Government workers from the National Science Foundation are sounding the alarm on President Donald Trump’s attack on the federal independent agency and its impact on the scientific community.
In a July 21 letter addressed to San Jose Rep. Zoe Lofgren — ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology — nearly 150 National Science Foundation (NSF) workers warned about a series of politically motivated actions harming the agency. The workers referenced nine issues in the letter, including the abrupt firing of hundreds of employees, political interference with their merit-based review system of grant proposals and proposed cuts to shrink the NSF budget by 56% next fiscal year that would cripple the organization’s key function.
The names of the NSF AFGE Local 3403 union workers were either redacted or signed as anonymous under protection of “whistleblower disclosure.”
“For 75 years, NSF has made this country a destination for students, innovators and Nobel laureates. In just a little over six months, this administration has torn it to shreds,” Lofgren said at a Tuesday news conference. “Dedicated civil servants who have advanced degrees and want to use their expertise to contribute to our federal scientific excellence are being mistreated day in and day out. They have a front-row seat to how President Trump and his political goons are breaking the law, breaking the spirit of civil servants and breaking the trust of our scientific community.”
NSF, established by Congress in 1950, provides grants to universities, startups and businesses to promote scientific research and innovations. Since its founding, it has funded key inventions and discoveries, including American Sign Language, Lasik eye surgery, the MRI, black hole research, gene-editing technology CRISPR and more.
Jesus Soriano, president of the AFGE Local 3403 union, said NSF funds at least 400 new startups every year, which have gone on to do impactful work.
“When there’s no science, there is no future,” Soriano told San José Spotlight. “So those young entrepreneurs or little businesses are not going to survive, or they will not be created.”
In addition, the Department of Government Efficiency cancelled 1,600 active grants between April and May, jeopardizing $1.3 billion. The authors of the letter claimed the department ended the grants “without transparency or lawful justification.”
The administration’s stripping of grants is already having a local impact on training and research opportunities for students and educators.
San Jose State University lost five grants totaling more than $3.5 million, according to NSF. These grants gave students research opportunities and funding to create education materials. The grants were expected to last another one to three years.
Additionally, nearly all NSF and National Institutes of Health training programs at SJSU have been eliminated, including U-RISE, Sonia Singhal, an assistant professor of microbiology, said. Students who participated in U-RISE received up to 60% of their tuition through NSF funding.
Singhal said these cuts have prevented them from making payments to researchers and purchasing lab supplies. Heavily invested experiments may be halted before they achieve results. Student researchers who received tuition funding will need to pay out of pocket or look for other sources.
“In the short term, an abrupt loss of funding is extremely disruptive to a research group. Mass termination of grants is utterly abnormal,” Singhal told San José Spotlight. “I worried constantly about whether I would receive the next year’s funds for my existing grant, and how I would support my students and their thesis projects if the grant were rescinded.”
In the long term, Singhal said Silicon Valley could see a decrease in people who can contribute to the scientific workforce.
“Our training of the next generation of scientists profoundly impacts the future questions the scientific community will address and the life-changing solutions it can deliver,” she said.
Without NSF’s investments, the U.S. could lag behind in being a global leader in technology, manufacturing and more, forfeiting its role to China, according to the letter.
“For so long the U.S. has been known as the destination for research, development and finding solutions to the great problems we face,” a Democrat spokesperson for the House Science, Space and Technology Committee told San José Spotlight. “The Trump administration is ruining that reputation and other countries will step in when we cannot, like China. We’re already seeing scientists get offers to leave the U.S. and do their research elsewhere.”
The union estimates it has lost about a third of its workforce, or at least 400 people, Soriano said. He added NSF is already a lean organization, and it’s been difficult to cope with the exodus of employees. If Congress goes through with slashing the budget in half, carrying out NSF’s mission will be challenging, he said.
“The union doesn’t want waste, fraud and abuse. Actually, I think I said we’re very good at preventing it, managing it, ending it,” Soriano said. “That’s why we feel sad. We are mad because we love the work we do. We work hard. We care about serving our fellow Americans. It is heartbreaking.”
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.
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