GoKawiilThe number of research grants awarded by the US National Science Foundation in 2026 is a fraction of the five-year average, although funding could soon start to flow more freely.Credit: B Christopher/Alamy
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.
Source: Grant Witness
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.
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