Danit Finkelstein has a B.A. in computer science and is a PhD candidate in Social Psychology at Rutgers working with me. Her research explores how social media and AI shape belief formation, political behavior, authoritarian attitudes, and civic trust. She is also a co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, where her work focuses on foreign influence operations, extremism, and emerging threats to national security. Her research is regularly featured in national news coverage and has contributed to briefings and testimony before Congress.
An email circulating at Rutgers (from some unidentified source) on May 12 regarding a House Appropriations Committee meeting raised alarms about the Trump administration’s science budget. From the email’s template for sending a letter to one’s Congressional representativers:
I respectfully urge continued congressional leadership to prevent the profound, potentially irreversible damage that the proposed FY27 budget cuts and related administrative actions could inflict on our nation’s scientific capacity, economy, and global competitiveness.
The full text of the email is presented at the end of this post, in an appendix. It includes lots of numbers about the proposed budget, which are factually accurate, but tells only one side of an active policy debate.
What’s actually happening is a fight between an administration that wants to restructure how federal science dollars are spent and a Congress that has consistently rejected the most severe cuts while still tightening agency budgets. Understanding both sides, what the White House is asking for, why, and how Congress is responding, matters for anyone deciding whether and how to weigh in.
This write-up draws on two White House documents: the OMB/OSTP “FY 2027 Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities” memorandum signed September 2025, and the FY27 President’s Budget Request released in early April 2026. The congressional response is drawn from the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) draft bill released April 29 and approved at subcommittee markup April 30.
What the White House is proposing and why
The administration’s framing is that federal R&D has been spread too thinly across too many objectives and that it should be realigned around five strategic priority areas. The September 2025 OMB/OSTP memo lays out the rationale before any dollar figures were attached. The five priorities are:
Critical and emerging technologies — AI, quantum information science, semiconductors, advanced communications (5G/6G, space-based networks), future computing, and advanced manufacturing.
Energy dominance and frontier exploration — fossil fuels, advanced nuclear fission and fusion, geothermal, hydropower, critical minerals processing, ocean exploration, and polar research (especially Arctic strategic interests and Antarctic infrastructure).
American security — hypersonics, unmanned and autonomous systems, modernized nuclear deterrent, the “Golden Dome” homeland missile defense initiative, and post-quantum cryptography for cybersecurity resilience.
Health and biotechnology — chronic disease, neurodegenerative disease, cancer, rare diseases, biosafety/biosecurity, and domestic biomanufacturing capacity.
Continued space dominance — human exploration of the Moon and Mars, in-space assembly, space nuclear power, and leveraging commercial space capabilities.
The memo also names five crosscutting actions that apply across all priorities: implementing “Gold Standard Science” (per Executive Order 14303, emphasizing replication, statistical validation, and categorization of basic vs. applied research); building the STEM workforce; expanding access to research infrastructure; revitalizing the broader S&T ecosystem through public-private partnerships; and consolidating programs to “focus on high-value research efforts.”
The memo is explicit that this is meant as a realignment, not just a reduction. Its preamble argues that prior federal R&D investment was “unfocused” and “weighed down by woke ideology and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives,” and that the goal is to redirect funds toward what the administration identifies as the technologies most consequential for economic growth, national security, and U.S. competitive position relative to China. Whether one accepts that framing or not, this is the stated reasoning, and it is consistent across the priority areas the budget then funds and the areas it cuts.
The April 2026 budget request operationalizes the memo. The headline numbers are real:
NSF: ~$4 billion proposed, a 55% cut from the FY26 enacted level of ~$8.8 billion. Within NSF, AI funding drops from $965M (FY25) to $655M (FY27) and quantum from $365M to $231M — so even the named priority areas absorb cuts, just smaller ones than the rest of the agency. The Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) Directorate is proposed for elimination.
NIH: ~$41.4 billion proposed, a 12% cut from FY26. Three institutes proposed for elimination: the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center, and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. ARPA-H cut by 37%.
NASA: ~$19 billion proposed (23% cut), with NASA Science specifically cut by 46% to $3.9 billion. Crewed exploration (Artemis, Moon, Mars) is protected; uncrewed Earth and space science bears the cut.
DOE Office of Science: $7.14 billion, a 15% cut. The cut funds a new Office of Artificial Intelligence and Quantum (AIQ) and seven AI supercomputers at Argonne and Oak Ridge.
NEA, NEH: proposed for elimination.
EPA: 52% cut, with research and development reduced to legally required minimums.
NOAA: Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research proposed for elimination.
On the other side of the ledger:
Defense: +42% (+$445 billion), including more than $400 billion in mandatory funding through a reconciliation bill.
National Nuclear Security Administration: +12% to $32.8 billion.
DOE AI investment: +$1.2 billion across the department.
NSF Antarctic icebreaker: $900 million separate request.
USDA competitive research grants: +8% to $472 million (even as the overall USDA budget falls 19%).
So the proposal is not “cut all science.” It is “reduce overall non-defense discretionary spending by 10%, increase defense by 42%, and within the non-defense piece, concentrate remaining R&D dollars in AI, quantum, nuclear, biomanufacturing, missile defense, and crewed space, while shrinking or eliminating the rest.” Whether that composition is wise depends on one’s view of what federal R&D is for. The traditional case for federal funding, articulated since Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier (1945), is that basic curiosity-driven research has long time horizons, diffuse benefits, and consequently is underprovided by private markets. The administration’s implicit position is closer to federal R&D should be mission-directed toward strategic competition with China, and curiosity-driven basic research is either better handled by industry or simply less important than the mission priorities.
What this means for social psychology specifically
The elimination of NSF’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) Directorate is the most directly consequential proposal for our field. SBE funds the bulk of federally supported basic research in psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, linguistics, geography, and political science. NSF SBE has funded major social-psychological research programs for decades, working on intergroup processes, attitude formation, judgment and decision-making, group dynamics, and behavioral methodology. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), is proposed to be halved.
But the picture is more nuanced than a straight loss. Three things are worth disentangling: what is actually being cut, why the administration is doing it, and what funding pathways remain.
The details
SBE has historically been the primary federal funder for basic social science research, supporting roughly 63% of all academic research in psychology, sociology, geography, anthropology, linguistics, political science, and economics. The FY27 NSF budget document states that the directorate will be “closed out” but that “continuing grants that align with Administration priorities, such as in behavioral and cognitive science, and all impacted employees will be transferred to other parts of the agency.” The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) will survive as an independent unit. NSF leadership reportedly began moving to dissolve SBE internally in April 2026.
The September 2025 OMB/OSTP memo’s reference to “woke ideology and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives” tracks a specific, documented policy controversy. The 2024 Senate Commerce Committee report (”D.E.I. Division. Extremism. Ideology.”) identified 3,483 NSF grants totaling $2.05 billion that the committee characterized as DEI-aligned or “neo-Marxist,” sorted into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice. The report’s framing was not just that grants used DEI keywords — it was that NSF money flowed through critical-race and decolonization frameworks to PIs who then operationalized those same frameworks into campus activism, particularly anti-Israel activism after October 7.
The three featured examples the committee put forward as representative:
Shirin Vossoughi (Northwestern), $1,034,751, 2023: “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” The committee’s specific charge was that Vossoughi explicitly credited “Marxist traditions” for her decision to teach children “the meaning of ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’” in the context of Hamas’s October 7 attack. The committee drew a direct line from NSF funding to anti-Israel pedagogy.
The problem is that a million dollars in federal basic-science money was awarded to a project whose stated framework the PI then used to teach children that Israel’s response to a terrorist massacre constitutes genocide and apartheid — meaning taxpayer-funded “STEM education” became a vehicle for political instruction on a contested foreign-policy question, with no apparent connection to the scientific or pedagogical merit the grant was meant to advance.
Kelly Cross (Georgia Tech), $99,791, 2023: funded to “disrupt[] racialized privilege in the STEM classroom” by acknowledging “Whiteness and White Supremacy” are “deeply ingrained in the past, present and future of U.S. Higher education,” and to “initiate a national conversation about addressing racial inequity and White Supremacy in the STEM profession and classroom.” Unusual in that this was the PI’s own language in the funded proposal.
The problem is that this language is in the funded proposal itself, not a critic’s characterization, meaning NSF reviewers read it, scored it favorably, and awarded it, which suggests the peer-review process had internalized critical-race-theory framing to the point that proposals could treat contested ideological claims (”Whiteness and White Supremacy are deeply ingrained”) as established premises rather than empirical questions, and still pass merit review.
Tammie Visintainer (San Jose State), $401,744 plus a $786,000 CAREER award: framed students as “climate justice action researchers and change agents.” The committee also noted Visintainer publicly argued Hamas’s October 7 attack needed to be “contextualized.” Of the three, this is the most contested on the substance , her work was on urban heat islands, a real scientific question, and the program was open to all students.
The problem cuts both ways here, which is why it’s the hardest case: urban heat islands are real, the underlying science is legitimate, and “open to all students” undercuts the discrimination charge — but training students as “action researchers and change agents” reframes the role of a scientist from disinterested investigator to advocate, which is a substantive shift in what scientific education is for, and one most Americans haven’t been asked to endorse with their tax dollars.
Beyond NSF specifically, broader instances exist where social-science-informed clinical and policy recommendations have produced documented harms, most prominently, the evidence base for pediatric gender-affirming medical care, which the UK Cass Review (2024) and multiple European systematic reviews have found substantially weaker than professional bodies represented, with downstream consequences for the minors who received those interventions. The disinformation-research field has also faced credible criticism for selectively applying “misinformation” framings to politically disfavored domestic speech rather than to foreign or coordinated information operations.
Real social scientists across the political spectrum have made versions of these critiques for years; they are part of the same conversation, just from inside the field rather than outside it.
The strongest version of the administration’s case is not “social science is worthless,” but that NSF in particular drifted into funding work whose theoretical frameworks and PI activism were substantively continuous with each other, that this drift damaged broader public trust in science, and that resetting the directorate structure is one response. See also:
The response has also clearly produced overreach. The keyword screen used for the Cruz database swept in research on the dusky-capped flycatcher (a bird, flagged because “diversification” appears in evolutionary biology), aerospace manufacturing grants (flagged for mentioning the percentage of Hispanic students), solar eclipse research, a grant to teach Hebrew at UMass (flagged in a database commissioned by an avowedly pro-Israel senator), and a postdoc on “How False Beliefs Form & How to Correct Them”, basic cognitive science on belief revision, terminated as “misinformation research.” Both things are true: the strongest examples are genuinely damning, and the implementation has been blunt enough to catch obviously unrelated work.
What funding pathways remain? Even with SBE eliminated, federal support for social and behavioral research is not zero. The realistic picture:
Within NSF, work that aligns with named priorities migrates. The budget document explicitly preserves “behavioral and cognitive science” grants. Plausible homes for transferred work include CISE (cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, AI-human interaction research), TIP (Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships), and BIO (biologically-grounded behavioral research). Research on decision-making, attention, perception, methodology, and computational social science tied to AI or security applications has the strongest case for continuation.
NIH remains the largest federal funder of behavioral and social science research, and faces a 12% cut, not elimination. The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) continues to coordinate behavioral funding across NIH institutes. NIA, NIMH, NIDA, NCI, and NICHD all continue to fund behavioral research tied to their disease-area missions. Three institutes are proposed for elimination (NIMHD, Fogarty, NCCIH), but the bulk of behavioral funding sits in institutes that survive.
National security and intelligence agencies — mixed but not closed. This is where work on influence operations, radicalization, foreign information manipulation, and platform-driven political behavior has the most natural home:
DOD Minerva Research Initiative was terminated in 2025. This was the major DOD basic-research funder for social science with national security relevance, and its loss is real. Researchers with Minerva grants on disinformation, extremism, and great-power competition had projects cancelled.
IARPA (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) is active. Funds research on disinformation detection, deepfake identification, text attribution (the HIATUS program), and behavioral prediction. Proposers’ Day was held January 2026.
Service research offices remain active. ONR (Naval), AFOSR (Air Force), and ARO (Army) fund basic research on human performance, decision-making, social influence, and human-machine teaming.
DHS Science & Technology Directorate funds behavioral research on terrorism, radicalization, and counter-extremism.
DOJ / National Institute of Justice funds behavioral and social research on criminal justice, including extremism, hate crimes, and online radicalization.
Private foundations. Templeton, Bradley, Searle, Sloan, and others have been active supporters of heterodox social science — particularly work that institutional academic funders have been less willing to fund.
What the new framework rewards and disadvantages. The work that has the strongest survival case is research that (a) addresses one of the named priority areas (security, AI, biotechnology, energy, space) on its substance, (b) uses rigorous quantitative methods over interpretive or critical frameworks, (c) treats findings as serving general American interests rather than particular identity groups, and (d) treats foreign actors as legitimate targets of study. Research on Chinese influence operations, platform manipulation, antisemitism as a foreign-amplified phenomenon, AI bias as a measurement problem rather than a social-justice claim, and methodology improvements aligned with “Gold Standard Science” all fit cleanly within the new priorities.
Research that will have a harder time: explicit DEI work, climate-justice and environmental-justice framings, work where structural inequality is the primary explanatory variable, and “mis/disinformation” research that treats domestic political speech as the central concern. NSF’s April 2025 grant terminations explicitly targeted both “DEI” and “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” The framing distinction matters: foreign influence operations as a topic is funded; characterizing domestic political speech as misinformation is not.
In summary
Federal social science funding is being restructured rather than eliminated, but the restructuring is real and it falls unevenly across sub-fields. The clearest losses are at NSF SBE and DOD Minerva. The clearest continuations are at NIH (health-tied behavioral research) and across the intelligence community (security-relevant work). For researchers whose work fits the named priority areas on substance — security, foreign influence operations, AI-human behavioral research, methodology and replication — the new framework actually contains room, and in some cases is more hospitable than the prior NSF environment. For researchers whose work was structured around DEI framings or critical theoretical commitments, the landscape is genuinely much harder. This isn’t a comfortable observation, but it’s the accurate one.
What Congress is actually doing
Last year (FY26), Congress rejected most of the administration’s proposed cuts. NIH got a modest boost rather than the requested 40% cut. NSF and NASA were largely preserved. The final FY26 numbers were closer to the Senate’s proposal than to the White House’s request — a pattern that’s likely to repeat.
The House CJS Appropriations Subcommittee released its FY27 draft bill on April 29 and marked it up April 30. The full committee markup was scheduled for May 13 (which is what the original email is about; this post was drafted before that meeting). The numbers in the House draft:
The House bill rejects the proposed elimination of NSF SBE and does not endorse the Antarctic icebreaker request. It also preserves the language from FY26 instructing Commerce, NASA, and NSF to continue applying the negotiated indirect cost rates for universities at FY24 levels, a significant procedural win for research universities, since the administration has tried to cap indirect costs in other contexts.
The Senate version, when it emerges, is widely expected to be more generous still. Last year the final enacted numbers tracked the Senate’s higher levels, and there’s no obvious reason that pattern would break this year.
So the most realistic forecast, based on the FY26 precedent and the current House draft, is that final FY27 numbers will reflect modest cuts (perhaps 5–15%) from FY26 levels rather than the 50%+ cuts the administration requested. That is still a meaningful reduction, with real consequences for grant success rates and graduate training. But it is far from the scenario implied by the original email, in which the President’s request would simply pass.
Why the push-pull happens, and why it’s not a charade
The annual cycle where the White House proposes deep cuts and Congress restores most of them is not new it has happened repeatedly in the Reagan and Obama administrations on different programs. Three things drive it:
The President’s budget is a request, not law. Article I gives Congress the power of the purse. The President’s budget functions as the executive’s negotiating opening a statement of priorities that signals what the administration would accept being cut if Congress chooses to cut something.
Appropriators have parochial and institutional interests in agencies. Members of both parties on the Appropriations committees have decades of relationships with NSF, NIH, NASA, and DOE, often involving facilities or grants in their districts. They are structurally inclined to protect agency funding more than non-appropriators.
The Senate filibuster creates a floor. Any appropriations bill needs 60 votes in the Senate, which means it needs bipartisan support, which means the final bill cannot be the President’s most ambitious request. This is why FY26 ended with numbers close to the Senate’s, not the White House’s.
The pushback is real and has a track record behind it. But the request still matters, partly because some cuts do survive in some years, partly because grant slowdowns within an existing budget can have similar effects to formal cuts. There are credible reports that OMB is currently slow-walking FY26 grant obligations at NOAA and NSF, which means the appropriated dollars exist on paper but are not being committed to researchers. This is a separate fight from FY27 levels and is one of the more substantive concerns advocacy groups are currently raising.
Sources
White House OMB/OSTP, “FY 2027 Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities” memorandum, September 2025: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/FY27-OMB-OSTP-RD-Priorites-Memo-FINALSIGNED.pdf
President’s FY27 Budget Request, released early April 2026
House Appropriations Committee, FY27 Commerce, Justice, Science draft bill, released April 29, 2026
AAU, “White House Once Again Proposes Massive Cuts to Scientific Research and Education,” April 3, 2026
AAU, “House Bill Cuts Funding for NSF, NASA Science,” May 1, 2026
AAS, “The FY27 President’s Budget Request: NASA, NSF, and DOE Details,” April 8, 2026
Science magazine, “Slasher sequel: Trump again proposes major cuts to U.S. science spending,” April 3, 2026
Science magazine, “House spending panel bumps up Trump’s request for NSF and NASA,” late April 2026
Computing Research Association, “NSF FY 2027 Request” analysis, April 2026
DOE Office of the Chief Financial Officer, FY 2027 Budget in Brief, April 2026
Appendix: The relevant text from the email circulated at Rutgers
The Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Committee of Appropriations is meeting on May 13th to decide the science and research budget for FY27. The Trump administration is proposing a 54% cut to NSF funding, a 12% cut to NIH funding (including entirely eliminating three institutes), as well as significant cuts to NASA and eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts in its entirety. (For details, see: https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-report/white-house-once-again-proposes-massive-cuts) If passed, these cuts will gravely threaten all federally funded scientific research in the US.
You can find your Representative here. https://www.house.gov/representatives
Suggested Letter
Subject Line: Request to Support Federal Science and Technology Funding
Dear Representative,
I write in my individual capacity and as one of your constituents to express concerns and perspectives regarding the FY27 science budget. Although I understand that you do not currently serve on the House Committee on Appropriations, I would be most grateful if you could forward this message to your colleagues on the committee.
First, I would like to express my deep appreciation for the U.S. Congress’s strong support of our nation’s science and technology enterprise during the FY26 appropriations process. I also wish to express my sincere gratitude to Congress for its decades of bipartisan support for science, engineering, and medicine since the publication of Science, The Endless Frontier.
I respectfully urge continued congressional leadership to prevent the profound, potentially irreversible damage that the proposed FY27 budget cuts and related administrative actions could inflict on our nation’s scientific capacity, economy, and global competitiveness.
At a time when China and other nations are making major strategic investments in research, innovation, and advanced technologies, it is difficult to understand how the United States can maintain its global leadership while proposing substantial reductions to its own scientific agencies and research infrastructure.
I greatly appreciate that the House Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS) Subcommittee rejected portions of the President’s FY27 proposal. However, as the full committee prepares to mark up the CJS appropriations bill on Wednesday, May 13, I respectfully urge all members of the committee to support amendments restoring science and technology funding, particularly for NSF, NOAA, and NASA’s Science, Aeronautics, and Space Technology programs, to at least FY26 enacted levels.
Sustained federal investment in science and engineering is not a luxury; it is a strategic necessity. It strengthens national security, economic competitiveness, technological leadership, public health, environmental resilience, and workforce development. The benefits extend far beyond the research community and directly support the prosperity and well-being of communities across the nation, including your constituents.
Thank you again for your leadership and for your continued commitment to America’s scientific and technological future.
Respectfully submitted,
xxx
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One of the priorities is "building the STEM workforce". There be DEI dragons there.
This is a very important and enlightening review of what actually goes on with federal funding, that is, the back and forth between the White House and Congress. I'm always amused by the panic that ensues when the White House proposes something (and this happens under every president) because what actually ends up happening is not much, rendering all that panic unnecessary.
This essay also identified the real problem with reform: Congress. It doesn't like to reform things, even those things that badly need reforming.
After 40 years of working in pure physics and astrophysics, much of it supported by federal funding, I long believed that maintaining current levels of government support was obviously in the best interests of both the United States and scientific progress more broadly.
Reading Danit Finkelstein’s recent piece changed my mind. Using clear quantitative arguments about our society’s actual opportunities, constraints, and competing needs, she presented a compelling case for rethinking the scale and priorities of public science funding.
I now see that academic research in physics and astrophysics is only loosely connected to prospects for beautiful insights and to future technological applications. Worse, it is increasingly burdened by institutional goals rooted in misplaced guilt over past victimhood rather than in the pursuit of truth and discovery. Thank you, Ms. Finkelstein for your analysis.