Boston Globe: Massachusetts leads the nation in lost NSF research funding

Massachusetts has lost more National Science Foundation money for science, math, and engineering research than any other state in the country, a Globe analysis of terminated grants found.

Since the start of the Trump administration, the NSF cut 251 grants to Massachusetts institutions worth $249 million, federal data showed. That accounts for a lion’s share of the $265.4 million in NSF grants lost at 40 institutions across New England. The cuts could mean lost jobs and hundreds of research projects abruptly halted without a clear path forward.

Until now, public attention has focused on cuts to health and medical research by the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that encompasses the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. and is headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The NSF, while also part of the federal government, sits outside HHS and funds nonmedical research across a wide range of subject areas including technology and engineering.

New England has lost about twice as much money to CDC and NIH cuts as it has to NSF cuts: about $560 million. The purge is a piece of the Trump administration’s effort to extensively reshape how federal money for research, science, and health is used.

The new data showing the NSF cuts’ outsize toll in the state coincided with Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, both Democrats, sending a letter to Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this week, seeking an explanation for the “ongoing chaos and upheaval” at the agency. The senators said the NSF cuts potentially violate court orders and endanger the country’s scientific excellence.

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Read the full article here.

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