The Trump administration has already installed political appointees in America’s federal R&D organizations including the NIH and NSF. They have final say on funding decisions. These appointees override grant peer review and regular agency channels. It’s all part of Russel Vought/Project 2025’s unitary executive theory.
These NSF initiatives could well be the next logical step to channel millions of research funds to politically connected companies and organizations. Something similar happened with the recent Reflecting Pool fiasco where the federal contracts were give to Trump donors.
There’s no reason not to believe this will also happen to America’s federal R&D. Grift aside, there’s no reason either not to believe the funds will be given to Trump administration pet projects of dubious scientific value.
Curious what the plan is when the academic pipeline for training researchers collapses entirely. AI all the things?
And its heavily inspired by the nazi Carl schmitt that created the legal foundation for Hitlers rule.
I naturally expect this money to go to tech companies who have time and time again proven their ability to innovate and thrive in the bleeding edge: basically Oracle.
It’s so weird. Presumably the conservatives still want the US to be a superpower, which presumably includes high-tech capabilities like global power projection, missile defense, and persistent space operations. At the same time they seemingly want a Cultural Revolution-like decimation of intellectuals.
I don’t see how they believe they can attain both objectives at once.
On the flip-side, my academic colleagues are tearing out their hair trying to get some - any - funding to support their labs. I'm completely inundated with request from colleagues to provide an LOI or some other evidence that our company is interested in working with their lab on something. But that's even _less_ attractive for many private companies!
Why would you presume that? Isn't enough that they get rich and powerful as compared to others around them?
I used to think that too, but it seems evident the current crop of conservatives is only interested in hurting people they don’t like and funneling money into the pockets of oligarchs. It’s pretty evident now that none of this is being done out of patriotism or a genuine desire to improve America.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is trimming this year’s budgets for hundreds of its traditional basic science programs by roughly 20% to 30% even though its overall budget is down just 3%, Science has learned. NSF has not publicly explained the drastic cuts. But sources within and outside the agency, who did not want to be named, say they suspect the goal is to free up funds for a new $1.5 billion initiative, launched last month, meant to turn NSF-funded discoveries into new products and industries.
Last month, when NSF announced plans to give perhaps a half-dozen “X-Labs” as much as $300 million each over 6 years, it did not explain where the money would come from. Rumors have circulated for months that NSF was withholding $1 billion or more of the $8.1 billion Congress approved earlier this year for its eight research directorates. An internal memo obtained by Science documents, for the first time, the extent of those cuts in some fields. NSF declined comment.
The 18 June memo, from the head of a unit within NSF’s math and physical sciences directorate, told program managers that the unit’s budget for this fiscal year, which ends on 30 September, has been cut by 30% from its FY 2025 level of approximately $260 million. “This [cut] will unfortunately affect all [core] programs as well as centers, facilities, and other initiatives. … We are sorry to share this bad news right before the [Juneteenth] holiday weekend.”
The memo also helps explain why the foundation has handed out few new grants so far this year compared with last—just one-eighth of the FY 2025 total through 15 June, the watchdog group Grant Witness has calculated—despite a research budget that is only $220 million less than in FY 2025. “We just learned about our section budget for FY26,” the memo explains. Program managers are cautious about recommending proposals to fund until they know how much money they have to spend. The memo indicates that this year, some units did not learn their actual budgets until mid-June, some 5 months after Congress had approved the agency’s FY 2026 appropriation.
The memo’s bad news extends beyond the slashed budget. It directs the section’s 15 program managers to stop seeking funding for any proposals, even those that received the highest marks from outside reviewers and program staff, “until we are able to provide more details.” It even suggests staff “pull back any award recommendations in the queue,” another way to lower the number of grants ultimately going out the door this year.
Program managers would normally rush to inform potential and current grantees about such dramatic changes. But the memo tells program managers to keep their mouths shut. “This information is highly confidential,” it reads. “Please do not communicate anything to PIs [principal investigators].”
Knowledgeable sources within and outside NSF have told Science about comparable cuts of from 20% to 30% within many other units. The agency’s biology directorate, for example, has been cut by $200 million from its FY 2025 level of roughly $800 million. And some directorates have been hit even harder. NSF announced earlier this year it was “dissolving” its smallest directorate, which funds social, behavioral, and economic sciences (SBE), thus freeing up $150 million. And SBE has made only a handful of awards this fiscal year. The coming months could bring other cuts: For 2 years running, President Donald Trump has proposed slashing NSF’s $1 billion education directorate by nearly three-quarters.
Meanwhile the X-Labs program, managed by NSF’s newest directorate, called Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP), is scaling up fast. Created in 2022, TIP’s mission is to address the decades-old complaint that the agency, traditionally focused on curiosity-driven research with no obvious commercial value, needs to do more to make sure scientific discoveries eventually benefit society—in new jobs and products, improved health care, or a rising standard of living.
NSF announced the precursor to X-Labs in December 2025, calling them Tech Labs. Trump’s FY 2027 budget request for NSF, which he sent to Congress in April, included a modest $50 million for that program, to be launched sometime next year. But NSF officials have decided to greatly expand the initiative and move up its launch date.
The May announcement says the X-Labs “will give entrepreneurial teams of scientists and engineers the autonomy, resources and milestone-driven focus to tackle challenges that were difficult to pursue in conventional academic and industry labs.”
NSF will fund the X-Labs through a rarely used mechanism, called Other Transaction Authority, that gives it much greater leeway than usual to choose winners and set funding and goals. For example, it allows NSF to make awards to nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm, some of which might have been created solely for the purpose of receiving the NSF award. It also allows NSF to make additional awards without the need to review a new application.
The first set of labs will focus on improved, artificial intelligence–driven instrumentation for sensing and imaging and research on quantum systems and photonics, fields that are priorities for the Trump administration. Awardees will receive $1.5 million in startup funding for the first 9 months, followed by anywhere from $10 million to $50 million per year for the next 5 to 6 years. To cover that commitment, NSF had to find more than $1 billion within an overall FY 2026 budget of $8.8 billion that contained zero dollars for X-Labs.
By levying such a large tax on its other programs, the agency appears to be defying a congressional directive in the final FY 2026 appropriations bill that “No [NSF] directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level.” That language was meant to address fears by the research community and some legislators that NSF, if its overall budget remained flat, might decide to grow TIP at the expense of its other directorates—a concern that now appears prescient.
Even scientists who agree about the need to more quickly translate basic research into societal benefits are dismayed. “I had always thought that the TIP directorate would have a budget sufficient to cover programs like X-Labs,” says Rice University physicist Douglas Natelson. “TIP has been around since 2022, so I didn’t think they’d need money from the other directorates.”
NSF is moving swiftly to stand up the X-Labs initiative. Applicants must prepare and submit proposals by mid-July, barely 2 months after being notified of the opportunity. Sources tell Science that X-Labs could make the first awards as early as this fall.