Hi, I’m Kei Koizumi (pronounced like the letter “K”; he/him). I’m new to this UCS blog, so let me introduce myself. I’m a social scientist, a science policy practitioner, and a science policy maker. My personal mission has long been to use science policy to provide everyone, in every community, opportunities to participate in and benefit from science and engineering.
I’ve been a UCS ally for decades—especially with my friends at the UCS Center for Science and Democracy, who are working to protect scientific integrity in the US government. That work includes pushing for Scientific Integrity Act legislation and drafting and implementing government-wide policies on scientific integrity. This summer, I’ve joined UCS as a Senior Advisor focused on countering the administration’s attacks on science and supporting the organization’s new Science Rising initiative.
Today, I want to talk to you about the US National Science Foundation (NSF), why it’s so important for American science, engineering, technology, and innovation, and how its role in American science is now under threat. But working together, we can protect the national treasure that is NSF.
Why the National Science Foundation matters
Although two dozen US federal agencies fund some form of research and development (R&D), NSF is the only federal agency charged in its original legislation with supporting research at the frontiers of knowledge across all science and engineering disciplines. Since 1950, NSF has been investing in research, research infrastructure, and STEM education across the nation—primarily through universities via research and education grants—with a mission “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense; and for other purpose.” And it’s delivered many benefits to the American people, as my colleague Carlos Martinez recently described.
NSF has built a merit review process for allocating nearly all of its funding to ensure “the proposals it receives are reviewed in a fair, competitive, transparent and in-depth manner.” This review process is the true gold standard of science and has been the inspiration and model for research funding agencies around the world. I know this because more than a dozen nations’ science policy professionals have visited me wanting to learn how NSF’s merit review process works, particularly its use of two criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts—so that they can build similar gold-standard merit reviews for their nations.
Several UCS colleagues have shared their stories of why NSF is important to them, so let me share mine: Early in my career, NSF’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES, part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Directorate) supported my early work on government R&D funding and its impacts and helped me become an R&D budget nerd (which I still am today) and science policy practitioner.
Without NSF, I would not have had the career in science and science policy I’ve had. That early support led to many years of contributing to NCSES’ federal R&D data and working with NSF and the National Science Board on its biennial Science and Engineering Indicators.
“More than a dozen nations’ science policy professionals have visited me wanting to learn how NSF’s merit review process works.”
My experience with NSF led to one of my first assignments at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 2009: implementing President Obama’s campaign pledge to double the number of NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (GRFs) awarded to 2000 from 1000 a year. Yes we did!
Over the years, I’ve had the chance to meet many current and past GRFs, and through them I understand on a personal level the impacts GRF and NSF support can have on US science and engineering and on STEM careers. Indirectly, my experiences with NSF led me to become the chair of the NSF transition team for the incoming Biden administration in late 2020 and then a White House science official in the Biden OSTP working closely with NSF leadership and the National Science Board (NSB) to keep advancing US science and engineering.
NSF under siege
NSF is so critical for US science and engineering that UCS has written repeatedly about the agency, from making our position known on the latest nominee to be NSF Director to taking legal action to prevent NSF from closing its National Center for Atmospheric Research. We’ve sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to NSF to release the responses to its Dear Colleague Letters and its own internal decision-making for greater transparency in these proposals. We’ve sounded the alarm on proposals to restructure the agency and fire scores of scientists, and we recently called on the UCS community to comment on a government-wide rule that would politicize federal research funding, including NSF funding, in unprecedented ways. (Thank you to everyone who responded by the July 13 deadline!)
Well, here we go again. NSF has just proposed major changes in its procedures for awarding research grants. Essentially, the proposed rules—which are now open for public comment— would codify within NSF the damaging changes OMB proposes to make government-wide. That would be destructive, not only to NSF’s merit review process, but also to the entire US science and engineering enterprise.
Injecting politics into science
The prime example, NSF’s proposed Guide 25 (page 197), incorporates OMB’s proposal to allow agencies to terminate a grant or decline to issue an award for not being aligned with administration political priorities. It would even allow NSF to terminate already-awarded grants at any time for being inconsistent with an administration’s political priorities.
The proposed rule would subject all NSF awards, meaning everything (not just research grants but also fellowships, training grants, center grants, undergraduate research opportunities, etc.) to review and approval by a politically appointed official before being issued through an unspecified process and under unspecified criteria, and thus contradicts everything NSF’s current merit-review process stands for.
This could be even more problematic for NSF than other agencies: NSF currently has no political appointees since Director Panchanathan resigned last year and the entire presidentially appointed National Science Board was fired this spring. Who’s supposed to review NSF grants? Presumably OMB and OSTP officials. I know that when I was an OSTP official, I would have been appalled at even the idea of someone like me approving every single NSF award with a political litmus test. NSF’s merit-review process and NSF’s talented program managers and leaders need to retain that non-political responsibility.
In another example, NSF’s proposed Guide 12 (page 128), would disallow NSF funds from supporting travel to scientific conferences or publication costs of research publications. I’ve always believed that if a federal agency determines that research is worthy of federal support with public dollars, they should support not only the experiment but also the publication and public presentation of the results of the research. Communicating research results is an integral part of research without which research can’t have impact because no one can learn from it or even read it.
And my final example, Guide 6 Section G (page 84), deals with international collaborations. Recently, NSF issued a Dear Colleague letter (DCL) titled “Prohibition on Collaborations with Restricted Entities” which replaces the NSF’s carefully constructed policies and procedures for evaluating potential NSF-funded research collaborations to consider research-security concerns with lists of restricted entities. The letter says plainly, “NSF has determined research security risk mitigation for NSF-funded projects involving these restricted entities is not sufficient.” Accordingly, NSF plans to implement a new research security policy prohibiting collaboration on NSF-funded projects with the restricted entities listed.
This article’s headline sums it up well: “New NSF policy would ban almost all collaborations with Chinese scientists.” I think it’s a bad idea to shut them down. US scientists are the best because they collaborate with the best scientists from around the world, including China, on areas where there is little to no risk for national security, especially for research that is intended to be published in the open literature. Putting aside thoughtful “research security risk mitigation” in favor of prohibiting any collaboration with entities on a list—even when no NSF funding supports foreign collaborators’ work, and even when results are openly available in publications—does great damage to US science.
OMB’s regulation goes further, and by implication NSF would too, by prohibiting federally funded researchers from collaborating with any researchers from a covered country or entity, list or no list, starting with China (including US scientists at Chinese institutions and also US-trained Chinese scientists) but with ‘covered country’ or ‘covered entity’ so ill-defined that an administration could add, say, Spain at a moment’s notice. Although the Dear Colleague letter is not open for public comment, only questions, the NSF Guidance on international collaborations which will incorporate this DCL and the proposed OMB regulation is.
Raise your voice for the National Science Foundation
I could go on. If you have thoughts on these and other proposals contained in the draft NSF Guidance for Financial Assistance, and I certainly do, then we have until August 24 to make our voices heard. I’ll be dusting off my OMB comments and sending some of them to NSF, as these OMB and NSF proposals both aim to do the same thing: change the US federal research enterprise as we know it, which has brought the United States so many benefits in scientific discovery, security, health, and economic opportunity, and replace it with a more isolated, more politicized, and less scientific research enterprise that no longer relies on merit review but rather political review.
I think these changes would destroy what has made NSF great and therefore diminish the United States as the leading scientific superpower and leader in achieving impact from research. If NSF’s long tradition of supporting leading-edge scientific research based primarily on merit review is as important to you as it is to me, I hope you’ll join me in using your voice to speak up for NSF.