The Trump administration requested more than $15 billion in cuts to federal research funding for a second consecutive year, leaving UCLA professors concerned about the future of scientific research.
The administration’s 2027 budget request, which it released April 3, included a nearly 55% cut to the National Science Foundation, a 23% cut to NASA and an 11% cut to the National Institutes of Health.
Congress rejected similar sweeping funding changes recommended by the White House for the 2026 fiscal year, and negotiations over the 2027 request will take place over the summer.
The proposal comes amid funding delays by the NSF, which provides about 25% of federal support for basic research to American universities, according to the NSF website. The cumulative number of grant awards provided by the NSF in 2026 is less than half of what the agency had distributed by May 2025, according to Grant Witness, a nonprofit that tracks grant terminations across federal scientific agencies.
The federal government suspended about 800 of UCLA’s grants – totaling $584 million – from the NIH, NSF and Department of Energy in late July. The Trump administration alleged that the university had engaged in affirmative action, “antisemitism and bias” and allowed “men to participate in women’s sports.”
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate UCLA’s frozen NIH and NSF grants in September and August, respectively, in response to a lawsuit filed by UC faculty.
[Related: Federal government suspends research funding to UCLA]
NSF funding supports research conducted on campus, said Kirsten Schwarz, an NSF program director from 2022 to 2024. Schwarz, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health, added that she believes the new budget represents the Trump administration’s continued effort to devalue science in the United States.
“From my time being at NSF, I feel like my job was mostly trying to make very difficult decisions about which excellent proposal to fund,” Schwarz said. “If we had more funding, we could support more of that work. That’s the direction we should be going in, not the direction that we’re taking right now.”
Agency employees said a late distribution of money to all NSF directorates – divisions which support research in certain disciplines – delayed the NSF’s funding, according to Nature, an international science journal. The stall in funding was also caused by disagreements between Congress and the White House over what projects should be prioritized, per Nature.
The Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA is funded by the NSF Mathematical Sciences Research Institutes program, which supports mathematics and statistics institutes across the country, said Dimitri Shlyakhtenko, a professor of mathematics and the director of IPAM.
The suspension of UCLA’s grants delayed funding to the institute, Shlyakhtenko said. He added that the institute raised money to support its research and projects until its NSF grant was reinstated in December.
IPAM aims to build connections between other disciplines and mathematics and invite scholars to collaborate on projects related to artificial intelligence and nuclear fusion, Shlyakhtenko said.
IPAM reduced workshop lengths and program sizes in response to the threat of future funding reductions, he added.
“Because of the increased risk, you end up making more conservative decisions, which by themselves, can actually lead to suboptimal outcomes,” Shlyakhtenko said.
The Trump administration’s requests also require a revision of the agency’s structure, according to the NSF’s budget request to Congress.
The NSF will be closing one of its eight directorates – the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences – by the end of the fiscal year, according to the budget request. The directorate provides 63% of funding for all U.S. academic research in social and psychological sciences, spanning archaeology, biological anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics and geographical sciences, according to the NSF’s website.
Susan Perry, a professor of anthropology, said the elimination of the directorate would terminate the support she needs for her 35-year study of white-faced capuchin monkey behavioral ecology.
Perry said animal behavior studies are especially important as many species face challenges caused by climate change, adding that disruptions to long-term studies could result in an irreversible loss of data.
“Because of recent disasters in funding – and COVID didn’t help either – I’m currently at a point where only I can tell all of these monkeys apart, and everything is about to collapse,” she said. “There is no more NSF funding, and NSF funding is the only three-year funding that somebody like me can get.”
Another recent change to NSF leadership came without congressional approval.
On April 24, the Trump administration fired all 22 members of the National Science Board, the independent body of advisors that establishes NSF policies and advises the president and Congress on science-related policies.
The president selects NSB members across a variety of scientific disciplines from industry and academia. They serve six-year terms on the nonpartisan board and are also responsible for approving the NSF budget.
Expert guidance is crucial for advising federal leadership on research and science policy, Perry said. She added that she believes the Trump administration is prioritizing the perspectives of non-scientists.
“They are just asking their buddies instead of the experts, and it’s just a huge cost to not only our nation but the world,” she said.
Comments are closed.