NSF Funding Freeze Hits Elite Universities

According to Nature, an internal document obtained by Nature shows that, as of April 9, the Office of Award Management (OAM) at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)—the office responsible for finalizing grants and managing their finances—had imposed restrictions on new funding to Duke University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University. A note attached to these institutions in the NSF database stated: “Future Awards to Organization on Hold.” Since then, the NSF has provided little new funding to these universities.

An internal NSF list obtained by Nature indicates that the OAM has stalled 33 research proposals submitted by researchers from the four universities or their collaborators. While the average NSF research grant takes about 10 days for the OAM to finalize, proposals involving researchers from Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale have remained pending for an average of 91 days.

Approximately 85% of the delayed proposals are in mathematics, the physical sciences, and engineering. Several of them focus on quantum information science, an area that the Trump administration has said it intends to prioritize.

According to the report, in 2024, these four universities received a combined total of 218 new NSF grants. However, in the current fiscal year, they have received only 13 new grants, with no new awards made to scientists at Duke or Harvard since April 9.

Meanwhile, last month, the NSF suspended 18 research grants awarded to the University of California, Berkeley.

However, according to Nature’s latest update, on May 28, the NSF’s OAM removed the “Future Awards to Organization on Hold” designation from its database for Duke, Harvard, and Yale. Agency staff members who spoke with Nature also said that a small number of grants for researchers at Harvard and Duke have since been released.

Notably, in May, sources familiar with the matter at Harvard University revealed that Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) could lay off as many as one-quarter of its staff this summer as part of a sweeping administrative restructuring. The plan would consolidate departments, centers, and institutes into shared administrative “clusters.”

The restructuring is intended to help address the FAS’s projected budget deficit of $365 million. However, it would also represent one of the most significant staff reorganizations in the school’s recent history, with layoffs expected to have a substantial impact on departmental administrators—staff members responsible for managing finances, human resources, and personnel matters within individual FAS units.