The National Science Foundation (NSF) is trimming this year’s budgets for hundreds of its traditional basic science programs by 20% to 30% or more even though its overall budget is down just 3%, Science has learned. NSF has not publicly explained the drastic cuts. But sources within and outside the agency, who did not want to be named, say they suspect the goal is to free up funds for a new $1.5 billion initiative, launched last month, meant to turn NSF-funded discoveries into new products and industries.
Last month, when NSF announced plans to give perhaps a half-dozen “X-Labs” as much as $300 million each over 6 years, it did not explain where the money would come from. Rumors have circulated for months that NSF was withholding $1 billion or more of the $8.1 billion Congress approved earlier this year for its eight research directorates. An internal memo obtained by Science documents, for the first time, the extent of those cuts in some fields.
Julia Phillips, a former member of NSF’s now-defunct National Science Board, is troubled by both the cuts to basic research and the applied focus of the new initiative. “NSF’s mission is to support discovery research, which is also the basis for any new technology,” she says. “This sudden change in direction reflects a total lack of understanding of how science is done.” NSF declined comment.
The 18 June memo, from the head of a unit within NSF’s math and physical sciences directorate, told program managers the unit’s budget for this fiscal year, which ends on 30 September, has been cut by 30% from its FY 2025 level of about $260 million. “This [cut] will unfortunately affect all [core] programs as well as centers, facilities, and other initiatives. … We are sorry to share this bad news right before the [Juneteenth] holiday weekend.”
The memo also helps explain why the foundation has handed out so few new grants this year compared with last year at this time—just one-eighth of the FY 2025 total through 15 June, the watchdog group Grant Witness has calculated—despite a research budget that is only $220 million less than in FY 2025. “We just learned about our section budget for FY26,” the memo explains. Program managers are cautious about recommending proposals to fund until they know how much money they have to spend. The memo indicates that this year, some units did not learn their actual budgets until mid-June, 5 months after Congress had approved the agency’s FY 2026 appropriation.
The memo’s bad news extends beyond the slashed budget. It directs the section’s 15 program managers to stop requesting funding for any proposals, even those that received the highest marks from outside reviewers and program staff, “until we are able to provide more details.” It even suggests staff “pull back any award recommendations in the queue,” a step that makes it less likely they would be funded this year.
Program managers would normally rush to tell potential and current grantees about such dramatic changes. But the memo tells program managers to keep their mouths shut. “This information is highly confidential,” it reads. “Please do not communicate anything to PIs [principal investigators].”
Knowledgeable sources within and outside NSF have told Science about comparable cuts in many other units, including 60% for each of the three core research programs within the geosciences directorate. The agency’s biology directorate has been cut by $200 million from its FY 2025 level of roughly $800 million. And some directorates have been hit even harder. NSF is “dissolving” its smallest directorate, which funds social, behavioral, and economic sciences and has made only a handful of awards this fiscal year. The coming months could bring other cuts: For 2 years running, President Donald Trump has proposed slashing NSF’s $1 billion education directorate by nearly three-quarters.
Meanwhile the X-Labs program, managed by NSF’s newest directorate, called Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP), is scaling up fast. Created in 2022, TIP’s mission is to address the decades-old complaint that the agency, traditionally focused on curiosity-driven research with no obvious commercial value, needs to do more to make sure scientific discoveries eventually benefit society—in new jobs and products, improved health care, or a rising standard of living.
NSF announced the precursor to X-Labs in December 2025, calling them Tech Labs. Trump’s FY 2027 budget request for NSF, which he sent to Congress in April, included a modest $50 million for that program, to be launched sometime next year. But at some point NSF officials decided to greatly expand the initiative and move up its launch date.
The May announcement says the X-Labs “will give entrepreneurial teams of scientists and engineers the autonomy, resources and milestone-driven focus to tackle challenges that were difficult to pursue in conventional academic and industry labs.”
NSF will fund the X-Labs through a rarely used mechanism that gives it much greater leeway to choose winners and set funding and goals than it has when awarding grants and contracts. For example, the mechanism allows NSF to fund nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm, some of which might have been created solely to receive the NSF award. It also allows NSF to keep money flowing without reviewing a new application.
The first set of labs will focus on improved, artificial intelligence–driven sensing and imaging and on research on quantum systems and photonics, priorities for the Trump administration. The notice says awardees could receive anywhere from $10 million to $50 million per year over 5 to 6 years after an initial investment of $1.5 million. It’s not clear from the notice how quickly the program would grow. But the large cuts to other programs suggest NSF wanted to find more than $1 billion within an overall FY 2026 budget of $8.8 billion that contained zero dollars for X-Labs.
By levying such a large tax on its other programs, the agency appears to be defying a congressional directive in the final FY 2026 appropriations bill that “No [NSF] directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level.” That language was meant to address fears by the research community and some legislators that NSF, if its overall budget remained flat, might decide to grow TIP at the expense of its other directorates—a concern that now appears prescient.
Even scientists who agree about the need to more quickly translate basic research into societal benefits are dismayed. “I had always thought that the TIP directorate would have a budget sufficient to cover programs like X-Labs,” says Rice University physicist Douglas Natelson. “I didn’t think they’d need money from the other directorates.”
NSF is moving swiftly to stand up the X-Labs initiative. Applicants must prepare and submit proposals by mid-July, barely 2 months after being notified of the opportunity. Sources tell Science NSF could make the first awards as early as this fall.
Update, 23 June, 3:45 p.m.: This story has been updated with a quote from Julia Phillips and additional details about the funding cuts.