The National Science Foundation (NSF), now being evicted from its building by the Trump Administration, recently celebrated its 75th anniversary. In that same week, the first example of gene editing success in a human was announced, saving the life of an American child from a previously incurable disease. This remarkable feat relied on numerous scientific discoveries, many of which the NSF funded.
The primary innovation used was a technique called CRISPR, whose acronym stands for Clustered, Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a reference to an obscure structure in a microbe’s genome identified by exploring basic fundamentals of microbiology. Other kinds of foundational research also propelled this new technology forward, including the invention of high throughput gene sequencing and then the analysis of numerous genome projects. Together these have enriched databases with DNA and protein sequences that scientists and clinicians scan for potential industrial compounds and personal medicine therapies.
But just this week the Supreme Court allowed the Trump Administration to move forward on firing hundreds of NSF staff. This is after it already cancelled upwards of $780 million dollars in awarded grants, placed a stop on funding new grants, and recommended an additional cut of over 57 percent to NSF’s budget, all potentially paralyzing its capability to serve American citizens.
The NSF is one of America’s greatest ideas with a mission to support basic foundational research. NSF funding has driven technological advances in nanotechnology, insulin resistance therapy, and the invention of LED light bulbs. NSF prides itself on funding work that explores the unknown from the smallest subatomic particle to whole ocean systems. It has given us the power to look beyond ourselves to view the solar system, explore galaxies, and theorize the origin of the universe. It helped conceptualize, build, and return to the public the infrastructure for the internet, providing unfettered worldwide access to knowledge.
NSF-supported foundational research helped catalog and interrogate Earth’s current and past creatures and to discover how organisms have adapted to changes, how they are threatened now, and how we can use this information to prepare global society for an increasingly uncertain future. At the same time, NSF has paid for scientific literacy and education programs, catapulting the US workforce to become the scientific and innovation leaders of the world.
Despite all this, NSF is now at risk, not just financially but existentially. Recently, the Trump Administration proposed a review path where America’s gold standard scientific peer review is devalued in decision making and proposed that NSF fund exclusively five, somewhat perplexing, areas of science: artificial intelligence, quantum information science, biotechnology, nuclear energy, and translational science.
These five parochial areas clearly align with DOGE’s intent of commoditizing and profiting on all US science but are insufficient to maintain American excellence in scientific discovery, as these categories neglect whole areas of US research distinction and the interdisciplinarity that has shown to be the best means of conducting science and discovery.
To demonstrate, let’s take AI, a tool that was in part discovered through NSF funded research on neural networks. Importantly, AI requires vast inputs of various forms of information to ask keen questions. For example, in 2024 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three researchers who developed the AI program AlphaFold to determine protein structure and function based on gene sequence.
This work was long funded by NSF both directly and indirectly. One of these US researchers received an NSF early investigator award and numerous other NSF grants from its multiple broadly defined divisions, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature required to do such groundbreaking work. This funding gave support for more than just the research, including providing physical infrastructure and cyberinfrastructure, funding for trainees and education, and money for outreach programs, central tenets of the NSF.
What is less clear is that NSF also supported decades of other researcher labs which together painstakingly studied individual proteins, conducted basic genetic experiments, and invented and democratized data analytics, without all of which these AI tools would never work. Without new exploration of basic science in biology, chemistry, physics, math, and other foundational science areas, AI learning will be dramatically stalled, mired in the Trump Administration’s limited and, frankly, unscientific ideas of which research should be funded.
For sure, science endeavors will continue with reduced and cannibalized funding, but the relevance of US science will falter. Read almost any article in the best science magazines today and you will see NSF’s name on it.
But flip through those magazines more and you will also see that scientists from other countries are now outpacing America in the race for discovery. Why? Because they recognized federal governments can drive R&D faster, collectively and efficiently lifting up a country’s economy, health, and future. America’s standing as the leader in the scientific world is already sliding, and without the NSF and federal research programs at large, we will continue to lose the race and retreat on our American values to support independent and creative thought and innovation.