By Paul Bierman / For The Conversation
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
No matter where you live, NSF-supported research has also made your life safer. Engineering studies have reduced earthquake damage and fatalities through better building design. Improved hurricane and tornado forecasts reflect NSF investment in environmental monitoring and computer modeling of weather. NSF-supported resilience studies reduce risks and losses from wildfires.
Using NSF funding, scientists have done research that amazes, entertains and enthralls. They have drilled through mile-thick ice sheets to understand the past, visited the wreck of the Titanic and captured images of deep space.
NSF investments have made America and American science great. At least 268 Nobel laureates received NSF grants during their careers. The foundation has partnered with agencies across the government since it was created, including those dealing with national security and space exploration. The Federal Reserve estimates that government-supported research from the NSF and other agencies has had a return on investment of 150 percent to 300 percent since 1950, meaning for every dollar U.S. taxpayers invested, they got back between $1.50 and $3.
However, that funding is now at risk.
Since January, layoffs, leadership resignations and a massive proposed reorganization have threatened the integrity and mission of the National Science Foundation. Hundreds of research grants have been terminated. The administration’s proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2026 would cut NSF’s funding by 55 percent, an unprecedented reduction that would end federal support for science research across a wide range of discipines.
At my own geology lab, I have seen NSF grants catalyze research and the work of dozens of students who have collected data that’s now used to reduce risks from earthquakes, floods, landslides, erosion, sea-level rise and melting glaciers.
I have also served on advisory committees and review panels for the NSF over the past 30 years and have seen the value the foundation produces for the American people.
American science’s greatness stemmed from war: In the 1940s, with the advent of nuclear weapons, the space race and the intensification of the Cold War, American science and engineering expertise became increasingly critical for national defense. At the time, most basic and applied research was done by the military.
Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who oversaw military research efforts during World War II, including development of the atomic bomb, had a different idea.
He articulated an expansive scientific vision for the United States in “Science: The Endless Frontier.” The report was a blueprint for an American research juggernaut grounded in the expertise of university faculty, staff and graduate students.
On May 10, 1950, after five years of debate and compromise, President Harry Truman signed legislation creating the National Science Foundation and putting Bush’s vision to work. Since then, the foundation has become the leading funder of basic research in the United States.
NSF’s mandate, then as now, was to support basic research and spread funding for science across all 50 states. Expanding America’s scientific workforce was and remains integral to American prosperity. By 1952, the foundation was awarding merit fellowships to graduate and postdoctoral scientists from every state.
There were compromises. Control of NSF rested with presidential appointees, disappointing Bush. He wanted scientists in charge to avoid political interference with the foundation’s research agenda.
NSF funding matters to everyone, everywhere: Today, American tax dollars supporting science go to every state in the union.
The states with the most NSF grants awarded between 2011 and 2024 include several that voted Republican in the 2024 election – Texas, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania – and several that voted Democratic, including Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and Colorado. (For the 2024 fiscal year, Washington state received 226 grants totaling $154.6 million.)
More than 1,800 public and private institutions, scattered across all 50 states, receive NSF funding. The grants pay the salaries of staff, faculty and students, boosting local employment and supporting college towns and cities. For states with major research universities, those grants add up to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Even states with few universities each see tens of millions of dollars for research.
As NSF grant recipients purchase lab supplies and services, those dollars support regional and national economies.
When NSF budgets are cut and grants are terminated or never awarded, the harm trickles down and communities suffer. Initial NSF funding cuts are already rippling across the country, affecting both national and local economies in red, blue and purple states alike.
An analysis of a February 2025 proposal that would cut about $5.5 billion from National Institutes of Health grants estimated the ripple effect through college towns and supply chains would cost $6.1 billion in GDP, or total national productivity, and over 46,000 jobs.
An uncertain future for American science: America’s scientific research and training enterprise has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. Yet, as NSF celebrates its 75th birthday, the future of American science is in doubt. Funding is increasingly uncertain, and politics is driving decisions, as Bush feared 80 years ago.
A list of grants terminated by the Trump administration, collected both from government websites and scientists themselves, shows that by early May 2025, NSF had stopped funding more than 1,400 existing grants, totaling over a billion dollars of support for research, research training and education.
Most terminated grants focused on education; the core of science, technology and engineering workforce development critical for supplying highly skilled workers to American companies. For example, NSF provided 1,000 fewer graduate student fellowships in 2025 than in the decade before; a 50 percent drop in support for America’s best science students.
American scientists are responding to NSF’s downsizing in diverse ways. Some are pushing back by challenging grant terminations. Others are preparing to leave science or academia. Some are likely to move abroad, taking offers from other nations to recruit American experts. Science organizations and six prior heads of the NSF are calling on Congress to step up and maintain funding for science research and workforce development.
If these losses continue, the next generation of American scientists will be fewer in number and less well prepared to address the needs of a population facing the threat of more extreme weather, future pandemics and the limits to growth imposed by finite natural resources and other planetary limits.
Investing in science and engineering is an investment in America. Diminishing NSF and the science it supports will hurt the American economy and the lives of all Americans.
Paul Bierman is a professor of natural resources at University of Vermont. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
