The original post: /r/askscience by /u/AskScienceModerator on 2025-02-19 13:38:23.

Funding and support for science in the United States is experiencing the largest crisis it has ever faced in the modern era. This assault has taken many forms, including rescinding existing grants to academics, proposing dramatic cuts in future funding budgets, unilateral and extreme changes to parts of budgets like “indirect cost rates”, and massive and indiscriminate firings of federal scientists. These efforts that if successful, will hobble not just scientific research – and universities more broadly – in the short term, but effectively destroy one of the most successful and productive environments for generating knowledge ever created. We are already seeing numerous tangible impacts, including:

At the same time, much of this is flying under the radar because of a general lack of context for what these changes mean, their downstream implications, or even what some of these things are. For example, what are “indirect costs” and what happens if they get slashed? At the same time, there is a fair amount of disinformation being used to cloud many of these issues. /r/AskScience has put together the information below to try to provide a window into how the funding and performance of science in the USA works and just how devastating and damaging the efforts to curtail it are, so that you may engage with discussions of these issues prepared with facts. Finally, as we discuss at the bottom of this post, we encourage you all to do what you can to help push back against these changes and the misinformation that surrounds them.

What is a grant? How are they selected?

Today, a lot of scientific research and development within the US is funded through grants, which often come from government funding. The development of grant programs administered by government entities like the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the National Institute of Health (NIH) mostly occurred after World War II. For both NSF and NIH, a large part of the motivation for developing grant programs was the recognition of the huge economic benefit provided by scientific research, something that became extremely clear during the WWII period where the government funded war effort also funded a lot of science, but also that relying on private foundations to fund scientific research was extremely limiting. It wasn’t just that these private foundations had limited money, but more importantly that it restricted “curiosity driven” science, as in science which was funded based on what particular philanthropists were interested in rather than what scientists were interested in or what might benefit society as a whole. There are different grants depending on the subject area, and they fund everything from pharmaceutical development to earthquake research. At present, other funding sources can include private organizations and companies, although the public sector now funds the vast majority of scientific research and development at universities in the US. Public and private funding are not fungible, either: privately-funded research is more likely to be patented, with the patent held by a private company.

The process for receiving this funding starts with a proposal to the funding institution, which is often a federal agency like the NSF or NIH. Within each agency, there are different “programs” that effectively represent different pots of money. Each program will have a theme and particular mission and scientists choose which program best fits the research they want to propose. Many of these themes are extremely broad, e.g., the NSF program for studying the structure of the Earth, giving scientists wide latitude to follow past innovations and their own interests in developing a proposal. That is to say, while the themes of the programs are defined by the agency, the actual research that is proposed and done, if the grant is awarded, is dictated by the scientists applying to the funding opportunities. Because funds are limited, these grants are highly competitive and developing the proposals – typically lengthy documents outlining the scientific rationale, prior work, and proposed new work, with numerous ancillary documents describing how data will be stored and distributed, graduate students will be mentored, and extremely detailed budgets with justifications for proposed expenses – is extremely time-consuming.

One of the hallmarks of most federally funded proposals are that they are evaluated by other scientists in that field through a mixture of “ad-hoc reviews”, where the proposal is read by other scientists and critiqued, and during “review panels” where a group of scientists are assembled to go through the reviews, review the proposals themselves, and then rank them based on the novelty, feasibility, and importance of the proposed work. Those rankings are then used by program officers, who are employees of their respective agencies (e.g., NSF or NIH), but almost exclusively were also practicing scientists within their respective disciplines before taking positions as program officers, to choose which grants are funded. At all steps of the process, funding decisions are made exclusively by scientists, not politicians or bureaucrats. These scientists are independent, not affiliated with the funding agencies.

Why does it matter if active grants or proposal reviews are temporarily paused?

There have been any number of news articles about various pauses on either the review of new grant proposals or the active grants having funds frozen. Some of these are still in place, some of them are rescinded, and some of them appear to be approaching a form of Schrödinger’s cat, both alive and dead depending on who is talking.

It may be hard to understand why scientists are concerned about “temporary” pauses. One major reason – and why “temporary” is in scare quotes – is that in most of these cases, it’s not actually clear how temporary these pauses really are. Beyond that, large portions of federally funded research are devoted to paying undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. These students and early career scientists are the backbone of modern science, not only doing a huge amount of the current work, but also are the future generation of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. For many of them, short delays in funding can be the difference between them being able to stay in their chosen careers or having to leave. Additionally, because each proposal represents huge time investments to prepare and the “normal” turnaround time between submission and decision is 6 months to a year, short-term delays compound an already slow process, leading to higher chances that students and other early career scientists who are living paycheck to paycheck will suddenly find themselves without any funding. Ultimately, short-term delays are bad enough, as they will disproportionately impact the next generation of scientists, but as we’ve seen, there are darker clouds on the horizon…

Why are attacks on broadening participation in science damaging?

Federal research grants often require specific sections of the proposal that discuss how other branches of science or society as a whole might benefit from the outcomes of the proposed work. For example, NSF proposals have a section called Broader Impacts that is required to be included by various US Congressional acts. At its core, broader impacts are meant to reflect how the project will benefit society as a whole, and these portions of funded projects often involve initiatives to promote human health and well-being, advances to key technologies or infrastructure, and a variety of efforts to improve STEM education and broaden participation in STEM fields, especially within groups which have been historically underrepresented or excluded from the disciplines. That means that while the executive order calling for a blanket halt on grant funding was rescinded, many grants remain in limbo while their broader impact sections are assessed to determine if they conflict with the still-standing executive order against federal support of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

While demographics va…

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