A high-variance budget request for NSF

The National Science Foundation’s 2027 budget request makes for some high variance reading. Two things that have me excited are the proposal for an NSF metascience unit to “champion agency-wide efforts to explore non-traditional R&D funding mechanisms and drive evidence-based optimizations to the R&D

portfolio” and the request for $50mn to the NSF Tech Labs (a number I hope grows). A metascience unit at the NSF is the kind of thing metascience geeks have dreamt of for many years. But two things that have me the opposite of excited are the proposal to eliminate the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate and cut overall funding to the NSF by a 55%. Fortunately, appropriations are set by Congress, and last year they largely ignored the proposal for a similar cut (this tweet by IFP’s Matt Esche provides a lot of useful context for how to interpret this proposal). My hope is that we land in a world where we avoid the bad parts of the proposal and retain the good bits.