Lots of news in the last few days regarding federal funding of university research: NSF has now frozen all funding for new and continuing awards.  This is not good; just how bad it is depends on the definition of "until further notice".   Here is an open letter from the NSF employees union to the basically-silent-so-far National Science Board, asking for the NSB to support the agency. Here is a grass roots SaveNSF website with good information and suggestions for action - please take a look. NSF also wants to cap indirect cost rates at 15% for higher ed institutions for new awards.  This will almost certainly generate a law suit from the AAU and others.   Speaking of the AAU, last week there was a hearing in the Massachusetts district court regarding the lawsuits about the DOE setting indirect cost rates to 15% for active and new awards.  There had already been a temporary restraining order in place nominally stopping the change; the hearing resulted in that order being extended "until a further order is issued resolving the request for a temporary injunction."  (See here, the entry for April 29.) In the meantime, the presidential budget request has come out, and if enacted it would be devastating to the science agencies.  Proposed cuts include 55% to NSF, 40% to NIH, 33% to USGS, 25% to NOAA, etc.   If these cuts went through, we are taking about more than $35B, at a rough eyeball estimate.  And here is a letter from former NSF directors and NSB chairs to the appropriators in Congress, asking them to ignore that budget request and continue to support government sponsored science and engineering research. Unsurprisingly, during these times there is a lot of talk about the need for universities to diversify their research portfolios - that is, expanding non-federally-supported ways to continue generating new knowledge, training the next generation of the technically literate workforce, and producing IP and entrepreneurial startup companies.  (Let's take it as read that it would be economically and societally desirable to continue these things, for the purposes of this post.) Philanthropy is great, and foundations do fantastic work in supporting university research, philanthropy can't come close to making up for sharp drawdowns of federal support.  The numbers just don't work.  The endowment of the Moore Foundation, for example, is around $10B, implying an annual payout of $500M or so, which is great but around 1.4% of the cuts being envisioned.   Industry seems like the only non-governmental possibility that could in principle muster the resources that could make a large-scale difference.   Consider the estimated profits (not revenues) of different industrial sectors.  The US semiconductor market had revenues last year of around $500B with an annualized net margin of around 17%, giving $85B/yr of profit.  US aerospace and defense similarly have an annual profit of around $70B.  The financial/banking sector, which has historically benefitted greatly from PhD-trained quants, has an annual net income of $250B.  I haven't even listed numbers for the energy and medical sectors, because those are challenging to parse (but large).  All of those industries have been helped greatly by university research, directly and indirectly.  It's the source of trained people.  It's the source of initial work that is too long-term for corporations to be able to support without short-time-horizon shareholders getting annoyed.  It's the source of many startup companies that sometimes grow and other times get gobbled up by bigger fish.  Encouraging greater industrial sponsorship of university research is a key challenge.  The value proposition must be made clear to both the companies and universities.  The market is unforgiving and exerts pressure to worry about the short term not the long term.  Given how Congress is functioning, it does not look like there are going to be changes to the tax code put in place that could incentivize long term investment.   Cracking this and meaningfully growing the scale of industrial support for university research could be enormously impactful.  Something to ponder.

There is a lot going on.  Today, some words about NSF. Yesterday Sethuraman Panchanathan, the director of the National Science Foundation, resigned 16 months before the end of his six year term.  The relevant Science article raises the possibility that this is because, as an executive branch appointee, he would effectively have to endorse the upcoming presidential budget request, which is rumored to be a 55% cut to the agency budget (from around $9B/yr to $4B/yr) and a 50% reduction in agency staffing.  (Note:  actual appropriations are set by Congress, which has ignored presidential budget requests in the past.)  This comes at the end of a week when all new awards were halted at the agency while non-agency personnel conducted "a second review" of all grants, and many active grants have been terminated.  Bear in mind, awards this year from NSF are already down 50% over last year, even without official budget cuts.  Update:  Here is Nature's reporting from earlier today. The NSF has been absolutely critical to a long list of scientific and technological advances over the last 70 years (see here while it's still up).  As mentioned previously, government support of basic research has a great return on investment for the national economy, and it's a tiny fraction of government spending.  Less than three years ago, the CHIPS & Science Act was passed with supposed bipartisan support in Congress, authorizing the doubling of the NSF budget.  Last summer I posted in frustration that this support seemed to be an illusion when it came to actual funding.   People can have disagreements about the "right" level of government support for science in times of fiscal challenges, but as far as I can tell, no one (including and especially Congress so far) voted for the dismantling of the NSF.  If you think the present trajectory is wrong, contact your legislators and make your voices heard.

The Scientia Institute at Rice sponsors series of public lectures annually, centered around a theme.  The intent is to get a wide variety of perspectives spanning across the humanities, social sciences, arts, sciences, and engineering, presented in an accessible way.  The youtube channel with recordings of recent talks is here. This past year, the theme was "democracy" in its broadest sense.  I was honored to be invited last year to contribute a talk, which I gave this past Tuesday, following a presentation by my CS colleague Rodrigo Ferreira about whether AI has politics.  Below I've embedded the video, with the start time set where I begin (27:00, so you can rewind to see Rodrigo).   Which (macroscopic) states of matter to we see?  The ones that "win the popular vote" of the microscopic configurations.

Many things have been happening in and around US science.  This is a non-exhaustive list of recent developments and links: There have been very large scale personnel cuts across HHS, FDA, CDC, NIH - see here.  This includes groups like the people who monitor lead in drinking water.   There is reporting about the upcoming presidential budget requests about NASA and NOAA.  The requested cuts are very deep.  To quote Eric Berger's article linked above, for the science part of NASA, "Among the proposals were: A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion."  The proposed cuts to NOAA are similarly deep, seeking to end climate study in the agency, as Science puts it. The full presidential budget request, including NSF, DOE, NIST, etc. is still to come.  Remember, Congress in the past has often essentially ignored presidential budget requests.  It is unclear if the will exists to do so now.  Speaking of NSF, the graduate research fellowship program award announcements for this year came out this past week.  The agency awarded slightly under half as many of these prestigious 3-year fellowships as in each of the last 15 years.  I can only presume that this is because the agency is deeply concerned about its budgets for the next couple of fiscal years. Grants are being frozen at several top private universities - these include Columbia (new cancellations), the University of Pennsylvania (here), Harvard (here), Northwestern and Cornell (here), and Princeton (here).  There are various law suits filed about all of these.  Princeton and Harvard have been borrowing money (issuing bonds) to partly deal with the disruption as litigation continues.  The president of Princeton has been more vocal than many about this. There has been a surge in visa revocations and unannounced student status changes in SEVIS for international students in the US.  To say that this is unsettling is an enormous understatement.  See here for a limited discussion.  There seems to be deep reluctance for universities to speak out about this, presumably from the worry that saying the wrong thing will end up placing their international students and scholars at greater exposure. On Friday evening, the US Department of Energy put out a "policy flash", stating that indirect cost rates on its grants would be cut immediately to 15%.  This sounds familiar.  Legal challenges are undoubtedly beginning.   Added bonus:  According to the Washington Post, DOGE (whatever they say they are this week) is now in control of grants.gov, the website that posts funding opportunities.  As the article says, "Now the responsibility of posting these grant opportunities is poised to rest with DOGE — and if its employees delay those postings or stop them altogether, 'it could effectively shut down federal-grant making,' said one federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal operations."   None of this is good news for the future of science and engineering research in the US.  If you are a US voter and you think that university-based research is important, I encourage you to contact your legislators and make your opinions heard.   (As I have put in my profile, what I write here are my personal opinions; I am not in any way speaking for my employer.  That should be obvious, but it never hurts to state it explicitly.)