This week, the Trump administration won an important victory in the legal campaign being mounted by universities over funding of scientific research.
Part of the Trump administration’s agenda has been reorienting federal support of research toward new priorities, including artificial intelligence (AI), computing infrastructure, and military needs. On April 18th of this year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a directive outlining the new research priorities, which included an extensive FAQ section explaining the rationale for researchers either holding current awards or applying for new awards. On its home page, the NSF features new opportunities in AI research, including $100 million in funding. Among the new priorities was a shift in how NSF fosters “broadening participation,” which must “aim to create opportunities for all Americans everywhere.” The directive went on to affirm that “these opportunities should not preference some groups at the expense of others, and directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.” In short, the NSF wanted to ensure that its research portfolio did not run afoul of anti-discrimination and civil rights law.
In accordance with the new directive, the NSF began to review its grant portfolio to identify grants that did not conform to the new priorities. By May 2025, about 1,700 of the NSF’s roughly 11,000 funded grants had been terminated, or about 15 percent of the NSF’s grants portfolio. Most were to projects broadly directed to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs. These included standalone programs, such as the Directorate for STEM education, which is strongly directed to advancing DEI aims.
In response, 16 states brought a lawsuit seeking to enjoin the NSF from implementing the Priorities Directive and to restore funding to the terminated grants. On August 1, John P Cronan, District Judge for the Southern District of New York, denied the petition, allowing the terminations to stand. National Association of Scholars Policy Director, Teresa Manning, outlines the legal issues and arguments in a separate piece. Here I offer some comments on why Judge Cronan’s decision marks a victory for science, not a setback.
[RELATED: Judge Allows Trump’s NSF Directive to Stand During Legal Challenge]
The problem facing the academic sciences today is not too little money or too few research grants. Rather, it is that the academic sciences have become a near-wholly owned client of government.
Federal and state funds presently account for the majority of support for academic scientific research. At some universities, nearly the entire research portfolio is funded by just four federal agencies. This has fostered an unhealthy dependence of academic science on support from an inherently political actor, namely, the government. Governments change, and when they do, so too will the ways the government spends money. The Trump administration’s reshaping of research priorities represents precisely that change.
Along with unhealthy dependence comes an unhealthy sense of entitlement, which seems to be the motivator for the plaintiffs in State of New York et al. v. NSF. Their suit challenged the authority of the Trump administration, through the NSF, to set its own priorities for what science it will continue to fund, and importantly, what science it no longer will. Those judgments are lodged solidly in the executive branch and are enabled by the NSF’s governing statute. The plaintiffs objected to that, arguing in essence that the executive be enjoined from exercising its legally established authority, and restoration of terminated grants.
The termination of grants has not been haphazard. The Trump administration has determined that federal funds should not support DEI.
Here is where sympathy for the holders of terminated grants comes in: the NSF sets two merit review criteria for evaluating whether a grant proposal should be funded. One of the merit review criteria is Broader Impacts. The other is Intellectual Merit. To be reviewed, every grant proposal must include statements describing how the work impacts each.
[RELATED: Mixing Politics and Science: Lessons Learned]
Since the Obama administration, the NSF and its governing body, the National Science Board, have been aggressively using Broader Impacts statements to impose DEI ideology on the evaluation and awarding of research grants. Because scientists’ employment, advancement, and tenure depend on research grant dollars brought in, this amounts to a form of compelled speech. This is what the NSF Priorities Directive seeks to eliminate. Science will be better off for it.
The funding of academic science by the federal government was an experiment begun in 1950, with the establishment of the NSF. Its aim was to foster basic research in universities, something which had never before been done in America. Of particular concern in founding the NSF was protecting basic science from undue interference and domination by powerful government and corporate interests.
That concern has now become reality for the academic sciences. No longer is there any distinction to be drawn, nor any protective firewall erected to insulate academic science from those contrary impulses. Rather, the academic sciences have become essentially government science agencies. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, now channels more than 80 percent of its research budget to extramural research in universities. This dissolves any meaningful distinction between the NIH, a government science agency that is explicitly charged with implementing government priorities in public health, and the academic research sector, which is supposed to be insulated from it.
Science will benefit from disentangling the academic sciences from their government masters and restoring true intellectual independence to academic research. Thanks to Judge Cronan’s decision, the academic sciences may now begin learning that lesson, even if they are determined to learn it the hard way.
Image: “Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse” by Americasroof on Wikipedia
