The United States National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about $8.75 billion (fiscal year 2026), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.
NSF's director and deputy director are appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate, whereas the 24 president-appointed members of the National Science Board (NSB) do not require U.S. Senate confirmation. The director and deputy director are responsible for administration, planning, budgeting and day-to-day operations of the foundation, while the NSB meets six times a year to establish its overall policies.
Contents
History
Founding
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) was established by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. Its stated mission is "to promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense". The NSF's scope has expanded over the years to include many areas that were not in its initial portfolio, including the social and behavioral sciences, engineering, and science and mathematics education. The NSF is the only U.S. federal agency with a mandate to support all non-medical fields of research.
Budget and performance history
Since the technology boom of the 1980s, the U.S. Congress has generally embraced the premise that government-funded basic research is essential for the nation's economic health and global competitiveness, and for national defense. This support has manifested in an expanding National Science Foundation budget from $1 billion in 1983 to $8.28 billion in 2020.
NSF has published annual reports since 1950, and since the new millennium has added an annual "Performance Report". More recently, the NSF has focused on obtaining high return on investment from their spending on scientific research.
Various bills have sought to direct funds within the NSF. In 1981, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) introduced a proposal to reduce the NSF social sciences directorate's budget by 75%. Economist Robert A. Moffit suggests a connection between this proposal and Democratic senator William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award series criticizing "frivolous" government spending — Proxmire's first Golden Fleece had been awarded to the NSF in 1975 for granting $84,000 to a social science project investigating why people fall in love. Ultimately, the OMB's 75% reduction proposal failed, but the NSF Economics Program budget did fall 40%. In 2012, political science research was barred from NSF funding by the passage of the Flake Amendment, breaking the precedent of granting the NSF autonomy to determine its own priorities.
Funding profile
In fiscal year 2020, NSF received 42,400 proposals and awarded 12,100, for a funding rate of 28%. In FY 2021, the estimates are 43,200 and 11,500 respectively, giving a funding rate of 26.6%. According to FY 2020 numbers, the median annualized award size is $153,800 and the average duration of an award is 2.9 years.
In 2022 the NSF has started funding open source software as part of their Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program.
Timeline
Although the federal government had established nearly 40 scientific organizations between 1910 and 1940, the US relied upon a primarily laissez-faire approach to scientific research and development. Academic research in science and engineering occasionally received federal funding. Within University laboratories, almost all support came from private contributions and charitable foundations. In industrial laboratories, the concentration of workers and funding (some through military and government programs as a result of Roosevelt's New Deal) would eventually raise concern during the wartime period. In particular, concerns were raised that industry laboratories were largely allowed full patent rights of technologies developed with federal funds. These concerns, in part, led to efforts like Senator Harley M. Kilgore's "Science Mobilization Act".
Amidst growing awareness that US military capability depended on strength in science and engineering, Congress considered several proposals to support research in these fields. Separately, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sponsored creation of organizations to coordinate federal funding of science for war, including the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) both from 1941 to 1947. Despite broad agreement over the principle of federal support for science, working out a consensus on how to organize and manage it required five years. The five-year political debate over the creation of a national scientific agency has been a topic for academic study, understood from a variety of perspectives. Themes include disagreements over administrative structure, patents and inclusion of social sciences, a populist-versus-scientist dispute, as well as the roles of political parties, Congress, and President Harry S. Truman.
Commonly, this debate is characterized by the conflict between New Deal senator Harley M. Kilgore and OSRD head Vannevar Bush. Narratives about the National Science Foundation prior to the 1970s typically concentrated on Vannevar Bush and his 1945 publication Science, The Endless Frontier. In this report, Vannevar Bush, then head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development which began the Manhattan Project, addressed plans for the postwar years to further foster government commitment to science and technology. Issued to President Harry S. Truman in July 1945, the report made a strong case for federally-funded scientific research, arguing that the nation would reap rich dividends in the form of better health care, a more vigorous economy, and a stronger national defense. It proposed creating a new federal agency, the National Research Foundation.
Grants and the merit review process
The NSF seeks to fulfill its mission chiefly by issuing competitive, limited-term grants in response to specific proposals from the research community and establishing cooperative agreements with research organizations. It does not operate its own laboratories, unlike other federal research agencies, notable examples being NASA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NSF uses four main mechanisms to communicate funding opportunities and generate proposals: dear colleague letters, program descriptions, program announcements, and program solicitations.
The NSF receives over 50,000 such proposals each year, and funds about 10,000 of them. Those funded are typically projects that are ranked highest in a 'merit review' process, the current version of which was introduced in 1997. Reviews are carried out by ad hoc reviewers and panels of independent scientists, engineers, and educators who are experts in the relevant fields of study, and who are selected by the NSF with particular attention to avoiding conflicts of interest. For example, reviewers cannot work at the NSF itself, nor for the institution that employs the proposing researchers. All proposal evaluations are confidential: the proposing researchers may see them, but they do not see the names of the reviewers.
The first merit review criterion is 'intellectual merit', the second is that of the 'broader societal impact' of the proposed research; the latter reflects a broader global trend for funding agencies to demand evidence of research 'impact' and has been met with opposition from the scientific and policy communities since its inception in 1997. In June 2010, the National Science Board (NSB), the governing body for NSF and science advisers to both the legislative and executive branches, convened a 'Task Force on Merit Review' to determine "how well the current Merit Review criteria used by the NSF to evaluate all proposals were serving the agency". The task force reinforced its support for both criteria as appropriate for the goals and aims of the agency and published a revised version of the merit review criteria in its 2012 report, to clarify and improve the function of the criteria. However, both criteria already had been mandated for all NSF merit review procedures in the 2010 re-authorization of the America COMPETES Act. The Act also includes an emphasis on promoting potentially transformative research, a phrase which has been included in the most recent incarnation of the 'merit review' criteria.
Scope and organization
The NSF is broadly organized into four offices, seven directorates, and the National Science Board. It employs about 2,100 people in permanent, temporary and contractual positions at its headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Prior to 2017, its headquarters were located in Arlington, Virginia.
In addition to around 1,400 permanent employees and the staffs of the NSB office and the Office of the Inspector General, NSF's workforce includes some 200 scientists on temporary duty and 450 contract workers. Scientists from research institutions can join the NSF as temporary program directors, called "rotators", overseeing the merit review process and searching for new funding opportunities. These assignments typically last one–two years, but may extend to four. The NSF also offers contracting opportunities. As of May 2018, the NSF has 53 existing contracts.
Offices
Office of the Director
Office of the Inspector General
Office of Budget, Finance, and Award Management
Office of Information & Resource Management
Office of the Chief Information Officer
The NSF also supports research through several offices within the Office of the Director, including the Office of Integrative Activities, and Office of International Science and Engineering.
Research directorates
The NSF organizes its research and education support through eight directorates, each encompassing several disciplines:
Biological Sciences (molecular, cellular, and organismal biology, environmental science)
Computer and Information Science and Engineering (theoretical computer science, fundamental hardware and software, systems and networking, and artificial intelligence)
Engineering (bioengineering, environmental systems, civil and mechanical systems, chemical and transport systems, electrical and communications systems, and design and manufacturing)
Geosciences (geological, atmospheric and ocean sciences)
Mathematical and Physical Sciences (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and materials science)
Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (neuroscience, management, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, science of science policy and economics)
STEM Education and Human Resources (science, technology, engineering and mathematics education at every level)
An eighth directorate, the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP), was created in 2022 to accelerate the transition of basic research into real world impact. It has a primary goal of the support of use-inspired research and the translation of research results to the market and society.
Overseas sites
Prior to October 2018, NSF maintained three overseas offices to promote collaboration between the science and engineering communities of the United States and other continents' scientific communities:
Brussels for Europe, formerly based in Paris (established 1984; relocated to Brussels in 2015)
Tokyo for East Asia, except China (established 1960)
Beijing for China (established 2006)
All three overseas offices were shut down in October 2018, to reflect the agency's move to a more nimble international posture. Rather than maintain dedicated offices, NSF will dispatch small teams to specific international institutions. Teams may work for up to a week on-site to evaluate research and explore collaborations with the institution.
Crosscutting programs
In addition to the research it funds in specific disciplines, the NSF has launched a number of projects that coordinate the efforts of experts in many disciplines, which often involve collaborations with other U.S. federal agencies. Examples include initiatives in:
Nanotechnology
The science of learning
Digital libraries
The ecology of infectious diseases
Insect farming
National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics
NSF's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) gathers data from surveys and partnerships with other agencies to offer official data on the American science and engineering workforce, graduates of advanced U.S. science and engineering programs, and R&D expenditures by U.S. industry. NCSES is one of the principal U.S. statistical agencies. It is a part of the NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate (SBE).
Center for Insect Biomanufacturing and Innovation
The Center for Insect Biomanufacturing and Innovation (CIBI), formerly known as the Center for Environmental Sustainability through Insect Farming (CEIF), is an NSF partnership program that provides funds for research and experimentation on insect as food and feed. CIBI is a partnership between three Universities, Texas A&M, IU Indianapolis, and Mississippi State University, who all do separate areas of insect research to discover its sustainability. It is a part of NSF's Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) program.
List of NSF directors
The following persons had led the National Science Foundation as director since 1950:
Criticism
In May 2011, Republican senator Tom Coburn released a 73-page report, "National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope", receiving immediate attention from such media outlets as The New York Times, Fox News, and MSNBC. The report found fault with various research projects and was critical of the social sciences. It started a controversy about political bias and a Congressional Inquiry into federally sponsored research. In 2014, Republicans proposed a bill to limit the NSF Board's authority in grant-writing.
In 2013, the NSF had funded the work of Mark Carey at University of Oregon with a $412,930 grant, which included a study concerning gender in glaciological research. After its January 2016 release, the NSF drew criticism for alleged misuse of funding.
Some historians of science have argued that the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 was an unsatisfactory compromise between too many clashing visions of the purpose and scope of the federal government. The NSF was certainly not the primary government agency for the funding of basic science, as its supporters had originally envisioned in the aftermath of World War II. By 1950, support for major areas of research had already become dominated by specialized agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (medical research) and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (nuclear and particle physics). That pattern would continue after 1957 when U.S. anxiety over the launch of Sputnik led to the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (space science) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (defense-related research).