In the summer of 1945, four days after Japan's official surrender and a few weeks into the Atomic Age, President Harry Truman began floating the idea of an agency guided by 'the free intelligence of the scientist' that would fund investigations into how the world works. As of 2024, the agency that Truman had envisioned, the National Science Foundation, supplied about one in every 10 federal research dollars going to U.S. universities. Its Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences division funds roughly 63 percent of academic research in the psychological and social sciences, according to the NSF. The Trump administration now seems determined to shrink the NSF'and to quash its ability to fund social sciences. The Trump administration has proposed cutting the agency's budget in half and eliminating the SBE division altogether in the next fiscal year. Congress would need to approve those changes, and it may not: Last year, when President Trump also requested drastic cuts to the NSF,...
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