By Rob Marus
AAU President Barbara R. Snyder and APLU President Mark Becker recently sent a letter the leaders of the appropriations panels in both chambers of Congress asking them to finalize an agency spend plan for the National Science Foundation (NSF) in FY25 and to hold oversight hearings regarding the administration’s FY26 budget request as well as its multiple changes to the agency. They noted that “[m]aking significant changes to the agency mission, structure, and personnel without any congressional oversight to align with ‘proposed future budgets’ seems incredibly premature,” adding, “[w]ithout a strong and vibrant NSF, we risk losing U.S. global science and technological leadership, sacrificing our national security, domestic workforce, and ability to lead in future technology.”
The administration has not only proposed a 56% cut to the NSF’s budget for the next fiscal year, but has also attempted to institute massive layoffs at the agency and has reportedly abolished all of its divisions and significantly reduced the programs they oversee. As the letter notes, the reorganization plans reportedly would refocus NSF’s work on a handful of research areas – artificial intelligence, quantum science, biotechnology, nuclear energy, and translational science – without recognizing that other fields of fundamental scientific research can lead to further discoveries in the focus areas – or areas of scientific inquiry that may be equally important, but do not fit neatly into one of those categories. “Scientific discovery is necessarily a process of inquiry and experimentation that cannot be scripted or tightly constrained,” the letter said. “By focusing in just a few areas NSF is certain to limit and impede, rather than grow, U.S. leadership in science and economic competitiveness for decades to come.”
Rob Marus is deputy vice president for communications at AAU.