With funding from the National Science Foundation and other government grants, scientists and meteorologists from the Center for Severe Weather Research study a storm in Oklahoma in 2017. They get close to supercell storms and tornadoes to better understand their formation and improve prediction.
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The National Science Foundation canceled all of its grant review panels this week, as the organization works to align its grantmaking process with new executive orders from the Trump administration.
The NSF funds a wide range of scientific research through grants to universities and research institutions. It convenes panels of experts to weigh the merits of those proposals, ultimately informing which receive federal funding. It has a budget of around $9 billion.
More than 60 of those meetings were scheduled for this week, all of which were abruptly canceled Monday morning. The move sparked confusion among panelists as to the extent of the pause. In a statement to NPR, an NSF spokesperson said that all review panels will be rescheduled. “This will allow the 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.”
Romi Burks, a biologist at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, had spent weeks preparing to serve on her NSF panel. “It’s a considerable amount of effort,” she said. “It’s extremely disappointing for it to be canceled for political reasons.”
Delays in grant approval inevitably mean delays in funding research. Those delays could threaten the scientists, who include tenured faculty, post-doctoral researchers and graduate students who often depend on grants for financial support. Delays also create extra uncertainty that makes it hard to plan, says Burks. Researchers need to schedule travel for field work, or arrange time to collaborate with colleagues. “All of these things cannot happen until you have notification,” she says. “It’s already a long time to get grants reviewed, any more time is just an increasing burden.”
It’s unclear which executive orders are responsible for the freeze, though researchers suspect it may be related to President Trump’s targeting of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. NSF reviews grant applications based on two criteria: intellectual merit and broader impacts. The latter is a catch-all term that assesses how the research would benefit society. Historically, a crucial component of those broader impacts relate to increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in the scientific process.
The pause comes at a time of heightened anxiety and confusion in the U.S. research community. Last week, the National Institutes of Health — the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world — canceled its scientific meetings and study sections, which also helps determine which research to fund.
NSF also has review panels scheduled for next week. An agency spokesperson declined to confirm whether they’d also be rescheduled.