The National Science Foundation is steering most of its money away from grants for individual researchers’ best ideas and toward the Trump administration’s tech-heavy priorities, as Jeffrey Mervis reports for Science. A 10-page NSF leadership memo issued September 10 lays out the shift, including a $1.5 billion X-Labs initiative for quantum science and AI-driven instrumentation.
The memo lands at an agency with no confirmed director since April 2025 and no National Science Board since Trump fired all its members a year later.
Some ideas earn praise. NSF plans large awards lasting five years or longer for “exceptional researchers … pursuing transformative questions,” answering complaints that grant sizes haven’t kept pace with research costs. Review panelists would also get a “golden ticket” to champion a controversial proposal colleagues might otherwise squash, a hedge against groupthink.
“I think it’s a thoughtful description of what a broad-based science strategy for NSF should be,” said Dan Reed, a University of Utah computer scientist and former NSB chair. “But it’s going to take a lot more money than NSF has now.”
Core disciplinary research gets just $1.5 billion of NSF’s $8.8 billion budget, graduate student funding will be split off from research grants, and efforts to broaden participation in science have vanished. Many new initiatives will run from the director’s office rather than NSF’s eight research directorates.
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Leslie Rissler, a former senior NSF biology administrator now dean of science at the University of Montana, questions whether those initiatives “will divert support from the universities that maintain the laboratories, field stations, collections, graduate programs, and intellectual capacity on which science itself depends.”
NSF’s real budget hasn’t grown in 20 years, and Trump wants to halve it. Joel Widder, a former senior NSF official and congressional staffer, calls the new mechanisms sound. “The question is whether an agency with a third fewer staff, no science board, no confirmed director, and a presidential request to halve its budget can run them,” he said.
