On Monday, the National Science Foundation confirmed to Inside Higher Ed that it has canceled all the grant application review meetings it had scheduled this week. The decision came just days after President Donald Trump issued a temporary freeze on grant reviews at the National Institutes of Health, heightening scientists’ fears that funding delays could threaten research.
In an email, an NSF spokesperson said that all review panels “will be rescheduled to a future date as appropriate” to allow the independent federal agency “to make the best use of everyone’s time and resources as we continue to develop guidance to ensure compliance with the recent executive orders.” Like the NIH, the NSF provides billions in research funding for colleges and universities each year.
The NSF did not respond to specific questions about which executive order—or orders—it’s working to comply with while the grant reviews are on pause. One week into his second term, Trump has already issued a spate of executive orders, including one with a directive to terminate “equity-related” grants or contracts. Last week, NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan sent a memo to staff announcing the closure of the agency’s Office of the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and plans to end all DEIA-related contracts in compliance with Trump’s executive orders. “These programs are viewed as dividing Americans by race, wasting taxpayer dollars and resulting in discrimination,” it said.
Late Monday evening, the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered all department and agency heads to pause all federal financial assistance, including grants and loans, by 5 p.m. today. That includes “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,” according to the directive.
Grant reviewers didn’t find out until Monday morning via email that their sessions were canceled for the day. “Our NSF review panel was cancelled 11 minutes before starting this morning after we’d all already done the work without any indication of a reschedule,” a self-identified social science professor posted on Reddit Monday morning. “This is just a heads up for those waiting on NSF grant decisions.”
NSF program officers emailed reviewers later in the afternoon indicating that the rest of the week’s dozens of sessions were canceled as well, noting in at least one of those emails that “This is all the information that we have.”
But the absence of more details didn’t stop the online chatter Monday about what’s going on behind the scenes and what it may mean for the future of NSF-funded research. And some researchers are speculating that the pause on NSF grant reviews may be part of the new administration’s anti-DEI crusade.
That’s in part because of the “Broader Impacts” section of an NSF grant application, which requires applicants to explain how their research benefits society. One of those broader impacts a proposal may have is “broadening participation in STEM,” which is currently one of the agency’s stated priorities. To make that happen, the NSF website says, “it is necessary to address issues of equity, inclusion, and access in STEM education, training, and careers.”
Although one professor, who self-identified as a scientist for a Research-1 institution, posted on Reddit that they believe it’s “highly unlikely” the Broader Impacts evaluation “will go away entirely,” another countered, “Sure, but would you bet on this admin using a scalpel to remove DEI rather than just taking a sledgehammer to BI more generally?”
A university-affiliated NSF grant reviewer, who asked to remain anonymous, told Inside Higher Ed in an email they’re also worried that changing NSF grant evaluation metrics could disadvantage proposals submitted prior to Trump taking office that referenced equity or inclusion in the Broader Impacts section of the application. In order “to conduct a fair and honest review,” they wrote, any changes made to application requirements should only apply to newly submitted proposals.
“If changes were to occur at this stage of the process to reduce the score of proposals that target this goal, it is likely that many (if not all) proposals will include some language related to inclusion and diversifying the STEM workforce,” the reviewer said. “This may result in a year’s worth of lost funding. These are the concerns that many scholars who have submitted their proposals months ago are sharing.”
Cancellations and delays in grant funding have the potential to not only stall scientific research, but also scientists’ careers.
“Early-career scholars are especially in need of funds to support their research and get tenure,” the reviewer said. “Some universities even include grant funds as part of their decisions related to promotion and tenure.”
Without more federal guidance, others in the academic research community are waiting to see what happens after the NSF and NIH’s grant review panels are scheduled to resume on Saturday.
“We’re very hopeful that this is just a slight pause and that we’ll resume those Feb. 1,” said Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education. “If it is a short pause until Feb. 1, it will be OK. If it goes much further than that, I think we’re going to have some major problems.”
