NSF Wants to Dissolve Its Social Science Directorate. 63 Percent of Academic Research Hangs in the Balance.

The National Science Foundation funds 63 percent of all academic research in the social sciences and psychological sciences conducted at American universities. That pipeline is now scheduled for demolition.

The White House's FY2027 budget request, released April 3, proposes dissolving NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate — known as SBE — and zeroing out its funding entirely. Continuing grants that "align with Administration priorities" would be transferred elsewhere in the agency. Everything else would simply end. Political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and the interdisciplinary research that connects them would lose their institutional home at the nation's primary basic research funder.

This is not the first time a president has proposed cutting social science funding. But it is the first time an administration has proposed eliminating the organizational structure that houses it — and it comes after a year in which NSF has already functionally stopped funding new social science research.

The Numbers Tell the Story Before the Budget Does

Before the FY2027 proposal even landed, the damage was already accumulating. NSF has awarded just 613 grants in fiscal year 2026 — roughly 20 percent of the pace from 2021 through 2024. Funding disbursed is running at about one-third of historical levels. For social scientists specifically, the situation is worse.

DOGE terminations hit SBE disproportionately. Of the 1,752 NSF grants terminated in 2025 — worth a combined $1.4 billion — the STEM Education directorate absorbed the largest share (839 grants, $888 million), but SBE lost 320 grants worth $91 million. Those terminations targeted research involving diversity, equity, and inclusion, misinformation and disinformation studies, and related topics. For a directorate with a fraction of the budget of engineering or computer science, losing $91 million was devastating.

The FY2027 proposal would formalize what the terminations started. SBE's budget would be cut 30 percent from FY2025 levels even before the dissolution takes effect. The biological sciences directorate faces a 25 percent reduction. Meanwhile, NSF's overall budget would shrink by 54 percent — from $8.75 billion to roughly $4 billion — under the proposal.

On April 3, NSF's interim leadership held an internal meeting to announce preliminary dissolution planning steps. No permanent NSF director has been appointed since Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned in April 2025. Brian Stone, the agency's chief of staff, has been performing director duties for a full year.

What Dissolution Actually Means

Dissolving a directorate is not the same as cutting its budget. Budget cuts leave the institutional infrastructure intact — the program officers who understand the research community, the review panels with domain expertise, the solicitation pipelines that connect researchers to funding opportunities. A dissolution dismantles all of that.

SBE currently manages two major political science funding programs — the Accountable Institutions and Behavior program and the Security and Preparedness program — along with programs in economics, sociology, social psychology, decision sciences, science of science policy, and methodological innovation. It also houses the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, which produces the data that policymakers, universities, and industry use to understand the American research enterprise.

The budget proposal states that "continuing grants that align with Administration priorities" would be transferred to other directorates. But this raises immediate practical questions. Which directorate absorbs economics? Where does political science land if the administration has explicitly targeted it for elimination? What happens to interdisciplinary programs that span psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics?

The answer, based on how previous restructurings have played out across federal agencies, is that transferred programs lose priority, staff, and institutional knowledge. A sociology program housed in the engineering directorate does not get the same advocacy, the same review infrastructure, or the same intellectual community. Transfer is a polite word for burial.

Congress Rejected This Last Year — But the Damage Is Already Done

The FY2026 budget proposed a 55 percent cut to NSF overall. Congress rejected it wholesale, appropriating $8.75 billion — a 3.4 percent decrease from FY2024, but nothing close to the evisceration the White House wanted. Social scientists reasonably expect Congress to reject the SBE dissolution as well.

But this framing misses what is happening on the ground. Congress controls the budget. The administration controls the operational machinery. And the operational machinery has already slowed to a crawl.

NSF's merit review process was overhauled in December 2025 with minimal public notice. The minimum number of external reviews per proposal dropped from three to two. One of those reviews can now be conducted by NSF staff rather than an independent expert. Panel discussions are optional rather than required. Panel summaries have been compressed to three to five sentences. NSF cited "proposal backlog and workforce reductions" as the rationale.

These changes make program officers more powerful and external peer review less influential. For fields like political science and sociology — which face explicit political hostility from the current administration — reduced peer review creates vulnerability. A program officer with ideological pressure from above and fewer independent reviewers to push back has more latitude to decline proposals for reasons that have nothing to do with scientific merit.

The 613 grants funded this year are not all equally distributed. Physical sciences, engineering, and computer science have seen proportionally fewer terminations and faster award processing. Social and behavioral sciences are at the back of a very long line, with less institutional advocacy and more political headwinds.

What Social Scientists Should Do Now

The standard advice — contact your members of Congress, sign petitions, write op-eds — is necessary but insufficient. The political dynamics around NSF's budget will play out over months. Researchers need to act on parallel tracks.

Diversify funding sources immediately. The Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation all fund social science research. Private foundations cannot replace NSF's scale — SBE distributed roughly $300 million annually at its peak — but they can sustain individual labs and projects through a lean period. Several foundations have increased payouts specifically to offset federal funding losses. CHANGE Philanthropy's Level Up pledge has over 40 signatories committed to raising payout rates to 8 percent or more.

Reframe research for surviving federal programs. The NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships directorate (TIP) has been explicitly protected in both the FY2026 and FY2027 budgets. Social scientists whose work touches innovation ecosystems, workforce development, technology adoption, or regional economic competitiveness should explore whether TIP programs can accommodate their research. Similarly, the Department of Defense funds social and behavioral research through the Minerva Research Initiative and through DARPA's Information Innovation Office. These are not natural homes for most social scientists, but the funding is real and currently less contested.

Build cross-disciplinary collaborations now. NSF's surviving directorates — particularly Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Engineering (ENG) — have programs where social and behavioral components add value. Human-AI interaction, technology ethics, engineering education, and disaster resilience all benefit from social science expertise. Proposals that embed social science within engineering or computing frames have better survival odds in the current environment than standalone social science proposals.

Document the impact. The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) is collecting stories from NSF-funded researchers for advocacy purposes. The American Political Science Association has a toolkit with template language for congressional outreach. Individual researchers should be able to articulate, in concrete terms, what their NSF-funded work has produced — not in the language of academic publications, but in the language of policy outcomes, economic impacts, and public benefit.

Plan for a multi-year disruption. Even if Congress rejects the SBE dissolution, the operational slowdown will persist. NSF is processing grants at one-fifth of normal speed with a leaderless agency and reduced staff. There is no scenario in which FY2027 grant funding returns to pre-2025 levels. Graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty should build contingency plans that assume two to three more years of constrained federal social science funding.

The Quiet Extinction of a Research Infrastructure

The most dangerous aspect of the SBE dissolution proposal is not the proposal itself — it is the compounding effect of a year of terminations, staff losses, review process changes, and operational slowdowns that have already hollowed out the directorate's capacity. Even if Congress preserves SBE's budget line, rebuilding the panel rosters, the program officer expertise, and the research community's trust in the funding pipeline will take years.

NSF's social science infrastructure took four decades to build. The economists, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists who run review panels, serve as rotators, and maintain the intellectual standards of the funding process represent an irreplaceable network. When those people leave — because their own grants were terminated, because the review burden shifted, because the political environment became untenable — they do not come back on command.

The FY2027 budget proposal may die in Congress. The directorate it targets is already on life support. For researchers navigating this landscape, tools like Granted can help identify alternative funding pathways and build competitive proposals for the programs that remain — because the social scientists who move fastest will be the ones who survive.