NSF terminates huge number of grants and stops awarding new ones
11:15 Share

It's Nikayla from Side Hustle Pro, and I want to tell you about something exciting. You're watching EveryDollar, and Walmart Business helps you stretch each one. From office supplies to snacks and cleaning gear, you'll get everyday low prices, plus easy bulk ordering and fast delivery. And with tools like spend tracking and multi-user accounts, staying organized is simple. Save time, money, and hassle at business.walmart.com. It's free to join.

This podcast is brought to you by Aura. By the time you hear about a data breach, your information has already been exposed for months. On average, companies take 277 days to report a breach. That's nine months where hackers have access to your personal data.

That's why we're thrilled to partner with Aura. Aura is an all-in-one digital safety solution that monitors the dark web for your phone number, email, and social security number, sending real-time alerts if your info is found. It also includes a VPN, password manager, and data broker removal to help keep you safe.

For a limited time, Aura is offering a 14-day free trial plus a dark web scan to check if your personal information has been leaked, all for free at Aura.com slash safety. That's Aura.com slash safety to sign up and protect your loved ones. That's A-U-R-A dot com slash safety. Terms apply. Check the site for details.

Hi listeners, Benjamin here. Been a few weeks since we checked in on all things going on in the US. Of course, there is a lot happening and will continue to happen over the next weeks and months, I'm sure. It's Monday as we're recording this, and we're very lucky that one of the team who've been reporting on this for nature, Dan Garisto, happens to be in London this week, and he joins me in the studio to have a quick chat about all things nature.

science policy in the U.S. Dan, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you for having me and for setting up the weather so nicely. Well, there has been a lot going on, and you and the team really have been getting the exclusives, I have to say, for nature. And a lot of news that's been happening over the past couple of weeks has surrounded one of the world's biggest supporters of basic research, the NSF, the U.S. National Science Foundation, certainly around funding. What's been going on there? Well, so there's been a couple of things happening at the NSF since the inauguration of Trump.

But I would say that two of the main things are these grant terminations. So the...

Trump team has been flagging certain grants based on essentially keywords in the grant abstracts for termination. And they have been terminating grants which relate to essentially anything with diversity, equity, inclusion, grants about misinformation. What they've done is about 1,400 grants have been terminated so far. And this has been very concerning because

It's not according to any kind of protocol. These grants are contractual obligations that NSF has with researchers. There's been essentially no explanation other than your grant no longer aligns with agency priorities. So that's one thing. The second thing is that

The NSF is undergoing a period of dramatic cutbacks. That's on both a budget level. So the proposed budget from the president's office is cut by half, 55.8%. I mean, this is a $5 billion cut to a $9 billion agency if it goes through. So this cut would not just be to all the research grants, but it would be to the agency itself.

So they are looking at potentially halving the number of NSF employees. NSF currently employs about 1,500, 1,600 people.

could be down to 700, 800 after these massive cuts. And let's unpick some of those things then. Let's start with the grants maybe, Dan. So what, researchers have just been getting letters saying, "You're cut," kind of thing? That's roughly correct. What happens is the universities and institutions where the researchers are at will get an email from the NSF. It just lists a number of grants and it says these grants are being terminated because they no longer align with agency priorities.

And we have been working to assemble lists of these grants to understand roughly how many of them there are, where the impacts are taking place. Right now, it looks about like $700 million in grants have been terminated.

And it's happening across the country, although it does seem to be more localized. And this is probably just due to where colleges and universities are, but it does seem to be more localized in Democratic-leaning areas, which some people have argued is evidence for political targeting.

And there are other changes going on as well, right? Right. So there is another thing, which is that the NSF has repeatedly frozen both new grants and more recently they have frozen the essentially additional funds going to existing grants. Researchers

should still be able to draw down funds that have been provided to them, but essentially no additional funds are going out. And this is likely related to a new policy which the NSF has put in place, which is putting a 15% cap on indirect or overhead spending. This is a reduction from usually about 50 to 60%. So it's

If a grant gives researchers funding to study black holes in space, that $100,000 grant, for example, would also include $50,000 for maintenance and electricity to the telescopes that they're using to study the black holes. And that's really important because, as one researcher put it to me, you can't afford to win that many grants because...

If you don't have overhead costs, you're just losing money with every grant that you receive. So, yeah, the answer is right now there's a lot of things happening at the NSF and researchers, the ones who have had their grants terminated, are looking to alternate sources of funding. But there's not too much. There was a recent venture by some private philanthropic foundations to give people $25,000 as a sort of very quick investment.

Here's some money to tide you over maybe for the next couple of months or maybe to pay your graduate students. But there's no way to replace, you know, $700 million, let alone the $5 billion, which is potentially coming down the line. Right. So we're in the situation then where existing grants have been cut then and presumably future grants may not be given out at all. That's sort of what it looks like right now.

There are a lot of big questions that depend on Congress. There are also questions that depend on the courts. Some of these actions are being challenged in court. The 15% cap, for example, there is a consortium of 13 universities which are suing the NSF for putting this cap on. And the same thing happened with the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, where they also attempted to put a 15% cap on overhead costs.

There has been a restraining order placed on both of those respective agencies because the courts found that, no, you're actually not allowed to just do this unilaterally. You have to go through the proper procedures. And so I think a lot of folks are hoping that what will happen is that NSF will be constrained in part by the courts. And I guess we'll wait and see what happens there. We are waiting and seeing. But of course, in terms of people and services,

If we follow this through line from the grants to the people to what they're studying, what sort of impacts have people told you about and what is at risk? One of the things I alluded to earlier with the example is telescopes. Telescopes are extremely, you know, resource intensive facilities, but they're not the only ones. Things like AI and quantum work.

They require million-dollar facilities to even do minimal basic research. And these are things which the Trump administration has said that it claims to prioritize. It wants to support some selected amount of research.

But when you impose a 15% cap, when you cut billions of dollars from the organization, when you slash the organization's numbers, I mean, the reality is that it could be very, very difficult for even the research that the Trump administration says that it wants to support to survive. And that's maybe the safest set of things. There are these grants which have been terminated. One of the people I spoke to is a researcher who studies...

With some small amount of irony, censorship. And this is a researcher who creates tools for people in countries to evade government firewalls. Millions of people use these tools. The researcher also studies all sorts of ways in which censorship impacts people living under authoritarian governments.

And the researcher's grant was terminated two weeks ago. Essentially, no explanation given other than your grant no longer aligns with agency priorities. One of the things that we've covered on these roundups is that a lot of the, well, you mentioned before, keywords are being targeted. We saw that in other cases as well. And presumably that's going to have knock-on impacts too. Yeah. So...

A lot of these keywords have been focused on the role of underrepresented minorities in science. And we should be clear about what that means. It means fewer black kids, fewer Hispanic kids, fewer women getting these opportunities to study science and engineering and math. And what you're doing if you terminate these grants is.

is you're removing many, many people's ability to get into science. The NSF is something that a lot of people cite as their way into science and...

It's not clear that that will happen anymore after these cuts. Well, let's maybe think about the long-term impacts as well. You spoke about how the federal funding for the NSF could face quite severe reduction. And that's something else you've been reporting on for Nature, the future federal budget, because the Trump administration announced their skinny budget, which is kind of an idea of what the actual budget might look like before the financial year begins in October.

Right. So the skinny budget came out two weeks ago and it's basically a very short abbreviated list. You know, it has here's each agency. Here's roughly how much we want to give them. But it's not a line by line, you know, accounting of all of the various programs.

But it gives a sense of here's what the president thinks should go into the budget. And what are some of the numbers we're looking at then? The NSF, it has a very large cut to it. Again, about 55.8% is the number they've put up. But NIH is looking at 40% cut, very large cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, very large cuts to NASA. I don't have all

all the numbers in front of me. But when you look at the budget and you look at here's what they're going to cut and here's what they're not going to cut, basically it's more funding for defense, less funding for everything else. And it's substantially less funding. And a lot of the funding cuts are targeted on science. And the rationale that was put forward in this preliminary budget document from the president's office is pretty

Basically, we don't like the science that you've been doing. They talk about woke science. The language in the budget is quite strong, but it's also not final. This is going to go to Congress in the next couple of weeks, and we will see what the Republican majority thinks of this budget. During the first Trump administration, there were similar, although not quite as extreme cuts to the budget proposed by President Trump during his first term.

But the Republican Congress at the time rejected it and, in fact, led to a slight increase in science funding over those four years. And we're not sure what we will see this time, but there is definitely a lot of pressure from many sides, not just Democrats, but many people who are concerned about science and its importance to national security, to the well-being and health of the nation, to

being able to plan and understand the impacts and effects of climate change over the next decades. And you spoke to many policy experts then who took a look at this preliminary budget. What did they say? The answer is uniformly, this is going to be very bad for American science.

There is essentially nothing you can do when the dollar amount is reduced that much. This is not about efficiency. It's not about making programs slim down and reducing administrative bloat. It's just about cutting certain things. And it's cutting not with a scalpel, but with a chainsaw. Well, let's leave it there. Dan Garisto, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks. It was a pleasure to be here.

Hey, this is Farnoosh Tarabi from the So Money Podcast. Running a business means wearing a lot of hats, but ordering supplies shouldn't be one of the ones you don't like. Walmart Business helps organizations like yours save time, money, and the headache of managing purchases. From office essentials to bulk break room snacks, it's all in one place, online, in-store, or right in their app. Sign up for free at business.walmart.com and get back to what really matters, running your business. This is Farnoosh Tarabi from the So Money Podcast.

This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Imagine waking up to find your bank account drained, bills for loans you never took out, a warrant for your arrest, all because someone stole your identity. Hackers aren't waiting.

Why are you? That's why we're thrilled to partner with Aura. Your personal data is a goldmine for hackers, and Aura helps lock it down. Aura monitors the dark web, blocks data brokers from selling your information, includes a VPN for private browsing, and a password manager to secure your accounts before criminals break in. For a limited time, Aura is offering our listeners a 14-day free trial plus a dark web scan to check if your personal information has been leaked.

all for free at aura.com slash safety. That's aura.com slash safety to sign up and start protecting yourself and your loved ones. That's A-U-R-A dot com slash safety. Terms apply. Check the site for details.