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Two major political bombshells hit the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) this week. The first was an official communication from the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM): Prepare for the possible layoff of half of your 1600-member staff as soon as this spring. The second, still a rumor, is equally shocking: President Donald Trump may ask Congress to cut your $9 billion budget by two-thirds.
The potential double whammy came as NSF has suspended business as usual to find out whether any research it is already funding clashes with a series of executive orders issued by Trump, including one to stop efforts to increase workforce diversity. And it has sparked anxious discussion of what such massive cuts would mean for the second-leading government funder of U.S. academic research behind the National Institutes of Health.
NSF employees learned about the proposed layoffs, or “reductions in force” in government parlance, at meetings held on 4 February at the foundation’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. After getting an oral message from OPM, NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan instructed his senior leadership team to spread the word, although staff were ordered not to discuss the news.
“My boss was crying when she told us,” says one NSF employee who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. “This is not something NSF wants to be doing,” the employee says. “But they weren’t given a choice.”
The threat to massively shrink NSF is fueled by Trump’s pledge to reduce the size of the federal workforce and reduce government spending—two longtime goals of political conservatives. And although NSF employs just a tiny fraction of the nation’s roughly 2.3 million federal employees, the agency hasn’t escaped their notice. For example, conservative economist Samuel Hammond of the Foundation for American Innovation this week wrote on the social media platform X, “The NSF could likely operate with one-tenth the staff and be 10x as effective with the right people and smarter approaches.” Hammond’s post came a day before he testified at a 5 February hearing held by the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on maintaining U.S. leadership in science.
Hammond believes NSF program managers are risk adverse, that the agency’s peer-review system operates as an old boys’ network favoring researchers at a handful of top-tier universities, and that NSF would do better to rely on artificial intelligence to pick the best proposals. He also suggested the agency should shift the bulk of its funding from academic institutions to the private sector, including both companies and nonprofit organizations.
Adopting those approaches would be a radical change in how NSF does business. And John Long, a vertebrate physiologist at Vassar College and a former NSF program officer in its biology directorate, thinks they reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of program managers. The roughly 400 Ph.D. scientists who serve as program officers and middle managers do far more than just pass out money, he explains.
The job of a program officer is “to identify gaps in our scientific knowledge and figure out a way to fill those gaps,” Long says. “ChatGPT Scholar may be good at summarizing what we already know by providing me citations to relevant papers. But it takes conversations between humans, whether over the phone or in the hallway, to really spark ideas that could open up an entire new line of research.”
In addition to being “talent scouts” by engaging with scientists at conferences, program officers are also “coaches, working with scientists whose proposals have been declined to help them write a better one the next time,” Long continues. Program officers, he adds, also play a vital role in helping early-career researchers or those moving into a new field to articulate the questions they hope to answer and why they are important.
NSF’s scientific staff is a mix of career civil servants and rotators such as Long—scientists who take leave from their academic positions to work at the agency for a few years. That hiring approach allows NSF to attract people with fresh ideas and then season them with veterans who understand how the government operates. The mixture of new blood and old hands, Long says, helps the agency identify new directions and figure out the best way to fund them.
Cutting NSF’s staff wouldn’t save much money: Its payroll accounts for less than 5% of its budget, with the rest going out the door as grants and contracts. But science lobbyists are increasingly worried by whispers that Trump will propose cutting NSF’s spending by up to 66% in his 2026 budget request to Congress, expected to be released in mid-April. (Congress has yet to pass a spending bill for this fiscal year, which began in October 2024.)
The White House is floating a $3 billion number for NSF, sources tell Science. By comparison, the agency’s current budget is $9.1 billion, and former President Joe Biden’s 2025 request, submitted in March 2024, was for $10.2 billion.
“The rumored [presidential request] top line for NSF would essentially destroy the agency as we know it,” astrophysicist Grant Tremblay posted on X this week.
Such cuts would likely force NSF to eliminate large portions of its broad portfolio, which ranges from operating one-of-a-kind telescopes at the South Pole to supporting elementary school science and math education. And it would almost certainly reduce a researcher’s chance of winning an NSF grant—currently one in four—to the point that researchers might look elsewhere for support.
“I mean, if the success rate drops to 10%, why bother even applying?” says one higher education lobbyist. “Researchers may decide to leave the United States if they can’t get funding here.”
Congress will have the final say on NSF’s budget. And despite Republicans enjoying narrow majorities in both the Senate and the House, it’s far from clear that Trump will be able to achieve reductions at NSF anything close to the rumored magnitude.
Still, this week’s House science committee hearing—its first in the new Congress—suggests the upcoming funding battle will be fierce. Republicans on the panel voiced support for Trump’s agenda, including efforts to lower taxes and eliminate regulations. Such policies will lead to “incredible growth in our science and technology sectors,” said Representative Brian Babin (R–TX), the new chair of the committee, “and the last thing Congress should do is slow that down.”
But Democrats expressed outrage at Trump’s actions so far. “For many decades there has been bipartisan consensus that the federal role in basic research is essential … and that funding needs to continue if we are to keep our [global] lead in science,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren (CA), the panel’s top Democrat. “But the new administration is actively and with unprecedented speed and ferocity apparently seeking to tear down and undermine some of the very scientific foundations upon which our leadership has been so painstakingly built.”
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