Marcia McNutt is one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation – a renowned geophysicist understanding of the way in which volcanic activity affects the surface of the earth.
In a career dating back to the 1970s, she was a professor at Stanford and MIT, published the flagship newspaper Scienceand led the US Geological Survey. She even presented her work at a Vatican scholarship conference on which Pope Francis chaired. And for almost a decade now, it has been president From the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, the first woman in this role.
But all this may not have happened, said McNutt recently by e-mail, if not for a scholarship from the National Science Foundation.
While McNutt was preparing to graduate from Colorado College with a Summa Cum Laude Diploma in physics, she assumed that more school would be too expensive and planned rather to work in a ski lodge – “becoming essentially a ski tramp,” she said – until a teacher intervened.
“I mentioned that my parents could not allow me to send me higher education, how much he gave me a form to request an NSF scholarship,” said McNutt. “He said,” Fill this. You will get the scholarship. You will go to higher education and your parents will not pay anything. So I did it.
The professor referred to one of the NSF graduate research scholarships. And his prediction was correct. MCNUTT won one of the coveted prices, later learning that its external intellectual validation – and the guarantee of federal financing that came to it – has helped to overcome skepticism on the part of some of the teachers admitting to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
“Without the NSF scholarship,” said McNutt, “I would never have attended the school of my dreams.”
McNutt knows that her experience was not unusual – in part, because she was then devoted to the screening committee for new candidates. “I was constantly overwhelmed by the lives that have been changed by these scholarships,” she told me.
But McNutt is also concerned that fewer people will have these kinds of opportunities in the future.
If you have paid attention to how the Trump administration has approached government funding for scientific research, you can guess why.
The NSF higher education scholarship is almost as old as the agency itself, which dates Back to 1950 and the call – originally from the presidential scientific advisor of the Second World War Bush Vannevar– For the federal government to invest more in science and scientists.
During the 75 years that followed, the scholarship financed doctoral studies for more than 70,000 graduate students, according to NSF. His former include more than forty winners of the Nobel Prize, as well as scientists attached to some of the most important discoveries and innovations that make news today – like the astrophysicist whose research on Cosmic radiation provided crucial evidence of the Big Bang and the computer scientist who was called the “godmother” of artificial intelligence.
Oh, and co-founder of GoogleAlso.
But when NSF announced the new stock of scholarship holders a week ago, the cohort had only a thousand students, less than half of last year and the least since 2008.
It’s a big problem. The program was already very competitive, with only 16% of candidates obtaining scholarships, because the three years of financial support without restriction that it offers may what it takes to enter a certain higher school, or to study with a particular mentor or in a particular laboratory – or, in certain cases, to continue an investigation which may not have support elsewhere.
Now, even less of the most promising scientists in the country in training will obtain this funding.
For what? This is a good question. As has become customary in the Trump administration, the reduction in scholarship prices came without official announcement. The news was revealed through publications on the social networks of researchers who reconstituted it according to public data, as well as reports in Nature And Science.
The NSF media office did not offer justification – its generic response to press requests (including mine) is a declaration of its commitment to fully finance the stock market course of this year and the possibility that it could still offer more prices later in the year. The White House did not explain the change either.
But it’s not a secret what’s going on.
The reduction of scholarships occurs while the Trump administration has considerably reduced federal support to all kinds of scientific research, both by freezing, cancellation or reduction of subsidies, and by reducing the government agencies that administer them. All of this happened in NSF.
Since Trump took up his duties, the total support of the NSF to research (above and beyond the graduate scholarship) fell in two, according to an analysis of public archives by Science. NSF’s workforce has also become smaller, thanks to Releases and redemptions.
Although it is difficult to know exactly how many NSF workers has lost, in part because a federal judge has ordered the agency to hire Some of the people he dismissed, agency managers have warned employees that the long -term objective of the administration is to reduce staff by 50%.
And the agency also abandons a long -standing infrastructure: Tuesday evening, according to ScienceThe management of the NSF announced internally that it dissolved a group of advisory committees on which it was based for external expertise. Only a handful of these panels – those whose existence is required by law – has been spared.
As with the cuts that the administration made in other parts of the federal government, several calendar agendas seem to be at stake.
One is the declared determination of the Trump administration to reduce unnecessary federal expenses, which, opposite, seems reasonable: many Americans support this objective with enthusiasm, at least in the abstract, and even many unconditional defenders of the great government will agree that there are places where it could work much more effectively.
But it would be difficult to find a federal investment that has generated larger or clearer yields than the NSF higher education scholarships.
Just think of Google, whose co-founder, Sergey Brinhad a graduate scholarship from the NSF while he was in Stanford. (It was there that he met the co-founder Larry Page, who worked on a project with his own separate NSF funding.) The wealth that Google has generated for the United States could easily reach the hundreds of billionsOtherwise billions of billions – which, all by itself, eclipse as many billions as the federal government has spent on the scholarship program since its creation.
And that does not mean anything about the economic contributions of other innovations of the former NSF scholarship holders – or non -economic advantages, which include progress that modifies life in energy, transport, communication and medicine.
Of course, federal research reductions are also part of the wider effort of the Trump administration for eliminate What he considers a left wing infestation Research universities and federal agencies that support them. This includes the NSF – which, according to a recent report By Trump’s supporter, Senator Ted Cruz, has subscribed more than $ 2 billion in “Grants Dei Woke Dei” which advance the “propaganda of the war of the neo-Marxist classes” during the mandate of the Biden administration.
The truth in the load – there are always some – is that the Biden administration has really expressed guidelines Call agencies like the NSF to put more emphasis on diversity and equity. This has almost surely led to more federal federal support to answer questions related to these priorities and researchers who pursue them.
But Cruz’s report has a little exaggerated the impact of Dei.
A survey of Propuplica noted that the Cruz database of research projects supported by the NSF had applied roughly keywords so that studies sometimes landed on its list simply because their summaries had words like “biodiversity” or “woman”. An analysis of National public radio I discovered certain studies on subjects such as self-controlling-car safety and the formation of fatal tumors found themselves in the database simply because they sought to include more researchers from historically under-represented groups.
And it is not clear to what extent all this has affected graduates’ scholarships, whose long application process emphasizes the type of scientific surveys which says that the Trump administration says (as badly convinced) that it wishes to protect against political influence.
Whatever the real impact of DEI on NSF financing decisions – and whatever the advantages or problems with this approach, depending on your point of view – the Trump administration could have chosen to end this accent in a methodical and meticulous way that would have continued to provide scientific research at roughly at levels comparable to the past.
Instead, the administration has adopted the same approach as it has other federal research organizations and the government as a whole – moving as quickly and roughly as possible, with little concern for the consequences.
You can already see some of these consequences, in the form of a thousand young promising scientists who do not obtain the type of support that has launched careers like that of Marcia McNutt. But these are the consequences that do not materialize – the potential studies of studies will never continue, the discoveries they will never make, the innovations that they will never produce – that America could regret it most.