The National Science Foundation NSF

In 1945 Vannevar Bush, who had directed the government's wartime research, sent President Truman a report titled Science, the Endless Frontier, arguing that peacetime prosperity and security depended on federal support for basic research at universities. Five years of argument over control followed, and the National Science Foundation Act was signed on May 10, 1950. The new agency started small, but the shock of Sputnik in 1957 tripled its budget in a year and made it the central funder of academic science outside the health fields that the National Institutes of Health covers.

NSF does almost no research itself. It funds scientists and engineers at about 2,000 colleges, universities, and other institutions through competitive grants, choosing among roughly 40,000 proposals a year by peer review and funding about a quarter of them. It supports about a quarter of all federally funded basic research at American universities and is the main federal source in fields such as mathematics, computer science, and the social sciences. It also builds and operates major research facilities, including telescopes, the Antarctic stations, research vessels, and the gravitational-wave observatory that first detected colliding black holes in 2015.

The agency is governed jointly by a Director, appointed for a six-year term, and the 24-member National Science Board, which sets policy and publishes the biennial Science and Engineering Indicators, the standard measure of the country's research enterprise. Its budget has run around 9 billion dollars. NSF-funded work produced the foundations of the internet, the barcode, magnetic resonance imaging, and the search algorithm that became Google, and its graduate fellowships have supported dozens of future Nobel laureates.

In 2025 NSF terminated more than 1,600 grants, many touching on diversity, equity, and misinformation research, and the President's budget proposed cutting its funding by more than half. Its Director resigned in April 2025, the agency lost its headquarters building to another department, and it moved to restructure its divisions. The administration argued that federal science funding needed to be refocused on priorities such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Scientists, universities, and members of both parties warned that the cuts would damage American competitiveness against China, and Congress funded the agency well above the requested level.