Trump cutting NSF grantmaking 50%
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Anonymous
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Trump cutting NSF grantmaking 50%
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/nx-s1-5371720/national-science-foundation-budget-grant-cuts-turmoil "The White House's budget request for 2026 says that it "cuts funding for: climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science." He wants to poison the air and water. |
Anonymous
| I am surprised this is not getting more attention here. Most probably have never heard of the NSF? Founded in 1950. If our president has it's way, it will essentially be wiped out. Our universities will be second (or third) rate, if that. |
Anonymous
The bigger economic impact will be loss of talent coming to the US to study. Foreign (and domestic) MS and PhD candidates will be turned away for lack of funds. We’ve benefited enormously by attracting the world’s top talent. Now we get to experience brain drain just like Russia. |
Anonymous
just amazing how the elites twist the truth. Foreign (and domestic) MS and PhD candidates will be turned away for lack of funds. -> this is a GOOD THING!!!! importing millions of cheap MS and PhD candidates cheapens our own MS and PhD candidates. Reduce PH.D Salaries https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhowandwhygovernment.pdf Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies. "Upcoming labor market shortages will devastate Science and Engineering. This was a mantra heard through much of the 1980s. And yet, the predicted “seller’s market” for talent never materialized as unemployment rates actually spiked for newly minted PhDs in technical fields. In fact, most US economists seemed to think that the very idea of labor market shortages hardly made sense in a market economy since wages could simply rise to attract more entrants. Yet we have had workers visas for over 34 years to alleviate mythical worker shortages. In the late nineties, in the course of research into immigration, I became convinced that our US high skilled immigration policy simply did not add up intellectually. As I studied the situation, it became increasingly clear that the groups purporting to speak for US scientists in Washington DC (e.g. NSF, NAS, AAU, GUIRR) actually viewed themselves as advocates for employers in a labor dispute with working scientists and were focused on undermining scientists’ economic bargaining power through labor market intervention and manipulation. Increasingly the research seemed to show that interventions by government, universities and industry in the US labor market for scientists, especially after the University system stopped growing organically in the early 1970s were exceedingly problematic. By 1998, it was becoming obvious that the real problems of high skilled immigration were actually rather well understood by an entire class of policy actors who were not forthcoming about the levers of policy they were using to influence policy. The NSF/NAS/GUIRR complex appeared to be feigning incompetence by issuing labor market studies that blatantly ignored wages and market dynamics and instead focused on demographics alone. During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall. The title of this study was “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” The study was undated and carried no author’s name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study’s author. After some hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and now disgraced demographic shortfall studies. The author turned out, again as predicted, not to be a demographer, but a highly competent Ph.D. in economics who was fully aware of the functioning of the wage mechanism. But, as the study makes clear, the problem being solved was not a problem of talent but one of price: scientific employers had become alarmed that they would have to pay competitive market wages to US Ph.D.s with other options. The study’s aim was not to locate talent but to weaken its ability to bargain with employers by using foreign labor to undermine the ability to negotiate for new Ph.D.s That study was a key link in a chain of evidence leading to an entirely different view of the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification. In this alternative account, American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market. The correlate of these objectives were shifts in orientation toward building bridges to Asia and especially China, so that senior scientists, technologists, and educators could capitalize on technological, employment, and business opportunities from Asian (and particularly Chinese) expansion. This, in turn, would give US scientific employers and researchers access to the products of Asian educational systems which stress drill, rote learning, obedience, and test driven competition while giving them relief from US models which comparatively stress greater creativity, questioning, independence, and irreverence for authority. I wrote this up in a study that the National Bureau of Economic Research published. Until a few weeks ago, it was available on their website. With other studies now appearing that are consonant with my conclusions and the Trump administration studying a possible revision of legislation on visas, I am grateful for INET’s encouragement and willingness to republish my study. |
Anonymous
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It’s such a shame (cuts to NSF funding). This would lead to such a loss of innovation and excellence in science here in the US. I’ve always been proud of US leadership in science - the best in the world. I can’t understand why the GOP wants these cuts. (And no, not going to read the post above. Too long.)
I hope there are science organizations and others who will stand with science and advocate against the cuts. Advocacy isn’t in most scientists’ skill sets. |
Anonymous
| Anyone working with federal government and adjacent agencies knows that there is fat to be trimmed everywhere. The article clearly states that many of the funds being cut were directly supporting woke priorities not aligned with the administration. It is unfortunate that no doubt many real science programs will be caught in the crosshairs. But as a so-called “urm” with a degree in a hard science field, Trump is correct to cut the millions wasted on these programs. |
Anonymous
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Cutting fat is fine. Cutting into the bone is disastrous for US Science and technology, for now and well into the future.
Cutting 50% is cutting into the bone and the very infrastructure of US science. It’s like cutting all the new growth off a tree, plus a bunch of the existing, healthy branches and maybe even some of the trunk and roots. It ain’t all going to grow back folks. |
Anonymous
Sure, there is fat that could be trimmed here and there, like 10-20% tops in most parts of civilian government. NOT 50% or 90% or gutting entire agencies as the Republican liars have been trying to say. |
Anonymous
They are actually cutting into the vital organs. The heart. The lungs. For the first time, the USA will be spending less on research than Europe and China. But I guess that's what we want. To be Russia. And not the imaginary Russia of spy movies. The poor doomed modern real nation. |
Anonymous
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There's a website with a list of cancelled NSF grants. I think it's self-reported, so there are likely many more.
Anything that says women, gender, minorities, LBGTQ, diversity, underrepresented, indigenous, equitable, cultural, disability, under served, bias etc. seems to be cancelled. I saw a grant on domestic violence and healthcare access that was cancelled. There's a lot of cancelled grants where the reason is unclear- but you can read the abstracts. The good news is that Red states were also hit hard with grant cancellations. Hoping they remember this, among other things, in the voting booth. |
Anonymous
Leadership isn't using scientific mercenaries. I'm all for cutting taxpayer money that funds research for foreigners. Let them pay for their own research and skills. Quit training our competition. |
Anonymous
Wake me up in September. Congress is not looking to enact any of these cuts, to NSF or elsewhere, and there are court cases enjoining many of Trump's cuts right now. Congress is aware of the importance of investment in science, technology, medicine, and innovation, even if the White House has forgotten. |
Anonymous
Oh please. After years and years of hiring freezes and budget cuts, there's no fat left anywhere. The federal government needs more funding, not less. And investment in innovation, in science and medicine, has been shrinking for decades, investment needs expanding, not cutting. |
Anonymous
| They quietly did another round of RIFs yesterday at NIH. |
Anonymous
but they are not doing just this. Grants in the physical sciences, which have no sociological component at all, are reduced to funding levels below the minimum to do cutting-edge research. While China just doubled their funding. Soon, US citizens will be going to China for training (where "soon" means next year) |