NSF Is Cutting Its Grant Solicitations in Half — What That Actually Means for Your Next Proposal

The National Science Foundation is about to become a very different agency to apply to. At a National Science Board meeting on February 25, NSF Chief Management Officer Micah Cheatham confirmed what researchers had been fearing since last year's workforce reductions: the agency will consolidate its roughly 200 annual grant solicitations down to 100 or fewer.

"The fewer solicitations you have, the less time grant applicants have to figure out which of our pigeonholes they fit into," Cheatham told the board. The framing was optimistic — less bureaucratic navigation for applicants, broader solicitations that welcome interdisciplinary work. But in a room full of scientists who've spent careers understanding exactly which NSF program funds their research, the reaction was more complicated.

As Granted News reported, the solicitation reduction follows an 18.3% workforce loss between September 2024 and October 2025, the abolition of all 37 divisions across NSF's eight directorates, and a broader restructuring that has fundamentally altered how the agency operates. This isn't a minor administrative adjustment. It's the most significant change to NSF's grant-making apparatus since the agency was founded 75 years ago.

The Restructuring Behind the Numbers

To understand why solicitations are being halved, you need to understand what happened to NSF's organizational structure over the past year.

In 2025, NSF eliminated all 37 of its internal divisions — the organizational units that housed specific program officers and managed targeted solicitations for everything from cellular biology to atmospheric chemistry to computer science education. The biology directorate, for instance, went from four distinct divisions to a single "OneBIO" structure organized around three themes: Foundations of Life, Living Systems, and Bioinnovation & Infrastructure. Similar consolidations happened across geosciences, engineering, social sciences, and every other directorate.

The workforce that managed those divisions shrank dramatically. NSF currently operates with approximately 1,300 employees, down 35% from the prior year. The biology directorate alone lost 40% of its program officers. Most employees who a year ago had five layers of management between themselves and agency leadership now have three. Cheatham characterized the executive-to-staff ratio as "extreme."

The agency was also evicted from its Alexandria, Virginia headquarters, forcing staff to work remotely. Internal communications obtained by Science magazine described remaining employees as fearful of retaliation, with experienced program officers taking early retirement rather than navigating the uncertainty.

Fewer people, fewer divisions, fewer solicitations. The logic is bureaucratically coherent even if the scientific consequences are unclear.

What "Broader Solicitations" Means in Practice

NSF's stated strategy is to replace targeted solicitations with broader ones, using technology to route incoming proposals to appropriate reviewers. Instead of a solicitation specifically for, say, marine geochemistry or computational neuroscience, the idea is that a broader earth sciences or biological sciences solicitation would accept proposals across multiple sub-disciplines, with internal sorting determining which reviewers see what.

This approach has both theoretical appeal and practical risks.

The appeal: Interdisciplinary researchers who've struggled to find the "right" program for proposals that span traditional boundaries could benefit. A project that combines machine learning with ecosystem ecology, for example, might no longer need to choose between a computer science solicitation and an ecology one.

The risks are substantial. Targeted solicitations existed for a reason — they signaled what NSF wanted to fund, provided specificity for reviewers, and created accountability for program officers managing defined portfolios. When a solicitation says "we're looking for proposals on X," researchers can tailor their approach accordingly. When a solicitation says "we fund science broadly," the matching problem shifts entirely to the applicant, who must now guess whether their specific niche fits within an opaque internal routing system.

Board member Dorota Grejner-Brzezińska, a geodetic scientist at Ohio State, raised the critical question directly: will fewer solicitations result in fewer funded researchers? NSF leadership has not provided a definitive answer.

Merit Review Is Changing Too

The solicitation reduction is happening alongside an overhaul of NSF's merit review process — the system by which proposals are evaluated and ranked.

The National Science Board released a December 2025 report titled "Merit Review for a Changing Landscape" that recommended several significant changes. The second review criterion, traditionally called "Broader Impacts," would be renamed "Societal Benefits" to clarify its meaning. The Board acknowledged persistent confusion among proposers, reviewers, and even NSF staff about how Broader Impacts should be interpreted, with many reviewers placing greater weight on Intellectual Merit despite instructions to weight both criteria equally.

More consequentially, the Board called for research portfolios to demonstrate alignment with "national priorities" as charted by Congress and the President — language that introduces a political dimension to what has historically been an agency committed to investigator-driven basic research. NSF updated its broader impacts guidelines in April 2025 to align with current administration priorities, including a requirement that outreach and recruitment activities be "open and available to all Americans."

On the operational side, NSF reduced the minimum number of outside reviews from three to two and made panel review optional. Unsuccessful applicants will now receive panel summaries limited to three to five sentences — down from the detailed feedback that researchers have traditionally used to strengthen resubmissions. Conference and workshop proposals up to $200,000 will no longer require external review.

For researchers accustomed to using detailed reviewer feedback to iterate on proposals, the truncated summaries are particularly concerning. Three to five sentences provides little actionable information about why a proposal was declined, making strategic resubmission much harder.

The Budget Context

Congress appropriated $8.75 billion for NSF in FY2026, including $7.18 billion for research-related activities. That's a $310 million cut from the prior year — painful but far less severe than the administration's proposed 57% reduction, which would have gutted the agency.

The $8.75 billion supports nearly 10,000 new awards and more than 250,000 scientists, technicians, teachers, and students. But within that topline, priorities are shifting. AI and quantum research are explicitly favored in the restructured management framework. NSF officials have been candid that these areas will receive disproportionate attention, raising questions about funding trajectories for disciplines — earth sciences, social sciences, fundamental biology — that don't fit neatly into the AI-and-quantum narrative.

The combination of fewer solicitations, broader framing, and stated priority for AI and quantum creates a landscape where researchers in traditional disciplines face genuine uncertainty about where and how to apply.

What Researchers Should Do Now

The strategic implications for anyone writing an NSF proposal in 2026 are significant.

Track the new solicitations as they're published. The shift from 200+ to 100 or fewer solicitations means the documents that do get published will be broader and more important to read carefully. Sign up for NSF alerts in your directorate and read every new solicitation in full, even if the title doesn't seem like an obvious match. The routing system means your proposal might be reviewed under a solicitation that didn't exist in this form last year.

Frame interdisciplinary connections explicitly. Broader solicitations favor proposals that demonstrate relevance across traditional boundaries. If your work has implications for AI, quantum, national security, economic competitiveness, or workforce development, say so — clearly and early in the proposal. These are the themes that NSF leadership has signaled will receive priority attention.

Recalibrate your Broader Impacts section. The rename to "Societal Benefits" and the alignment with administration priorities mean this section needs more strategic attention than ever. Concrete, measurable societal outcomes — particularly those framed around American competitiveness, security, and workforce — will likely resonate more than traditional academic broader impacts activities.

Don't count on detailed reviewer feedback. With panel summaries capped at three to five sentences, the information available for resubmissions will be minimal. Invest more upfront in pre-submission feedback — from colleagues, program officers (where available), and institutional grants offices. Getting it right the first time matters more when the feedback loop is thinner.

Talk to program officers while you still can. NSF is hiring to recover from the workforce reduction, but the current staff-to-proposal ratio is historically poor. Program officers who remain are managing larger portfolios with less time per investigator. Reach out early, be concise, and ask specific questions about whether your research fits within the new solicitation structure.

The NSF that researchers applied to in 2024 no longer exists in organizational terms. The science it funds hasn't changed, but the pathways to funding have been fundamentally redrawn. Adapting to that reality — rather than hoping the old structure returns — is the most productive response.

For researchers trying to map the broader federal funding landscape alongside these NSF changes, Granted can help identify alternative opportunities across agencies while the solicitation structure settles into its new shape.