The director of the National Science Foundation, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned last month in the midst of major discounts to grant funding to the agency.
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Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration displays its attacks on the National Science Foundation, the government agency which is a main funder for fundamental sciences, mathematics and engineering, in particular in the colleges and universities of the United States.
The last salvo: a Preliminary budget request of the White House which would reduce $ 4.7 billion, more than half of the agency’s $ 9 billion budget.
The proposal landed on the same day that the NSF said that 344 previously approved subsidies had been terminated because they “were not aligned with the agency’s priorities”, according to an email at NPR. This follows two previous waves of cancellations, in April, which ended a thousand prices.
In addition, the agency has now decree deliver new prices and has stopped finance all existing, the scientific newspaper Nature said. An NSF spokesman, asked for this report, refused to comment.
In the middle of all these troubles, the director of the NSF, Sethuraman Panchanathan, suddenly left last week, adage“I think I did everything I can.”
To eliminate a large part of the budget of this agency would be “a crisis, just a disaster for American science,” said Sudip ParikhDirector General of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the largest scientific societies in the world.
It is optimistic that Congress would not follow it, but the budgetary process would probably take months.
Meanwhile, uncertainty would let scientists worry about how to support their laboratories and students and researchers at the start of their career.
“This has created this paralysis which, I think, already hurts us,” explains Parikh, who says that when he speaks to scientists, he begins to hear them express his interest in having a “outing plan for these jobs”.
Marianna ZhangA cognitive scientist at New York University who studies how children form stereotypes and how to reduce these stereotypes, says that she learned that her two-year scholarship was canceled in an NSF e-mail which, according to her, has misized the word “priorities”. His work no longer served these priorities, he said.
“I was just numb,” she said, “explaining that she had received the email by leading to a scientific conference and stopped to read it. “It was just shocking. I cried, on the side of the road.”
“Wider and stranger”
Some of the canceled subsidies initially involved diversity, equity and inclusion or examined disinformation or disinformation. These two research categories have already been targeted by the Republicans at the Congress such as representative Jim Jordan and Senator Ted Cruz.
But the cancellations did not stop there.
“As you go, you see that the scope of this becomes wider and stranger,” said Noam RossExecutive director of a non -profit organization called Ropensci, who started a database So that people can self-assess the cancellations of their subsidies.
“Looking at this, there is a conference on geometry and topology that has been canceled,” said Ross. “Why was he canceled, right?”
He notes that the subsidy to hold this conference may have mentioned scholarships for students from the under-represented communities. In the past, many researchers funded by the NSF have been encouraged to explain how their work would stimulate commitment to science.
Many canceled subsidies focus on education – especially in small middle, rural or minority colleges and universities.
Take the funded before NSF RNA meeting on the rust beltFor example. “We really highlight the students,” said Charles Hoogstraten Michigan State University, which notes that the NSF had funded it for many years. “The vast majority of our talks and a good majority of our posters are given by students.”
For many poorer students who cannot afford to travel, it is one of their rare chances of attending a high -level scientific conference, Hoogstraten explains. He and his colleagues try to understand what to do now that the funding has been cut.
Amy Hagena doctorate. A student at Virginia Tech, asked for the funding of the NSF for the geology work she wanted to do who involved going out with rocks from the Cambrian period.
“I applied, I received the subsidy on Thursday, then canceled it on Friday,” she said.
Growing uncertainty
Kathleen JohnsonA geochemist from the UCI Climate Justice Initiative, said their NSF subsidy was about 1.5 million dollars per year and worked to make geosciences more diverse and inclusive. Now they are faced with the possibility that staff members are dismissed and rush to understand how to support students this summer.
“There is a lot of uncertainty,” she said. “It was really stressful.”
Asked about the effect of all these cancellations on American scientists, an NSF spokesman said that “NSF refuses comment”.
The demand for the budget of the White House for 2026 says that it “reduces funding for: climate; clean energy; social, behavioral and economic sciences awake; and programs in the fields of science at low priority”.
“Funding for research on artificial intelligence and quantum information sciences is maintained at current levels,” he said.
But the brutal end of grants with little explanation means that all scientists feel the impact, explains Parikh.
“Even people who are not canceled or who are not terminated are worried that they will be dismissed,” he said.
Zhang, at New York University, says that she is starting to wonder if her future scientific career will have to leave the United States.
“It’s quite frightening, what’s going on,” she said. “I think it also shook my short -term faith that all of this is happening – but also in the long term.”