Researchers across the U.S. social sciences are facing an uncertain future as funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), historically the field’s main federal sponsor, has sharply declined. In fiscal year 2026, the agency awarded fewer than 100 new social-science grants, compared with a historical average of about 850 per year, while the White House has proposed eliminating the NSF’s Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE).
After a long day excavating a prehistoric campsite in eastern Wyoming, Todd Surovell lay in his tent imagining the distant past. “I tried to put myself in that world and think about what it would sound like to hear a herd of mammoths passing by,” he says. “How do you behave? What does your social network look like?”
Now a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Surovell lies awake for another reason. Much of his previous work—and the funding sources that have supported generations of American archaeologists, economists and other social scientists—is being dismantled.
The NSF has long provided most U.S. research funding for the social sciences. “For many economists, it’s really NSF or nothing,” said Michael Woodford, an economist at Columbia University in New York City. Woodford shared the 2026 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to fiscal stability theory.
But the agency’s approval ratings have plummeted over the past two years. In fiscal year 2026, which ended on September 30, it awarded fewer than 100 new social-science grants, according to data from Grant Witness, a nonprofit organization that tracks U.S. research funding, and the NSF.
The agency awarded no new grants in dozens of programme areas, including archeology and economics. In October, the NSF announced that the number of Nobel Prize-winning economists it has supported had reached 75. Woodford, the 75th, began his career with an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and later received 10 additional awards from the organization.
Compared with other fields, the social sciences are unusually dependent on the NSF. Until late September, the NSF’s Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences advertised that it “funds 63 percent of all academic research in the social and psychological sciences in the United States.” That statement has since disappeared from the agency’s website, and the White House has said it wants to abolish the NSF entirely.
The potential dissolution of SBE has created uncertainty across the sector. It threatens projects that the division has supported for decades, including research into American political attitudes and behavior. Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, said such research is “currently facing an existential threat.”
Without intervention, “these projects that the NSF has funded for years will simply wither away,” wrote Mark Solovey, a historian at the University of Toronto in Canada, in Social Science for What?, the agency’s 2020 book on the history of social science.
In response to a request for comment from Nature, the NSF said the White House’s fiscal year 2027 budget request “does not include continued funding for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate,” but that the directorate is not being closed. The agency also said that, as part of President Trump’s policy implementation plan, “NSF regularly evaluates its portfolio of funding opportunities to ensure alignment with agency priorities.”
Social science closure
In its April budget proposal, the White House characterized SBE’s portfolio as “woke” and said the bureau would be completely abolished. Congress has not yet considered the bureau’s fate, but President Donald Trump’s administration is continuing to push for cuts to SBE spending.
SBE’s total spending on new grants fell from an average of US$247 million in fiscal years 2021 to 2024 to US$94 million in 2026. The NSF reported that SBE is allowing new grants only in areas approved by the White House, such as artificial intelligence and cognitive science, according to a report in Science.
SBE now has fewer than a dozen employees, down from about 50 at the start of President Trump’s current term in 2025. It is not actively seeking funding applications or convening a review board.
Research under threat
The largest projects funded by SBE include the “Big 3” studies, which researchers have conducted over several decades. The General Social Survey (GSS) is a biennial survey of the behaviors, opinions and experiences of the American public. Another is the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which collects economic data.
These datasets are “a very important shared public good,” said Pamela Hurd, a sociologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and co-principal investigator of the SBE grant to the GSS. The surveys also still include face-to-face interviews, making them expensive to maintain. Each study requires millions of dollars annually—a level of funding that is beyond the reach of social-science philanthropy.
Source: www.nature.com