds of research proposals approved during a multi-step review process — but not yet finalized — be sent back to NSF programme officers, who have been told to perform “mitigation work” without any further details. Science first reported the arrival of DOGE at the NSF this week.
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With a budget of US$9 billion, the NSF is one of the largest funders of basic research in the world. From the start of Donald Trump’s second US presidency, the agency has gone through whiplash-inducing changes: it froze all grant payments and then unfroze them in February following court orders; it fired its probationary employees in February and weeks later rehired half of them. And earlier this month, the agency cut its graduate research fellowship programme by half, offering only 1,000 positions instead of the usual 2,000.
The NSF has been under heightened scrutiny following the release of an October 2024 report authored by the office of Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas who now chairs the Senate Science Committee. The report alleged that 3,483 research grants awarded between January 2021 and April 2024 by the NSF during the administration of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, “went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets”, wasting $2 billion. Today, Democrats in the Science, Space and Technology Committee of the US House of Representatives released an analysis of the Cruz report. The analysis claims major flaws with the report, suggesting that it “jeopardizes the economic and national security of the United States” by “undermining the important work of scientific researchers, educators, and institutions”.
A spokesperson for the NSF says it “continues to issue awards” and declined to answer Nature’s questions. Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White House, says that “the Trump administration is committed to ensuring that federal research spending is in line with the priorities of everyday Americans.” Cruz’s office did not immediately respond to Nature’s requests for comment.
To better understand the situation at the NSF, Nature spoke to five staff members, who were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with the press.
DOGE arrives
While DOGE visited other US agencies over the past two months — in some cases dismantling them entirely — NSF staffers held their collective breath.
But on Wednesday, DOGE turned its attention to the NSF’s grants, the focus of the agency’s mission. Documents seen by Nature show that two members of DOGE, Luke Farritor and Zachary Terrell, have been given access to grant management systems and used that access to prevent grants from receiving funding that were already approved but awaiting finalization. “That, of course, raises the hairs on the back of our neck in a worrisome way,” an NSF programme officer says.
Research projects at the NSF go through multiple steps before approval. Proposals are first submitted to NSF programme officers with expertise in the scientific field they focus on. If the proposals pass muster with the officers, those staff members then commission a review from independent experts outside the agency. Only the strongest applications pass this step — the typical success rate is between 20% and 30%. Division directors within the NSF then give the final approval and send the grants on for finalization with the Division of Grants and Agreements. This is where grants are currently being sent back from.
Proposals that receive final approval are essentially always funded — until now, the employees say. Before DOGE’s arrival, new research awards at the agency had slowed by half, relative to 2024, Science has reported. On 16 April, they stopped completely.
A report under fire
This isn’t the first time since Trump took office that the NSF has re-examined its grants. In February, the agency initiated a review of all its grants to ensure that they weren’t in violation of executive orders from Trump on “radical and wasteful” DEI programmes and “gender ideology”. At that time, it was flagging grants containing any of hundreds of words that the Cruz report claimed were indicators of left-wing ideologies rather than hard science — such as “women”, “black men”, and “inequality”. Since 1980, the US Congress has mandated that as part of its mission, the NSF should broaden the participation of under-represented groups in science.
The House analysis found that the report inappropriately flagged grants at minority-serving institutions because the grants referred to the minority status of the institution. It also found that the Cruz report contained a “slew of embarrassing mistakes”, including that it flagged grants completely unrelated to DEI initiatives, such as the genomic diversity of rice and female leopard seals. Additionally, 14% of the 3,483 grants were duplicates, so they were double-counted.
Zoe Lofgren, a US representative from California and the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, sent the analysis to the NSF earlier today. “It is imperative that NSF is not intimidated into accepting these vacuous findings and undermining its merit review process by substituting the Cruz Report’s slander for expert opinion,” Lofgren wrote in a letter to NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan.
Most of the grants, the analysis found, were flagged because they included language about “broader impacts” of the research to society, a mandatory requirement passed unanimously by the Senate in 2010, before Cruz was a senator, and then again in 2017, after he was.
Anthony Gitter, a computational biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had a grant about using deep learning for protein modelling flagged by the Cruz report. It contained a single sentence about offering summer research opportunities to underrepresented minorities as part of the broader impact statement. The Cruz report “plays into the narrative that universities are these elitist places that harbour out-of-touch academics that are no longer doing science,” he says. “But it’s out of touch with the data.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 17, 2025.
