In the summer of 1945, four days after Japan’s formal surrender and a few weeks into the Atomic Age, President Harry Truman began floating the idea of an agency led by a “free scientific mind” that would fund the study of how the universe works. By 2024, the agency that Truman had envisioned, the National Science Foundation, provided about one in every 10 federal research dollars to America’s universities. Its Department of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences funds approx 63 percent of academic research in the psychological and social sciences, according to the NSF.
The Trump administration now appears determined to cut the NSF—and erase its ability to fund social science. The Trump administration has proposed cutting the agency’s budget in half and eliminating the SBE division entirely in the next fiscal year. Congress would need to approve the change, and it may not be appropriate: Last year, when President Trump also requested drastic cuts to the NSF, Congress refused and warned the White House against cutting federal research dollars for any unit by more than 5 percent. But already, change has come. On April 24, Trump fired all 22 members of the NSF board, which must approve any major changes at the agency. They are not changed. (NSF did not respond to requests for comment.)
The outlook is very bad for the social sciences. In response to a detailed list of questions, White House spokesman Kush Desai told me in an email that the administration is “committed to strengthening America’s governance in the modern technology of the future—innovation that is driven by advances in hard science, not in ‘social science’ driven by ideology.” In the past month, a group of all NSF staff meeting NSF staff. he said that the SBE division would shut down. According to two current employees of the agency (who, like other government employees I spoke to for this article, asked not to be named for fear of punishment), the leaders also announced in the meeting that experts who review grant proposals related to social science will be assigned to various departments within the agency. Some employees have already moved out, the two employees said.
Staff at NSF learned last month, too, that the SBE unit’s research budget for this fiscal year is two-thirds smaller than last year, several current staffers told me—and last year, funding was already at a historic low. Even that money seems not to have been passed on to the researchers. At the end of May in a typical year, NSF would award about 250 social science awards. This year, it has distributed five, according to Witness Grantefforts that monitor federal research spending.
Social scientists have been worried about the National Science Foundation for months. Starting last year, the agency ended its support for doctoral dissertation research in archaeology, linguistics, geography and anthropology. The funding has been a support in some fields. “It is now less clear how the independent research of early career anthropologists can be supported,” a current NSF employee told me. Last month, 160 behavioral and cognitive scientists attended a Zoom meeting to discuss how they can save the SBE divide. (Among academics whose fields are under threat, behavioral and cognitive researchers may have the least reason to worry: Trump’s budget request seeks to avoid funding this type of research, perhaps because of its benefits in advancing AI.) National organizations that represent NSF-funded academics presented the “adverse effects” of Trump’s proposed board and changes to the agency soon. “This is their only place in the federal government to get help,” Antoinette WinklerPrins, a geographer and senior official in the SBE division until last April, told me. “If that money is gone, that’s bad for those sciences.”
If the National Science Foundation stops funding social scientists, experts told me, our 5,000-foot view of American life will get worse. NSF, through the SBE division, is the major funder of the “big three” social science research, which has enabled the work of several generations of academics, economists and policy scholars. The surveys run out of university facilities, but the agency helps offset the high cost of conducting them, including funding database storage, compensation for thousands of participants, and the underlying game of the surveys. (All three still conduct face-to-face interviews.) At times, support for these studies has accounted for about one-sixth of NSF’s social science budget; according to two NSF employees I spoke with, there has been no indication that research will be insulated from major cuts.
One of these projects is the world’s longest family study, which allows for the study of economic mobility and the long-term effects of child poverty; at least nine federal agencies based on his data. Another is the General Social Survey, which asks about almost every aspect of home life, including respondents’ pets, cultural values, credit history and overall satisfaction. Without federal funds to support this data collection and other SBE unit research, the American Political Science Association said in statement last month, the ability of academics to understand changes in American attitudes “would definitely weaken.” The last study is the US National Election Studies database, which has tracked US voting behavior since 1948. In the 1990s, it showed mistrust of government and hostility between parties, which helped establish the study of political fragmentation. (Polarization it is one of many The words “DEI” on the list that the office of Senator Ted Cruz collected last year to mark NSF’s recommendations for additional investigation, two former agency employees told me.)
NSF has also effectively restricted grantmaking in at least one area that the foundation has historically supported: science and technology studies, an interdisciplinary field that examines issues of how research is conducted and the social consequences of new technologies. This section tends to engage with thorny social and political questions using theoretical frameworks such as feminism and structural equality—both terms on Cruz’s DEI list. Normally, outside advisors review grant proposals at the annual spring meeting, but those advisors have been told that this year’s science and technology conference has been canceled, according to an email from NSF leadership that I reviewed that did not detail the decision. “There is no indication that another meeting will take place,” Martha Kenney, one of the field inspectors, told me. “That was the scariest thing.” Without the conference, grants in the field seem unlikely to be funded.
Social science can get a bum rap for being rigorous, and for being ignorant. Accurately measuring emotions and attitudes is very difficult, and many studies in these fields cannot be reliably replicated. As a result, debates have continued for decades about whether the federal government has any business funding for such screening methods. The Truman White House had previously supported NSF funding for the social sciences, but backed off after conservatives objected. In 1975, William Proxmire, a Democratic senator with an accounting zeal, gave his first Golden Fleece award—recognizing the most unethical government-supported research—to the NSF for funding research on why people love. Years later, President Ronald Reagan proposed cutting social science funding at the agency by 75 percent.
But Reagan’s position declined. Shaken by the proposed cuts, social scientists argued to Congress that understanding how society works is good for the economy (which at the time was in recession). Advocates used social science research to develop anti-tax policies. Finally, government funding for the social sciences twice during the Reagan years.
Some commentators in conservative academic groups make similar arguments in favor of social science today, despite a general backlash among Republicans for mocking the irony-sounding research. Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, recently he wrote on X that “if you care about giving businesses and policymakers the information they need to understand the world,” you should care about the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences division remaining. Joshua Katz, a senior fellow at the institute who has helped review NSF grant proposals in linguistics, thinks the federal government should continue to fund good social science research even if it lacks immediate practical benefits. “There are actually a lot of sociologists I like, which is not the kind of thing you would expect to hear from someone like me,” Katz, who has criticized “hyper-wakeA “civilized society,” in his opinion, should allocate at least some money to understand the past of man through fields such as archeology and anthropology.
Much of the social science funded by NSF has turned out to be of concrete benefit. In the 1990s, NSF funded an economic study that was used to develop a nationally efficient kidney donor matching system. American families are now saving more for retirement because an NSF-funded study by a tax researcher discovered the right ways to pull it off. Even the work of derided romance researchers has remained important. 20 years after being awarded the Golden Skin, someone came up with the idea of emotional contagion, a theory of how exposure to others’ emotions affects our own. (They never received NSF funding again; one of the researchers loans (losing his dog, marriage, car, and getting shot in early retirement at the Fleece.) The concept has since been used to study the effects of social media on mental health—something the Trump administration has said. it needs immediate attention.
A coalition of about 40 organizations representing hard science disciplines, led by the Computer Research Association, recently told Congress, too, that losing the SBE division could cause “long-term, potentially permanent” damage to national research as a whole. The stickiest obstacles to progress in the areas the administration wants to prioritize—AI, biotechnology—are “fundamentally human,” the organizations argued. The SBE division often sponsors a social scientist on interdisciplinary research projects, Sara Kiesler, a former SBE division chief whose own research has focused on how the adoption of e-mail changed the workplace, told me. And because other NSF divisions would still need to understand how humans interact with technical systems, they could essentially create their own internal SBE division anyway. Whether this administration realizes it or not, a critical study of how our society works is possible, and helpful.
