Trump’s Science Cuts Will Be Felt for Generations
Mindless slashing at NSF won’t just harm the scientific enterprise today—it will damage discovery and innovation for years to come.
MARCIA MCNUTT IS ONE OF THE MOST accomplished scientists of her generation—a world-famous geophysicist who has traveled the oceans and mapped their floor, helping to establish new understandings of how volcanic activity affects the earth’s surface.
In a career stretching back to the 1970s, she has been a professor at Stanford and MIT, edited the flagship journal Science, and led the U.S. Geological Survey. She’s even presented her work at a Vatican scholarship conference over which Pope Francis presided. And for nearly a decade now, she has been president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, the first woman in that role.
But all of that might not have happened, McNutt told me recently over e-mail, if not for a fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
As McNutt was preparing to graduate from Colorado College with a summa cum laude degree in physics, she assumed more school would be too expensive and was planning instead to work at a ski lodge—“basically become a ski bum,” she says—until a professor intervened.
“I mentioned that my parents couldn’t afford to send me to grad school, at which point he gave me a form to apply for an NSF fellowship,” McNutt said. “He said: ‘Fill this out. You will get the scholarship. You will go to graduate school and your parents won’t pay anything.’ So I did.”
The professor was referring to one of NSF’s graduate research fellowships. And his prediction was correct. McNutt went on to win one of the coveted awards, learning later that its outside intellectual validation—and the guarantee of federal funding that came with it—was instrumental in overcoming skepticism from some of the admitting faculty at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
“Without the NSF fellowship,” McNutt said, “I would never have attended my dream school.”
McNutt knows her experience was not unusual—in part, because she later went on to serve on the committee screening new applicants. “I was constantly overwhelmed by the lives that were changed by those fellowships,” she told me.
But McNutt also worries that fewer people will have these sorts of opportunities in the future.
If you’ve been paying attention to the way the Trump administration has been approaching government funding of scientific research, you can guess why.
THE NSF GRADUATE SCHOOL FELLOWSHIP is almost as old as the agency itself, which dates back to 1950 and the call—originally from World War II presidential science adviser Vannevar Bush—for the federal government to invest more heavily in science and scientists.
In the 75 years since, the fellowship has financed doctoral studies for more than 70,000 graduate students, according to NSF. Its alumni include more than forty Nobel laureates, as well as scientists attached to some of the most important discoveries and innovations making news today—like the astrophysicist whose research on cosmic radiation provided crucial evidence of the Big Bang and the computer scientist who has been called the “godmother” of artificial intelligence.
Oh, and a co-founder of Google, too.
But when NSF announced the new class of fellows a week ago, the cohort had just a thousand students, less than half of last year’s number and the fewest since 2008.
That’s a big deal. The program was already highly competitive, with just 16 percent of applicants getting fellowships, because the three years of unrestricted financial support it offers can be what it takes to get into a certain grad school, or to study with with a particular mentor or in a particular lab—or, in some cases, to pursue a line of inquiry that might not have support elsewhere.
Now even fewer of the nation’s most promising scientists-in-training will get that funding.
Why? That’s a fine question. As has become customary in the Trump administration, the reduction in fellowship awards came with no official announcement. The news came to light via social media posts from scholars who pieced it together based on public data, along with reports in Nature and Science.
NSF’s media office hasn’t offered a rationale—its generic reply to press inquiries (including mine) is a statement of its commitment to fully funding this year’s fellowship class and the possibility it might yet offer some more awards later in the year. The White House also hasn’t explained the change.
But it’s no secret what’s happening.
The reduction in fellowships comes as the Trump administration has been dramatically reducing federal support for all kinds of scientific research—both by freezing, canceling, or cutting grants, and by downsizing the government agencies that administer them. All of that has happened at NSF.
Since Trump took office, total NSF support for research (above and beyond the graduate fellowship) has fallen in half, according to an analysis of public records by Science. NSF’s workforce has also gotten smaller, thanks to layoffs and buyouts.
While it’s hard to know exactly how many workers NSF has lost, in part because a federal judge ordered the agency to rehire some of the people it fired, agency leaders have warned employees that the administration’s long-term goal is to cut the staff by 50 percent.
And the agency is scrapping some longstanding infrastructure too: On Tuesday evening, according to Science, NSF leadership announced internally that it was dissolving a group of advisory committees on which it relied for outside expertise. Only a handful of these panels—those whose existence is required by law—have been spared.
AS WITH THE CUTS THE ADMINISTRATION is making to other parts of the federal government, several overlapping agendas seem to be in play.
One is the Trump administration’s stated determination to cut wasteful federal spending, which on its face seems reasonable: Plenty of Americans support that goal enthusiastically, at least in the abstract, and even many die-hard defenders of big government would agree there are places it could operate a lot more efficiently.
But it would be hard to find a federal investment that has generated larger or clearer returns than the NSF graduate fellowships.
Just think about Google, whose co-founder, Sergey Brin, had an NSF graduate fellowship while he was at Stanford. (That’s where he met co-founder Larry Page, who was working on a project with its own, separate NSF funding.) The wealth Google has generated for the United States could easily reach into the hundreds of billions, if not trillions—which, all by itself, dwarfs however many billions the federal government has spent on the fellowship program since its inception.
And that’s to say nothing of the economic contributions of other innovations from former NSF fellows—or of the non-economic benefits, which include life-altering advances in energy, transportation, communications, and medicine.1
Of course, the cuts to federal research are also part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to eliminate what it sees as a left-wing infestation of research universities and federal agencies that support them. That includes NSF—which, according to a recent report by Trump supporter Sen. Ted Cruz, underwrote more than $2 billion in “woke DEI grants” advancing “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” during the Biden administration’s tenure.
The truth in the charge—there’s always some—is that the Biden administration really did issue directives calling on agencies like NSF to put more emphasis on diversity and equity. That almost surely led to more federal support of studies taking up questions related to those priorities, and of the scholars who pursue them.
But Cruz’s report exaggerated the impact of DEI quite a bit.
An investigation by ProPublica found that Cruz’s database of NSF-supported research projects had crudely applied keywords so that studies sometimes landed on his list simply because their abstracts had words like “biodiversity” or “female.” An analysis by National Public Radio discovered some studies on subjects like self-driving–car safety and the formation of deadly tumors ended up in the database simply because they sought to include more researchers from historically underrepresented groups.
And it’s not clear how much any of this affected the graduate fellowships, whose lengthy application process emphasizes the kind of scientific inquiries the Trump administration says (however unconvincingly) it wants to protect from political influence.
Whatever the actual impact of DEI on funding decisions by NSF—and whatever the merits or problems with that approach, depending on your perspective—the Trump administration could have chosen to end that emphasis in a methodical, careful way that would have continued to provide scientific research roughly at levels comparable with the past.
Instead, the administration has taken the same approach it has to other federal research organizations, and to the government as a whole—hacking away as quickly and crudely as possible, with little concern for the consequences.
You can see some of those consequences already, in the form of a thousand promising young scientists who won’t get the kind of support that launched careers like Marcia McNutt’s. But it’s the consequences yet to materialize—the studies would-be fellows will never pursue, the discoveries they will never make, the innovations they will never produce—that America may come to regret most.
A skeptic might point out that at least some of the advances in science and technology that are linked to NSF fellowships or grants would have happened anyway even without that federal support. That’s surely true in some cases. But the overall track record of achievement is so strong, the scale of the returns on NSF fellowships and grants is so great, and the evidence of their indispensability to American discovery and invention so clear—not least from testimonials and biographies of scientists and engineers—that the counterfactual is unpersuasive.
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Its not just the NSF. I am hearing talk that NASAs budget will be cut by 20%. The next gen space based telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman telescope which is fully assembled and ready to launch in two years, would be abandoned. Its teeth grindingly infuriating to see these cuts happening and not being able to do a damn thing about it.