Trump Budget Proposes Cutting National Science Foundation By More Than Half, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That America Was Funding The Discovery Of Things It Did Not Yet Know

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration unveiled a federal budget proposal Friday that would reduce the National Science Foundation by roughly 56 percent, sparing the United States the burden of continuing to learn things at its current rate.

The proposal, part of the White House discretionary budget request, would shrink the 75-year-old agency from about nine billion dollars to under four billion, the deepest single-year reduction in the foundation's history. Created in 1950 to underwrite the basic research that private companies find insufficiently profitable to pursue, the NSF funds roughly a quarter of all federally supported fundamental science at American universities, a figure administration officials described as approximately a quarter too high.

The budget arrived alongside companion measures already underway, including the termination of more than a thousand active research grants, a proposed cap limiting universities to 15 percent for the overhead costs of conducting the research, and staff reductions across the agency's scientific directorates. Officials characterized the combined effect as a return to fiscal discipline, noting that knowledge produced under previous funding levels would remain available for Americans to consult.

"The taxpayer should not be on the hook for research that may or may not discover something," said one source within the administration, who added that the private sector could be trusted to fund any inquiry that turned out, in advance, to be worth funding. The source declined to specify how a discovery's value would be established prior to the discovery.

University researchers warned that the cut would idle laboratories, strand graduate students midway through doctoral programs, and accelerate the departure of scientists to better-funded institutions in Europe, Canada, and China, nations that administration officials noted would then bear the expense of finding things out.

At press time, the President had instructed aides to determine which previously funded breakthroughs the nation could simply keep, and whether any of them were refundable.