National Science Foundation director Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned on 24 April, the day after staff learned the White House plans to chop NSF’s $9 billion budget to about $4 billion and lay off half of its 1,700 employees. His departure, announced in a brief statement on NSF’s website, follows the mass-layoff scenario R&D World first flagged on 10 April.
“I believe I have done all I can to advance the critical mission of the agency and feel that it is time for me to pass the baton to new leadership,” Director Sethuraman Panchanathan wrote. In his departing statement, he emphasized that “NSF is an extremely important investment to make U.S. scientific dominance a reality. We must not lose our competitive edge.”
His exit comes as a newly minted White House unit moves aggressively to shrink the agency’s footprint. President Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in January through Executive Order 14158. Since 16 April, DOGE’s “workforce-optimization” team at NSF has frozen every new grant award, launched line-by-line reviews of more than 200 active projects that mention diversity or misinformation, and started drafting a formal reduction-in-force plan to comply with the White House’s February cost-efficiency order that demands a 55% budget rollback and firing of about 50% of NSF’s 1,700 employees.
Inside NSF, staff say grant making has ground to a halt. All new awards stopped on 16 April after DOGE intervened, sending hundreds of already-approved proposals back for “mitigation work,” and the flagship Graduate Research Fellowship Program was sliced to 1,000 slots, about half its normal size.
The impact extends beyond just new grants. A special “efficiency” task force has been reviewing over 200 active NSF grants with DEI-related terms for potential termination. Projects focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion or combating misinformation have been specifically singled out and defunded.
Scientists across the country describe the situation as “chaos” with thousands of grant-dependent jobs at universities at risk. Even some Republican lawmakers have voiced concern that such cuts would “cripple America’s ability to sustain its technical workforce“.
R&D World recently projected that China is on track to outspend the U.S. in terms of R&D by more than 30% by 2030 (PPP-adjusted).
Federal R&D already sits at its lowest level in six decades. That comes to 0.63% of GDP in 2022 (0.62% est. for 2023) versus the 1964 peak of 1.86%, according to NSF figures. During the same interval the federal share of total domestic R&D collapsed from 67% to 18%, while business financing rose from 31% to 75%.
For perspective, at the height of the Apollo programme the federal government channelled 4.4% of its entire FY 1966 budget to NASA. That line item was $5.93 billion then, roughly $59 billion in 2025 dollars (CPI-U 319.8 vs 32.4). The full Apollo effort ran to $25.8 billion between 1960-73. That equates to about $218 billion in 2025 dollars using the same consumer-price series. At the White House’s proposed level of $4 billion, NSF would spend in a year what Apollo burned through in a little over 90 days, and it would take roughly 55 years of a downsized NSF to equal Apollo’s total bill. In raw budget share the post-cut NSF would sit at 0.014 % of GDP, forty times smaller than NASA’s peak Apollo allocation.
