This is text from a previous episode of the Daily Tech News Show detailing monthly changes affecting federal funding for science in the United States for May 2025.
Monthly update – US Science
You may be asking yourself: DTNS is a tech show, why do I come on every month and talk about federal science updates? We owe a lot of important tech inventions to federally funded science. If not for NSF, we wouldn’t have MRI, ASL, the internet, kidney donor matching, first image of a black hole in 2019 and now, AI!
So without further ado, here are some of the biggest stories since our last segment, on April 15th 2025.
16 April 2025
- NSF stops grant awards while staff performs second round of reviews. Staff have been asked to determine whether projects in their field of expertise contradict any presidential directives. See list of banned words we covered in March. Last year NSF reviewed over 38k proposals and awarded over 11k of them. This year we are flatlining
https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-halts-grant-awards-while-staff-do-second-review
- The administration proposed a 40% budget cut to the NIH, combined with the proposal to merge NIH’s 27 institutes into 8 and eliminating the nursing and minority health institutes.
18 April 2025
- Following grant freezes to Columbia University, NIH has frozen grants & contract payments to Harvard, Brown, Northwestern & Cornell Universities, despite these funds having been awarded constitutionally. This move led to hundreds of research projects receiving stop work orders. This delays work from a wide variety of science from research on ALS treatment to the Artemis II moon orbit mission
- NSF terminates >200 grants designed to improve the demographics of the scientific workforce, despite this being one of the pillars of its mission for the last 75 years. This also includes grants related to combatting “misinformation/disinformation”. These grants had already been awarded and are now being retracted.
- Environmental protection agency (EPA) also terminating grants – no reason given. These grants had already been awarded and are now being retracted.
25 April 2025
- Some good news! Initially, the NIH had cut the first & largest women-centered study, the Women’s Health Initiative which had been running for over 30 years. However, officials rolled back this decision a few days later due to immense pushback from scientists, senators and celebrities. Proof that sometimes, your voice matters!
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-cancels-its-first-and-largest-study-centered-women
8 May 2025
- NSF turns 75 this week. At the same time, it has been announced that its 37 divisions are being abolished and many programs will be cut, following a proposed budget cut of 55%. This will undoubtedly mean many more layoffs this coming Friday, which is when many announcements seem to be happening. So far, almost 1400 grants worth $1 billion have been terminated
Previous science news updates:
Nicole Ackermans, CVN lab 
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