A Senate spending panel today offered a glimmer of hope to the more than 1600 scientists who had their grants terminated earlier this year by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
As part of a larger spending bill covering NSF and several agencies that was approved today by the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Republican leaders agreed to work with Senator Tammy Baldwin (D–WI) to refashion her failed amendment to restore funding for most of those grants. The revised amendment would then be voted on by the full Senate when it took up the entire $79 billion bill. The bill itself would give NSF $9 billion, only $60 million less than its current budget and $5.1 billion more than President Donald Trump has requested for the agency in the 2026 fiscal year that starts on 1 October.
Baldwin’s amendment would require NSF to restore the terminated grants unless they were canceled because of financial mismanagement or research fraud. (Those reasons are believed to apply to at most a handful of the grants.) But the scope of those exceptions was too narrow for Senator Jerry Moran (R–KS), who chairs the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) subcommittee that has jurisdiction over NSF and other science agencies. Given the panel’s Republican majority, Baldwin’s amendment was defeated on a party line vote of 14 to 15.
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/senate-panel-raises-hopes-nsf-will-restore-killed-grants
