The budget for the fiscal year hasn’t been set, but uncertainty continues to swirl as the proposed budget cuts will deeply affect NASA, the NSF, and other agencies that lead and support physics and astronomy. Canceled grants and research have already disparately affected scientists from underrepresented groups. The NSF had purposefully approved projects designed to broaden participation by scientists in underrepresented groups, including women, Black scientists, and those with disabilities.
The smallest proposed NASA budget since 1961.
Source: The Planetary Society
According to an article from science.org, “More than half of the 1500 research grants that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has terminated in the past month under orders from President Donald Trump’s administration aimed to bring groups historically underrepresented in science into the mainstream. Ending those grants reversed decades of efforts focused on what the agency calls the “missing millions”: women, racial and ethnic minorities, veterans, and low-income and rural students.”
These grants have been cut for their association with DEI, which the current administration has labelled as exclusionary. In Jeffrey Mervis’s article, several debated that definition.
“I get that Trump doesn’t like DEI, but we don’t exclude anybody,” says Tammie Visintainer, a science educator at San Jose State University (SJSU) who has lost NSF funding for two projects. One helps local secondary school teachers prepare units and guide student research on the health and environmental effects of urban heat islands, and the second aims to improve introductory undergraduate science courses at SJSU. Visintainer says the work benefits not just minority students at inner-city schools, but also suburban kids from wealthy families who have been turned off by boring lectures and prepackaged lab experiments that don’t reflect real scientific inquiry.
“Remember, white men are still a majority in science,” Handelsman says. “So when we improve how we teach science, the white male students learn more, too.
Read the full article “NSF grant cuts fall heaviest on scientists from underrepresented groups” at science.org.
The NSF isn’t the only one dealing with this issue. Science News interviewed Harlan Krumholz, a cardiovascular medicine specialist at Yale School of Medicine, about his work to track which grants were terminated and their impact.
“…when you look across institutes, the effects weren’t felt uniformly. We found that the National Institutes on Minority Health and Health Disparities … was hit the hardest. About 30 percent of their funding was cut. And that’s tenfold higher than the average cut. That was really striking to us.
Finally, we wanted to characterize not only which grants were cut, but also the career stage [of recipients]. That really kind of caught us off guard. One in 5, or about 20 percent of grants that were terminated, were classified as early career grants. These grants are really critical for early career researchers and the next generation of researchers to become independent investigators.”
Policy and equity researcher Michael Liu of Harvard University also assisted in the research, and both Liu and Krumholz are concerned for the future of science as the current atmosphere of uncertainly lowers morale and makes research less attractive to future scientists.
Read $1.8 billion in NIH grant cuts hit minority health research the hardest at sciencenews.org.
Meanwhile, the unpredictability continues with the current U.S. budget proposal set to tear into NASA’s and the NSF’s budgets. Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, has done exceptional work to bring to light how devastating these cuts will be. In an article for Scientific American, Dreier says, “This is a profound, generational threat to scientific leadership in the United States.”
“If implemented, it would fundamentally undermine and potentially devastate the most unique capabilities that the U.S. has built up over a half-century.”
Source: The Planetary Society
The Planetary Society highlights the fact that the proposed budget is the smallest for NASA since 1961. Each of NASA’s four major divisions will be slashed 30 to 65% if passed. It would cancel 19 active missions, including Chandra, Juno, and New Horizons, and invalidate years of research and design, and over $12 billion invested in space science.
The Planetary Society is running a petition to save NASA science. Visit the action center at planetary.org to sign it. You can also call your representatives and encourage them to support funding for NASA. The Planetary Society offers a script for the calls as well as information on how to prepare, FAQs, and the latest talking points. The calls only take one to two minutes.
Let’s continue to advocate for science for everyone, by everyone.
