A troubled birthday for the National Science Foundation
The headquarters of the U.S. National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. | Courtesy of U.S. 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.
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Visible are two prominent spiral galaxies (lower right), three merging galaxies (upper right), several groups of distant galaxies, many stars in the Milky Way galaxy and more. NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Funded by the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, Rubin will observe from Cerro Pachón, an 8,900-foot (2,700-meter-high) mountain peak accessed from the Elqui Valley near La Serena, Chile, in the foothills of the Andes and in the southern Atacama Desert — one of the driest places on Earth, with the clearest sky. It's far from light pollution and major flight paths. The Southern Hemisphere also offers a clearer view of the Milky Way's center, which is dense with star fields and nebulae, as well as of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. This image shows a small section of NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's total view of the Virgo ... More cluster. Bright stars in the Milky Way galaxy shine in the foreground, and many distant galaxies are in the background. NSF-DOE Rubin Virgo cluster 1 Its $168 million LSSTCam imager is about the size of a car, weighs over three tons and captures 3,200-megapixel images — each large enough to fill 378 4K screens. Developed over more than a decade, its suite of six optical filters enables astronomers to peer across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared. It has a 9.6 square-degree field of view. The telescope inside the dome of the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/H. Stockebrand 'a Taste Of Rubin's Discovery Power' 'Since we take images of the night sky so quickly and so often, we'll detect millions of changing objects literally every night,' said Professor Aaron Roodman, program lead for the LSST Camera at Rubin Observatory and Deputy Director for Rubin construction, in a press briefing. 'We will also combine those images to be able to see incredibly dim galaxies and stars, including galaxies that are billions of light years away. The first images provide just a taste of Rubin's discovery power.' Staff in the control room of the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory celebrate the "first photon" from ... More the sky captured by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time Camera in April 2025. NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/W. O'Mullane It's built for the era of big data and automation, with fiber optics from Cerro Pachón to La Serena enabling Rubin's images to be relayed to supercomputers in California within seconds, where AI-driven systems will compare them with previous captures. If an object's position or brightness has changed, an alert will be issued to the global scientific community within just two minutes. During its 10-year mission, Rubin will generate up to 10 million alerts per night, identifying cosmic events faster than any telescope before. A view of NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory beneath the Milky Way galaxy. NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/H. Stockebrand Beyond 'snapshots' Of The Sky 'What astronomy has given us mostly so far are just snapshots, but the sky and the world aren't static — there are asteroids zipping by and supernovas exploding,' said Dr. Yusra AlSayyad, who oversees image processing at Rubin Observatory, in a press briefing. 'One of the reasons we haven't been able to convert the snapshots of the sky that we've had so far into time-lapse video is that the data management technology technologies simply did not exist 20 years ago to store transfer process and interpret the petabytes of data that this would require.' New cutting-edge automated algorithms will be used to analyze and mine the LSST data set, enabling the expected scientific discoveries. The telescope inside the closed dome of the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Why Supernovas Matter Among the Rubin Observatory's many targets, supernovas are perhaps the most scientifically tantalizing. These powerful stellar explosions serve as cosmic lighthouses, helping astronomers measure vast cosmic distances and understand the accelerating expansion of the universe. Supernova data first revealed the presence of dark energy in the 1990s. Rubin is set to take that discovery to the next level. By detecting millions of supernovas — far beyond the handful historically observed in our galaxy — the LSST will refine the timeline of cosmic expansion and offer vital clues to the nature of dark energy. Further Reading Forbes Asteroid Larger Than Golden Gate Bridge Approaches Earth In Rare Event By Jamie Carter Forbes When To See June's 'Strawberry Moon,' The Lowest Full Moon Since 2006 By Jamie Carter Forbes In Photos: Strawberry Moon Skims Horizon In Once-In-A-Generation Event By Jamie Carter
