President Donald Trump’s latest budget proposal includes a plan to slash funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) by 57%.
That would drop its budget from about $9 billion to $3.9 billion and cut support for about 250,000 researchers.
For context, the NSF currently funds about one-quarter of all federally backed basic research at U.S. universities.
If the cuts are approved, that number would shrink from supporting 330,000 people to just 90,000, according to the detailed budget proposal released last week.
The administration says the cuts reflect “a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment,” according to an NSF spokesperson.
But many scientists see the move as a direct attack on U.S. research.
“The president’s request is a stab in the back of U.S. science,” one NSF staffer told Nature.
Across-the-Board Damage
The proposed budget cuts would hit nearly every scientific discipline, though some would be hit harder than others:
- The directorate for geosciences: -44.6%
- The education directorate: -75%
- The math and physics directorate: -66.8%
Those three areas alone would lose about $2.6 billion.
Clean-energy research would be almost entirely eliminated, with 99% of its funding wiped out.
Meanwhile, LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which made history in 2016 by detecting gravitational waves, would see a 40% funding cut.
If enacted, one of LIGO’s two detectors would be forced to shut down, reducing its ability to pinpoint cosmic events and increasing the chance of misreading noise as signal.
“Devastating,” said David Reitze, LIGO’s executive director at Caltech.
Even Trump’s stated research priorities wouldn’t be spared. Artificial intelligence would receive just a 3.1% funding increase, and quantum information science would see a 0.4% bump, both well below the rate of inflation.
A Political Agenda
This year’s NSF budget request closely mirrors a 2023 proposal from the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank led by Russell Vought, now head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.
That proposal argued that universities have lost their effectiveness due to embracing “radical gender and race ideology.”
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas made similar claims in a 2024 report, alleging that $2 billion in NSF grants funded “neo-Marxism” and diversity efforts.
Democrats and independent reviewers have criticized the report for poor methodology.
Unlike other agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, which also support hospitals and industry, about 80% of NSF funding goes directly to universities.
Former NSF Director Neal Lane warned, “[It] would spell the end of any pretence that the U.S. leads the world in science and technology, handing that position to China.”
What This Could Mean for America’s Future
The budget still needs approval from Congress, and during Trump’s first term, lawmakers often rejected similar science cuts. But this time, many policy experts fear Congress may not push back.
As one current NSF employee put it: “If it passes in its current form, the American economy probably won’t recover for years or decades.”
Cutting funding that supports 250,000 researchers isn’t making America great again.
It’s undercutting the very foundation of innovation that made the country a global leader in science in the first place.