Visit nsf.gov this week and you’ll see a tan warning banner: ‘Due to a lapse in appropriations, NSF is closed.’ It’s five months past the agency’s 75th birthday: Harry Truman signed the National Science Foundation into law aboard his presidential train in Pocatello, Idaho on May 10, 1950. Now, roughly three-quarters of its staff are sidelined, according to internal guidance, and the debate over its budget is intensifying just as lawmakers have yet to follow through on CHIPS and Science Act authorizations that envisioned $20 billion for NSF’s technology directorate over five years.
NSF is the federal government’s primary backer of basic research across all sciences: the curiosity-driven work that doesn’t promise immediate applications but creates the ‘scientific capital’ behind future breakthroughs. Last year’s budget was $9.06 billion, down 5% from the year before. But actual research funding, the dollars committed to grants, fell 16%, dropping from $7.4 billion to $6.2 billion, according to data fetched from www.research.gov. In another words, NSF made fewer awards (–4.4%) and shrank the average grant from about $617,000 to $531,000.
The budget in numbers
Vannevar Bush
NSF’s FY2026 request to Congress would shrink the agency’s total discretionary resources to $3.903 billion (−57.2% vs. FY2024’s plan), with Research & Related Activities at $3.276 billion (−60.8%). Most directorates would fall roughly 45–75% versus FY2024. The number of people working on NSF-funded projects would plummet from 330,000 to 90,000. These are request figures, not enacted appropriations, but they quantify the scale at issue.
The timing is uncanny. NSF was born from a five-year political battle over who should control American science, the engineer, inventor and head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush’s vision of autonomous researchers versus Harry Truman’s insistence on democratic accountability. The compromise that emerged in 1950 balanced scientific expertise with political oversight. Seventy-five years later, political oversight has become political paralysis, and the agency that helped kickstart Google, detect gravitational waves and support 268 Nobel laureates is back to arguing the case for basic science itself, with the FY2026 request putting that debate in black and white.
Vannevar Bush’s vision
To understand how we got here, start with the man who imagined NSF. Vannevar Bush, MIT’s former engineering dean and a co-founder of Raytheon, built the first large-scale analog computer (the differential analyzer) and, in World War II, ran the Office of Scientific Research and Development. From Washington, he oversaw some 6,000 researchers and 2,500 contracts totaling over $500 million. The teams delivered programs that pioneered radar, created the proximity fuze and scaled penicillin into mass production. He attended the Trinity test on July 16, 1945; later that month (July 25) he gave President Truman Science: The Endless Frontier, the report that set the template for postwar U.S. science policy.
Bush’s pitch was clear: “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress.” The 19th-century U.S. could lean on European basic science while excelling at applied engineering, but ‘now the situation is different’: nations that depend on others for new scientific knowledge fall behind. He proposed a National Research Foundation funded at $33.5 million in year one, rising to $122.5 million by year five, and governed by a part-time independent board (dominated by scientists) that would appoint the director, insulating research policy from day-to-day presidential control.
From vision to reality
The report proposed a National Research Foundation starting at $33.5 million: basic research funded by government but governed by scientists, not politicians. That autonomy clause triggered a five-year war. Senator Harley Kilgore wanted the President to appoint the director; Bush wanted a board of scientists to pick their own leader. Truman vetoed the scientist-controlled version in 1947, forcing compromise. By the time the NSF Act passed in 1950, the agency Bush envisioned had shrunk: first-year funding was just $3.5 million, and other agencies, the Office of Naval Research, the Atomic Energy Commission, NIH, had already claimed major research territories.
The FY2024 cuts are the latest chapter in a seven-year slide. NSF award obligations peaked in 2018 at $9.09 billion, then fell steadily to $6.41 billion in 2024, a compound annual decline of about 1.2% even before adjusting for inflation. The research dollars Bush fought for in 1945: the ‘scientific capital’ he insisted would pace technological progress, have been eroding in real terms for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, the system has quietly democratized: the top-10 recipient institutions’ share of NSF funding dropped from 31% in 2018 to 17% in 2024, and the top-10 states’ share fell from 64% to 56%. More universities are getting NSF awards, but there’s less money to go around.
What’s at stake
If Congress enacts the White House’s FY2026 request, the contraction accelerates dramatically. The $3.9 billion budget would cut total NSF resources by 57%, slashing research activities by 61% and reducing the number of people supported by NSF from 330,000 to 90,000. That’s not a trim: it’s a dismantling of the infrastructure Bush envisioned, one that took five years of political compromise to build and 75 years to refine. The peer review system Waterman established, the merit-based grants that supported 268 Nobel laureates, the pipeline that fed Google and LIGO: all of it depends on stable, sustained funding that Congress currently can’t deliver.
Seventy-five years ago, Bush’s ‘Endless Frontier’ report argued that America could no longer rely on European universities for fundamental discoveries. The nation needed its own scientific capital, and that required government investment with ‘stability of funds over a period of years.’ Congress eventually bought the argument. Today, as NSF’s tan banner announces another shutdown and lawmakers propose cuts that would gut basic research, the question isn’t whether Bush was right about the endless frontier. It’s whether America still believes in funding the journey.
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