A troubled birthday for the National Science Foundation

Happy 75th birthday, National Science Foundation! On May 10, 1950, Congress established one of the world’s best value, highest impact, and, frankly, coolest science agencies. The NSF finances federal research in just about anything that’s not health (the National Institutes of Health do that).

It’s been a bit of a rough birthday party. Elon Musk’s “DOGE” has been cutting research funding right and left, including at least 13 grants at MSU at the last count. The director of NSF just resigned as the Trump administration announced plans to dissolve its 37 specialist divisions. Trump’s budget proposes cutting NSF by half. The money that would save? About $5 billion, which isn’t that far from the amount of money that the budget wants to give to SpaceX. And of course they are going especially hard after anything that implies a commitment to equity, diversity, or inclusion, whether it’s the whole NSF equity division or research on environmental justice in Detroit.

Michigan researcher’s work on air pollution and racial inequities caught in funding freeze

NSF, unlike the Trump administration, doesn’t “give” money to anybody for anything. It chooses grants for research on an enormously competitive basis – in the 2024 fiscal year, only 15.4% of NSF grant applications were funded. The government is paying universities to do the best possible research with NSF money, and it’s driving a very hard bargain. When a university, be it Harvard, Grand Valley State, or Albion College, gets a grant, it’s not getting a gift of tax money. It’s competing very hard for the right to do science that barely breaks even.

What does NSF do for us? One measure is direct spending. In Michigan, the NSF spent $262 million in fiscal year 2023. The University of Michigan ($132m), MSU, ($66m), and Michigan Tech ($15m) were the largest recipients, but practically every four-year school in Michigan won NSF support. NSF helps support economic engines for the whole state in the big schools, but equally imagine the seasonal, tourism-dependent economy of the Upper Peninsula without Michigan Tech’s success at winning competitive grants for its year-round scientific work.

Michigan also wins when the US wins. NSF works for all Americans, and often the whole world. Imagine the auto industry, or pretty much any industry, operating as it does today without 3D printing. NSF funded that. Artificial intelligence? NSF. The MRI machines that help doctors diagnose you? NSF. The Doppler radar technology that saves lives in severe weather and makes aviation far safer by conquering wind shear? NSF. Lasik? NSF.  Polar or undersea exploration? NSF. Duolingo‘s underlying programming? NSF. The internet itself? NSF. The list is a long one, and in each case it means a crucial sector that thrives because NSF took a bet on the underlying science that others commercialized.

It should be no surprise, then, that Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas economists found that federal science funding has implied returns between 140% and 210%- a fantastic investment by any standard and one that by design accrues to communities, small businesses, and all of us.

What happens when funding is interrupted, or cut? Scientists start to leave science, permanently, after as little as a month of interrupted funding. They certainly can find work, but it will probably be work that underuses their skills.

Meanwhile, what happens to the science that does get done when we take away federal funding? Researchers who lose federal support often get private industry funding, which sounds great until we see that it produces lower quality science that is less influential, contains less basic research that leads to breakthroughs, and is more likely to produce a benefit confined to a single business that paid for the research.

That America, of stagnant science and profiteering businesses, might appeal to real estate developer Donald Trump and technology hype man Elon Musk. It shouldn’t attract the rest of us.

Don’t forget that science is fast-moving, collaborative, and international. The European Union and some Canadian institutions are directly trying to recruit our scientists. China, a fierce scientific competitor, has for a long time seen many of its best minds move to the US, teach our students and work in our companies, because of the science ecology that the NSF supported. Trump and Musk are giving Beijing an opportunity to reverse the flow as our immigration and higher education policies make the United States an impossible option.

Cutting federal funding produces scientific stagnation that benefits only a few, short-termist, businesses. By replacing basic, public research with applied, private, research it makes the rich richer and deprives all of us of breakthroughs that come from basic research. And in a state like Michigan, cutting the NSF makes it all the more likely that we continue our decades-long slide from the technological leaders that we were a century ago.

NSF is 75 years young this month. In a better world, we would be strengthening it so it can make our lives even better in the coming years. Unfortunately, we are fighting to protect it, and if we lose the world, and the United States in particular, will be permanently worse off.