What’s New
The National Science Foundation has frozen funding for all new and existing grants, according to Nature, bringing billions of dollars in federally supported research to a halt. The agency also announced on Friday that it was capping indirect funding for new awards at 15 percent, following the lead of the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, which imposed their own 15-percent limits in recent months. Both of those agencies’ caps have been paused by federal judges.
The Details
NSF staff members were told on Wednesday to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” Nature reported. An email reviewed by the publication did not offer a reason for the freeze and said it would last “until further notice.” (Asked to confirm the freeze, an NSF spokesperson declined to comment to The Chronicle, but NSF’s public awards database showed that no grants had been awarded on Thursday.)
The blanket freeze comes amid mass terminations of individual grants at the NSF. The agency has slashed more than 1,000 grants since President Trump took office, according to a document shared with The Chronicle, and more researchers were reportedly receiving termination notices Friday. Those moves could be paving the way for large-scale funding cuts at the NSF: Trump is recommending that the budget for fiscal year 2026 reduce NSF expenses by more than $4.5 billion, according to a document released by the White House Office of Management and Budget on Friday. On the chopping block would be grants related to “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science,” that document reads. Sethuraman Panchanathan, who had been appointed director of the independent agency during the first Trump administration, resigned last week.
Meanwhile, the indirect-cost cap is scheduled to take effect Monday. In its announcement, the NSF said the change would allow the agency and its grantees “to focus more on scientific progress and less on administrative overhead by aligning with common federal benchmarks,” and would apply only to new grants. The policy’s language is similar to what appears in the directives issued by the NIH and the Energy Department, which announced 15-percent caps in February and April, respectively.
The cuts to support for indirect costs are a “disaster in the making” for the nation’s science, technology, and competitiveness, Matt Owens, the president of COGR (formerly the Council on Governmental Relations), said in a statement Friday. “Thankfully, the courts have thus far prevented earlier attempts to implement such ill-advised policies.”
Barbara R. Snyder, president of the Association of American Universities, also condemned the cut. “It would be, quite simply, a self-inflicted wound and a gift to competitors and potential adversaries such as China,” Snyder said in a statement.
Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education, said in an email that it was “puzzling and frustrating” that the administration keeps pursuing such cuts. “The losers are the millions of Americans who benefit from the cutting-edge advances made every day in university laboratories,” she said.
The AAU and ACE are plaintiffs in lawsuits challenging both the NIH and Energy Department indirect-cost caps, but neither organization commented Friday on whether it planned to take similar action against the NSF cap.
The Backdrop
The NIH and Energy Department indirect-cost caps were each swiftly met with legal challenges from coalitions of higher-ed associations and individual institutions. Massachusetts District Court judges paused both policies from taking effect; a permanent injunction was issued against the NIH’s, which the judge ruled was “arbitrary and capricious” and failed to follow rule-making procedures. (The NIH has appealed that decision.) The Energy Department cuts are barred by a temporary restraining order.
Indirect costs, a key component of federal grants, cover expenses not directly tied to scientific work, such as facilities, equipment, and administrative staff. At some institutions, such support from a single agency can be more than $100 million annually. In the 2023 fiscal year, the NSF funded $6.7 billion in higher-ed expenditures, according to federal data. It is the third-largest source of federal-research funding for the sector, after the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense.
The kinds of research the NSF supports are generally broader in scope than NIH and Energy Department grants, making it more difficult to characterize the impact of the indirect-cost cuts at the NSF, said Cole Donovan, the associate director for science and technology ecosystem development at the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s going to be similarly difficult for institutions to adjust and find sources of funding that can support the actual cost of research going on at the university,” said Donovan, who worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration.
What to Watch For
Legal challenges to the NSF indirect-cost policy are likely imminent.
