Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the world’s leading funders of basic research, will “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” including awarding new grants and disbursing funds for existing grants, according to Nature.
Staff at NSF were told of the policy change in a 30 April email. The email did not give a reason for the funding freeze and did not say whether or when the agency would resume awarding funding.
Each year, the agency awards about 12,000 new grants with an average duration of three years, meaning tens of thousands of projects may be affected by the new policy. NSF funds about a quarter of all federally supported research in the United States.
Unless the funding freeze is lifted, it will “destroy people’s labs,” Colin Carlson, an epidemiologist at Yale University, told Nature. The latest development at NSF is a “five-alarm fire for American science,” Carlson wrote in a Bluesky post.
NSF had already drastically tightened its disbursement of funding—in the past two weeks, the agency terminated more than 1,000 grants, together worth $739 million. Hundreds of those grants were related to diversity, equity, and inclusion or misinformation and disinformation. In April, the agency returned all grant proposals to program officers, asking for extra review of whether each followed directives from the Trump administration.
In addition to causing turmoil among scientists who are now unsure their work can continue, such dramatic cuts to U.S. research funding may also cause long-term economic harm. One recent study by researchers at American University found that just a 25% reduction in federal funding for scientific research and development would reduce the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of economic health, by an amount comparable to the Great Recession and would make the average American poorer.
“This country’s status as the global leader in science and innovation is seemingly hanging by a thread at this point,” one NSF staff member told Nature.
—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer
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