🧪 Concrete evidence of political motives:
Out of 1044 NSF terminations so far, *not a single one* started under Trump 1.0. Zilch. Nada. 0%.
That is, all terminated NSF awards started Feb 1, 2021 or later after Biden took office.
Yet, Trump 1.0 awards still account for 15% of still-active awards.
Out of 1044 NSF terminations so far, *not a single one* started under Trump 1.0. Zilch. Nada. 0%.
That is, all terminated NSF awards started Feb 1, 2021 or later after Biden took office.
Yet, Trump 1.0 awards still account for 15% of still-active awards.
Comments
Grants approved by Trump appointee under Trump getting a pass doesn’t seem shocking.
Now that he’s gone, we’ll see what changes
Seems like it’s a data scrape parameters choice
And of course, we know that Cruz's list did that explicitly:
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092-4246-91A5-58EEF99750BC
I’m inclined to blame ignorance and laziness of DOGE babies over some secret intentional scheme.
(1) Explicitly relying on Cruz's list as a starter would still be clearly direct political influence.
(2) Round 2 of terminations was only loosely connected of Cruz's list, but still didn't have Trump 1.0 awards.
Source for (2):
I just think they don’t care and will cut anything they can whenever they find the next weasel-excuse to do it.
I don’t think anything methodical is going on
I am curious if the big AI projects on Cruz’s list got cut, though
Kudos to @noamross.net and @scott-delaney.bsky.social that made the above insight possible with data here: https://grant-watch.us/nsf-data.html
(The second 15% figure comes from NSF's own public award data: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearch.jsp).
Here's a month-by-month breakdown.
Started Jan 2021 or earlier? Consistent 0's.
Started Feb 2021 or later? Consistent non-zero.
And note start date of Feb 2021 means the proposal was still submitted under a Trump 1.0 solicitation/review process.
Huge cancellation numbers afterwards.
Political motivation? Or sign of policing of fraudulent research, people taking advantage of relaxed oversight during the emergency?
Not enough info.
By Trump? Attacking any Biden era started research?
That is clearly political, if so.
But not for the terminated. Hence, that theory can't account for the abrupt sharp drop-off for the blue line.