National Science Foundation Sets New Priorities

The National Science Foundation is changing its priorities and cutting hundreds of grants in order to get in line with the Trump administration’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion.

The agency, which focuses on nonmedical sciences and engineering, has spent decades trying to attract more women and racial minorities to STEM professions and to improve scientific media literacy. But in a statement released Friday, the NSF said those efforts are no longer consistent with its mission.

“Research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities,” the agency’s director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, wrote. 

An attached FAQ document also noted that the NSF “will not support research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’” as it would “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” All awards that “are not aligned” with NSF’s mission on either front have been terminated, the FAQ explained.

Neither Panchanathan’s statement nor the FAQ specified how many grants will be cut or the sum of their value. But the Department of Government Efficiency said in a post on X that NSF canceled 402 “wasteful DEI grants” that led to $233 million in savings. (One unnamed source told Science that more than 200 of the canceled grants came from NSF’s education directorate.)

NSF doled out approximately $8.4 billion through nearly 10,600 new awards in 2024, according to the agency’s website.

And while the NSF said these cuts are necessary to “ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent in the most efficient way possible,” Democrats and research advocates say slashing grant funding will actually dampen the nation’s spirit of competition and innovation.

“The American people deserve a scientific enterprise free from political interference,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat and ranking member of the Committee on Science, said in a news release. They “do not want a system where politicians, be they in the Senate or in the White House, decide which scientific projects to fund or defund based on their biases.”

‘Protected’ v. ‘Unprotected’

Throughout both the statement and the FAQ, the NSF repeatedly states that in order to align with the agency’s new priorities, grant-funded research projects and outreach efforts will not directly or indirectly exclude “protected characteristics.”

NSF’s definition of “protected” is broad, and includes any traits cited in “relevant laws” like the equal protection clause of the Constitution and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII explicitly prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. But the FAQ more specifically defines the “un-protected characteristics” it will still allow, such as “institutional type, geography, socioeconomic status, and career stage.”

It also noted that even grant recipients who focus on the allowable characteristics cannot “indirectly preference or exclude individuals or groups based on protected characteristics.”

Inside Higher Ed asked NSF for a more detailed list of what characteristics are protected, but the agency declined to comment.

The FAQ also explained that future grant applicants should only focus on the first six of the agency’s seven congressionally outlined goals, such as increasing economic competitiveness, supporting national defense and enhancing partnerships between academia and industry.

Research and outreach projects driven by the last goal—expanding participation in STEM for women and underrepresented groups—would go against the agency’s new priorities.

As far as misinformation, officials said little aside from that studies centered around it will not be federally funded since it could “infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens” and “advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

Broader Implications

Sarah Spreitzer, vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education, said this is not the first time that NSF has targeted DEI programs. Rather, the agency is taking a second strike at it—this time with a new strategy and a broadened scope. Shortly after President Trump first signed his executive orders targeting DEI, Spreitzer said, multiple NSF grant programs went under review, and prior Inside Higher Ed reporting shows that processing of many award applications had been paused.

But this time, grants haven’t just been paused or reviewed, they’ve been terminated. And rather than linking the cuts to Trump’s executive orders, the NSF is saying it’s a matter of different priorities.

“It’s yet another step in limiting the amount of funding that’s going to be given out by NSF,” Spreitzer said. But “whether it’s because of the executive orders or whether it’s because of prioritization, the result is the same.”

The agency even addressed this difference in approach, noting in the FAQ that this “updated guidance” does not violate a recent court order that says congressionally appropriated funding cannot be withheld due to executive orders.

Implementing restrictions around “misinformation” as a second topic that goes against the agency’s priorities, Spreitzer said, is just another part of the Trump administration’s effort to disguise various attempts at cutting off federal funds.

“There’s so much confusion at research agencies—NIH, NSF, NASA and all of the others—because there’s multiple actions that are being taken,” she said. “They’re not supposed to freeze federal funding, but these various actions have basically done that.”

The detriment to higher education and scientific innovation, however, is crystal clear, research advocates say. Mike Wagner, a journalism and communications professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, called the NSF changes a “Friday Night Massacre of accurate information.”

And Paul Bierman, a geology professor at the University of Vermont, made similar comments about the impact such cuts would have on academic representation.

“I spent 32 years doing everything to diversify the science workforce and now this. Do I scream or cry?” he wrote in a post on BlueSky.

To Spreitzer, the fact that one political action can suddenly terminate a whole collection of grants will discourage a lot of future scientists from joining the academic workforce and will lead to the “complete gutting of America’s scientific enterprise.”

“The U.S. is no longer going to be a leader in the scientific enterprise,” she said. “And it’s going to take us generations to kind of address.”