On Tuesday, Feb. 18th, the National Science Foundation (NSF) fired over 150 employees, roughly 10 percent of its workforce. This order came from NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan — who delivered a lecture at Carnegie Mellon in Oct. 2024— in response to a recent executive order calling for a reduction in the federal workforce.
According to anonymous interviews conducted by NPR, many fired workers served as program directors at the NSF, who decide which grants the foundation will and won’t fund. In the wake of their absence, remaining employees have expressed anxieties about the foundation’s ability to properly evaluate grant proposals. Some have even said that the federal agency may have to begin hiring experts from abroad to fill the gaps in specialized knowledge lost in this Tuesday’s firings, seemingly counteracting the original goal of the executive order. Those who continue to work at the NSF face mounting concerns regarding the security of their jobs, and others in academia have expressed concerns regarding how these firings could damage future hiring efforts at the NSF.
Notably, these firings took place just weeks after the NSF froze funding to grants containing words from a list of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) terms in response to a different executive order from President Trump targeting DEI initiatives. Historically, the NSF has been directed by Congress to promote the participation of women, minorities, and other underrepresented groups in science. As recently as a few years ago, the CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) and Science Act of 2022 explicitly instructed the NSF to widen involvement in science across the country.
Many of these changes drew worries from the scientific community. Some medical researchers have shared how being forced to exclude words like “women” and “diverse” could harm their ability to collect data from samples representative of the American population and reach appropriate conclusions.
Beyond unease regarding existing grants, many members of the scientific community also shared how these changes could harm the future advancement of science in the U.S.
Former director of the NSF, Neal Lane, told NPR that “NSF has a mandate to… ensure that all Americans have opportunities to participate in science,” and that, by targeting DEI, “they’re killing American science.”
The dean of Duke University’s Graduate School, Suzanne Barbour, said that these DEI policies benefit all taxpayers. When discussing diverse teams of researchers, she noted that “They’re more creative, they’re more successful, and… ultimately are the kinds of teams that make the biggest discoveries.”
Carnegie Mellon receives a large amount of funding from the NSF each year. In 2023, the university received over 73 million dollars for research and development. In each year since 2014, the university has consistently received over 55 million dollars for research purposes. It’s still unclear what the lasting impacts of the NSF’s recent changes will be, and the possible impact on Carnegie Mellon even more unpredictable.
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