Social science at the NSF - by Matt Clancy

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Social science at the NSF<br>History rhymes

Matt Clancy<br>May 20, 2026

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Series: Reagan White House Photographs, 1/20/1981 - 1/20/1989, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<br>The 2027 National Science Foundation Budget Request proposes to eliminate the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Directorate, which funds social science research.1 So far, all signs suggest it means to follow through on this proposal (the NSF’s SBE Directorate has made essentially no research awards so far this year, which is highly atypical). We care a lot about R&D at the Abundance and Growth Fund, but let’s set aside for a minute the question of whether the NSF should be supporting social science research.2 What I find interesting about this whole episode is that we’ve been here before, a little over 40 years ago.<br>Thanks for reading The Abundance and Growth Blog! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

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Reagan Revolution

Let’s go back to 1981, shortly after Ronald Reagan took office. The following account of the social science fights of the first Reagan administration are based on a few histories of the period that I read earlier this year.3 The Reagan administration ultimately ended up cutting inflation-adjusted non-defense R&D by a third by 1983, but it was especially hostile to the social sciences. In the FY1982 President’s Budget, the administration called for a sharp reduction in spending on social science research, more severe than proposed for the overall NSF.<br>The Executive Branch wasn’t an outlier though; Congress was also skeptical. In the same year, it passed a rescission package reducing the appropriated funds for social science at the NSF by $10mn, out of a total allocation of $33mn (Congress eventually restored $1mn). The next year, the Reagan administration proposed cutting the NSF social science budget from the post-rescission level of $24mn by an additional $14mn, but Congress split the difference and appropriated funds equivalent to another $6.4mn cut. Funding bottomed out in 1982 and then began to slowly recover. But the social sciences would not attain the inflation-adjusted level of funding they had enjoyed in 1980 until 1996.<br>While the scale of these cuts caught the social sciences off guard, they didn’t come out of nowhere. Support for social science research at the NSF had always been more tenuous than other fields: some draft legislation founding the NSF had even banned the social sciences from receiving funding, though an outright ban wasn’t in the legislation that ultimately established the NSF. Decades later, in the lead up to the 1981 cuts, multiple bills had been proposed that cut social science funding at the NSF (one passed the House, but not the Senate, in 1979). Social science research was also the frequent subject of ridicule, for example via Senator Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” awards, which kicked off in 1975 with a criticism of an NSF-funded social science study on why people fall in love. Perhaps as a consequence of all this doubt, funding for the social sciences had been growing at a significantly slower rate than other sciences at the NSF leading up to the 1980s.<br>Make America Great Again

Fast forward 44 years to 2025, and the second Trump administration had just come into office. It also arrived highly skeptical of federal support for R&D; President Trump’s FY2026 budget proposed a 20% cut to overall R&D, with much larger cuts for non-defense R&D (57% at NSF, 40% at NIH4). This time, however, Congress was not on board with the proposed cuts. The normal appropriations process for discretionary spending (like R&D) is subject to the filibuster, which means any large cuts to NSF and NIH would have had to garner supermajorities to pass. This meant a large cut through the normal appropriations process was pretty unlikely.<br>That said, it was possible Congress might pass large cuts at the NSF and NIH with a rescission package instead. Rescissions are a mechanism for the executive branch to seek approval not to spend appropriated funds, and as noted above, Congress passed one in 1981. Through much of 2025, the administration’s spending at NIH and NSF was below trend (see figure below); a large pot of unspent funds near the end of the year could potentially be used as a pretext for rescissions, which unlike normal appropriations, can be passed by a simple majority.5

Source: ScienceSpending.org<br>However, that isn’t what ultimately happened. In the second half of the summer of 2025, spending at NSF and NIH accelerated and ended the year on trend or above (see figure). No rescission packages targeting R&D were proposed. And the eventual appropriations from Congress cut the budget of the NSF by 3.4% (roughly $300mn), rather than 57%. The budget appropriated for NIH actually increased.<br>The social sciences, however, fared worse. As under the Reagan administration, one can see some indications that...