Delays have kept new NSF grants to a trickle — that could be about to change

More than halfway through the fiscal year, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded many fewer new grants than it usually would have by this point, with particularly big hits to grants in areas such as the social sciences and biological sciences. The delays have left many researchers bewildered and anxious, uncertain whether money will be available for crucial projects and staff salaries.

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Agency staff members, who spoke to Nature on the condition of anonymity, attribute the hold-up to factors including an unusually late distribution of money to the NSF’s eight main divisions, called directorates, and protracted haggling between Congress and the administration of US President Donald Trump about what the NSF should be funding.

The delays compound concerns in February that funding for US science agencies was not flowing freely. Although distribution of new grants by other agencies has since picked up, spending by the NSF has remained alarmingly low.

The NSF, with its budget of US$9 billion, is one of the world’s largest funders of basic research and typically awards around 11,000 grants each year. The fiscal year, which starts on 1 October, typically sees more grants awarded in the second half than in the first. Still, the number of grants issued so far this year is unusually low: 854, which is 25% of the five-year average for 19 April see ‘Funding slowdown’), according to public data compiled by Grant Witness, a non-profit project that tracks changes to research funding.

For researchers such as Amelia Shevenell, a palaeoceanographer at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, the delay has been nerve-wracking. Last June, Shevenell sent the NSF a grant proposal about using marine sediment cores to measure ancient ocean temperatures. The agency “strives to be able to tell applicants within six months whether their proposals have been declined or recommended”, according to its website, but ten months later, Shevenell has heard nothing. She worries about her five graduate students, who will have only partial funding for their salaries when her remaining funding runs out next Thursday. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” she says. The geosciences directorate, to which Shevenell applied for her grant, has awarded only 104 new grants this year, compared with a five-year average of 425.

The spigot opens

Last week, the NSF finally began distributing substantial sums of money to its eight basic-research directorates, staff members say. A ledger of these distributions, seen by Nature, indicates that some directorates are now set to spend more money this year than they did last year: the technology, innovation and partnerships directorate, which funds translational research, would get a 33% boost from 2025 levels, for example.

But most directorates would have to make do with less. Funding for the biological-sciences directorate would be roughly 25% lower than in 2025, and funding for the social, behavioural and economic sciences directorate (SBE) would be 30% lower — despite a Congressional report accompanying the 2026 appropriations bill that directs the NSF to “equitably distribute funding to support all basic research directorates” and not to cut funding for any directorate by more than 5% from the 2024 level. Such reports are not legally binding, but they convey Congressional intent and are taken seriously by agencies.

In response to Nature’s request for comment about the cuts, an NSF spokesman said in a statement that the agency’s “work to allocate appropriated funding in alignment with both Administration and Congressional priorities is ongoing.”

Science stalled

The directorates are all awarding many fewer grants than average (see ‘Uneven spending’), but the most severely affected is the SBE directorate . It has funded just two new grants since 1 October, a funding rate that is 1% of its recent five-year average. What’s more, the president’s latest budget request proposes no funding at all for the directorate in 2027. “SBE has historically funded cutting-edge, discovery-focused science,” says Jon Freeman, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York City, whose proposal for using neuroimaging to study social interactions is under review with the SBE. If the directorate is eliminated, “it’s a societal loss in my view”, he says.

In response to questions about the status of SBE, an agency spokesperson said, “NSF is engaging in prudent planning for the coming fiscal year.”

The NSF’s ability to award grants was initially set back when the US government shut down for six weeks in late 2025, requiring the rescheduling of more than 300 grant-review panels.

Adding to the delays, Congress, which sets US federal agencies’ spending levels, did not approve the NSF’s 2026 budget until late January — almost four months after the fiscal year began. Staff members across the agency told Nature that they had received verbal instructions in the interim to spend as if Trump’s budget proposal for 2026 was in effect. That proposal called for a 57% cut to the NSF’s funding, although Congress ultimately rejected that number and set the NSF budget at 3.4% below the previous year’s.