National Science Foundation Budget Grant Cuts: How Students Can Get Their Science Experiences Done While Traveling to a Conference, or What Do They Want to Do?
“I was just numb,” she says, explaining that she’d gotten the email while driving to a science conference and had pulled over to read it. It was shocking. I was crying on the side of the road.
Some of the grants canceled initially involved diversity, equity, and inclusion or looked at misinformation or disinformation. These two categories of research have previously been targeted by Republicans in Congress such as Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz.
“As it goes on, you see that the reach of it just gets wider and weirder,” says Noam Ross, executive director of a nonprofit called rOpenSci, who started a database so that people could self-report the cancellations of their grants.
He notes that the grant for holding this conference may have mentioned scholarships for students from under-represented communities. In the past, many NSF-funded researchers were encouraged to explain how their work would boost engagement in the sciences.
For example, you could take the previously funded Rustbelt RNA Meeting. “We emphasize the students and have been doing that for a long time”, said Charles who is from the Michigan State University. A good majority of the posters and talks are given by students.
One of the only chances for poorer students who can’t afford to travel is to attend a high-level scientific conference. He is trying to find a solution to the issue of funding being cut.
Amy Hagen, a PhD student at Virginia Tech University sought out funding for her work that involved dating some rocks from the ancient Cambrian period.
Kathleen Johnson, a geochemist with the UCI CLIMATE Justice Initiative, says their NSF grant was about $1.5 million a year and worked to make geosciences more diverse and inclusive. They are trying to figure out how to support students this summer because staffers could be laid off.
The White House wants to cut funding for climate, clean energy, woke social,behavioral and economic sciences, and programs in low priority areas of science.
Source: Scientists reel as turmoil roils National Science Foundation
The NSF budget crisis confronts scientists and scientists in New Haven, Connecticut, a scientist who is studying pandemic threat phenomenology
“It’s quite scary, what’s happening,” she says. “I think it’s also shaken my faith in the short term that all of this is going on — but also in the long term.”
Marianna Zhang, a cognitive scientist at New York University who studies how children form stereotypes and how to reduce those stereotypes, says that she learned her two-year fellowship was being canceled in an email from NSF that she said misspelled the word “priorities.” Her work is no longer useful to the priorities, it said.
“That’s created this paralysis that I think is hurting us already,” says Parikh, who says that when he talks to scientists, he’s starting to hear them express an interest in having an “exit plan from these jobs.”
Meanwhile, the uncertainty would leave scientists fretting over how to support their labs and the students and early-career researchers who work there.
An NSF staff member says that although good science can still be funded, the policy has the potential to be “Orwellian overreach”. Another staff member says, “They are butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades”. A program officer claims that they are quitting because of the policy. Nature spoke with five staffers at the NSF who are not authorized to speak to the media for this story.
The changes are hitting an agency in a crisis. In the past two weeks, the NSF has terminated a number of grants that would have made them US$739 million. The agency’s director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned last month.
The American Association for the advancement of science, one of the largest scientific societies in the world, says that cutting so much of the budget would be a crisis.
Scientists outside of the agency are also feeling uncertainty. Colin Carlson, an expert in disease emergence at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, leads an initiative to predict viruses that pose pandemic threats. The project received a $US12.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Carlson is worried about future funding and the fate of other researchers after the funding round was approved. Carlson says the freeze will ruin people’s labs unless it is lifted.
All federal agencies have their funding set by the US Congress. The agency has received less than one quarter of the funding appropriated to it in the current fiscal year.