Founding The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) was established by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. Its stated mission is "to promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense". NSF has published annual reports since 1950, which since the new millennium have been two reports, variously called "Performance Report" and "Accountability Report" or "Performance Highlights" and "Financial Highlights"; the latest available FY 2013 Agency Financial Report was posted December 16, 2013, and the six-page FY 2013 Performance and Financial Highlights was posted March 25, 2013. More recently, the NSF has focused on obtaining high
return on investment from their spending on scientific research. Various bills have sought to direct funds within the NSF. In 1981, the
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) introduced a proposal to reduce the NSF social sciences directorate's budget by 75%. Economist Robert A. Moffit suggests a connection between this proposal and Democratic senator
William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award series criticizing "frivolous" government spending — Proxmire's first Golden Fleece had been awarded to the NSF in 1975 for granting $84,000 to a social science project investigating why people fall in love. Ultimately, the OMB's 75% reduction proposal failed, but the NSF Economics Program budget did fall 40%. breaking the precedent of granting the NSF autonomy to determine its own priorities. In 2022 the NSF has started funding
open source software as part of their Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program.
Timeline Pre–World War II Although the federal government had established nearly 40 scientific organizations between 1910 and 1940, the US relied upon a primarily
laissez-faire approach to scientific research and development. Academic research in science and engineering occasionally received federal funding. Within University laboratories, almost all support came from private contributions and charitable foundations. In industrial laboratories, the concentration of workers and funding (some through military and government programs as a result of
Roosevelt's
New Deal) would eventually raise concern during the wartime period. In particular, concerns were raised that industry laboratories were largely allowed full patent rights of technologies developed with federal funds. These concerns, in part, led to efforts like Senator
Harley M. Kilgore's "Science Mobilization Act".
1940–1949 Amidst growing awareness that US military capability depended on strength in science and engineering, Congress considered several proposals to support research in these fields. Separately, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt sponsored creation of organizations to coordinate federal funding of science for war, including the
National Defense Research Committee and the
Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) both from 1941 to 1947. Despite broad agreement over the principle of federal support for science, working out a consensus on how to organize and manage it required five years. Themes include disagreements over administrative structure, patents and inclusion of social sciences, as well as the roles of political parties, Congress, and President
Harry S. Truman. Narratives about the National Science Foundation prior to the 1970s typically concentrated on Vannevar Bush and his 1945 publication Science—The Endless Frontier. In this report, Vannevar Bush, then head of the
Office of Scientific Research and Development which began the
Manhattan Project, addressed plans for the postwar years to further foster government commitment to science and technology. The third attempt began with the introduction of S. 2385 in 1948. This was a compromise bill cosponsored by Smith and Kilgore, and Bush aide John Teeter had contributed in the drafting process. In 1949, S. 247 was introduced by the same group of senators behind S. 2385, marking the fourth and final effort to establish a national science agency. Essentially identical to S. 2385, S. 247 passed the Senate and the House with a few amendments.
1950–1959 In 1950
Harry S. Truman signed Public Law 507, or 42 U.S.C. 16 creating the National Science Foundation. which provided for a
National Science Board of twenty-four part-time members. In 1951 Truman nominated
Alan T. Waterman, chief scientist at the
Office of Naval Research, to become the first Director. With the Korean War underway, the agency's initial budget was just $151,000 for 9 months. After moving its administrative offices twice, NSF began its first full year of operations with an appropriation from Congress of $3.5 million, far less the almost $33.5 million requested with which 28 research grants were awarded. After the 1957 Soviet Union orbited
Sputnik 1, the first ever human-made satellite, national self-appraisal questioned American education, scientific, technical and industrial strength and Congress increased the NSF appropriation for 1958 to $40 million. In 1958 the NSF selected
Kitt Peak, near
Tucson, Arizona, as the site of the first national observatory, that would give any astronomer unprecedented access to state-of-the-art telescopes; previously major research telescopes were privately funded, available only to astronomers who taught at the universities that ran them. The idea expanded to encompass the
National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the
National Solar Observatory, the
Gemini Observatory and the
Arecibo Observatory, all of which are funded in whole or in part by NSF. The NSF's astronomy program forged a close working relationship with
NASA, also founded in 1958, in that the NSF provides virtually all the U.S. federal support for ground-based astronomy, while NASA's responsibility is the U.S. effort in space-based astronomy. In 1959 the U.S. and other nations concluded the
Antarctic Treaty reserving
Antarctica for peaceful and scientific research, and a presidential directive gave the NSF responsibility for virtually all U.S. Antarctic operations and research in form of the
United States Antarctic Program.
1960–1969 In 1963, President John F. Kennedy appointed
Leland John Haworth as the second director of the NSF. During the 1960s, the impact of the
Sputnik Crisis spurred international competition in science and technology and accelerated NSF growth. In 1969, Franklin Long was tentatively selected to take over directorship of the NSF. to the US president and Congress, as required by the NSF Act of 1950. In 1977 the first interconnection of unrelated
public data networks was developed, run by
DARPA.
1980–1989 During this decade, increasing NSF involvement lead to a three-tiered system of internetworks managed by a mix of universities, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. By the mid-1980s, primary financial support for the growing project was assumed by the NSF. One of the first six grants went to
Stanford University, where two graduate students,
Larry Page and
Sergey Brin, began to develop a search engine that used the links between Web pages as a ranking method, which they later commercialized under the name
Google. In 1996 NSF-funded research established beyond doubt that the chemistry of the atmosphere above Antarctica was grossly abnormal and that levels of key chlorine compounds are greatly elevated. During two months of intense work, NSF researchers learned most of what is known about the
ozone hole. In 1998 two independent teams of NSF-supported astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was actually speeding up, as if some previously unknown force, now known as
dark energy, is driving the galaxies apart at an ever-increasing rate. Since passage of the Small Business Technology Transfer Act of 1992 (Public Law 102–564, Title II), NSF has been required to reserve 0.3% of its extramural research budget for Small Business Technology Transfer awards, and 2.8% of its R&D budget for small business innovation research.
2000–2009 NSF joined with other federal agencies in the
National Nanotechnology Initiative, dedicated to the understanding and control of matter at the atomic and molecular scale. NSF's roughly $300 million annual investment in nanotechnology research was still one of the largest in the 23-agency initiative. In 2001, NSF's appropriation passed $4 billion. The NSF's "Survey of Public Attitudes Toward and Understanding of Science and Technology" revealed that the public had a positive attitude toward science, but a poor understanding of it. and
Hurricane Katrina. An NSF-funded engineering team helped uncover why the levees failed in
New Orleans. In 2005, NSF's budget stood at $5.6 billion, in 2006 it stood at $5.91 billion for the 2007 fiscal year (October 1, 2006, through September 30, 2007), and in 2007 NSF requested $6.43 billion for FY 2008.
2010–2019 President Obama requested $7.373 billion for fiscal year 2013. Due to the
October 1, 2013 shutdown of the Federal Government, and NSF's lapse in funding, their website was down "until further notice", but was brought back online after the US government passed their budget. In 2014, NSF awarded rapid response grants to study a chemical spill that contaminated the drinking water of about 300,000 West Virginia residents. In early 2018, it was announced that Trump would cut NSF Research Funding by 30% but quickly rescinded this due to backlash. As of May 2018, Heather Wilson, the secretary of the Air Force, signed that letter of intent with the director of NSF initiating partnership for the research related to space operations and
Geosciences, advanced
material sciences, information and
data sciences, and workforce and processes.
2020-Present On April 28, 2026, President
Donald Trump fired all 24 members of the foundation's governing board. ==Grants and the merit review process==