On April 3, Russell T. Vought, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, submitted to Congress President Trump’s proposed budget of the US Government for fiscal year 2027, writing that “[u]nder President Trump’s bold leadership, every tool in the executive fiscal toolbox has been utilized to achieve real savings.” Among the proposals in the budget, which “builds on the President’s vision by continuing to constrain non-defense spending and reform the Federal Government,” is a 54.7 percent reduction in the money allotted to the National Science Foundation (NSF): from $8.8 billion to $4 billion.
That same day, the NSF submitted its own budget request to Congress for just shy of $4.9 billion, noting in the opening sentence that it “reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment.” One consequence is the elimination of one of the NSF’s eight so-called directorates: the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE).
The move is not all that surprising. A year ago, Heather Mac Donald wrote about the 2026 proposed budget that while “cuts to the hard-science directorates were arguably too sweeping,” those to SBE were “too timid.” Certainly it’s a good bet that most Americans would prefer that, if their tax dollars must go to a scientific agency at all, they be earmarked for the Directorate for Engineering or the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships rather than for the division of the NSF responsible for such fields as cultural anthropology, dynamic language infrastructure, and the science of organizations.
In any case, many areas of inquiry in what are broadly—indeed, likely too broadly—referred to as the social sciences do have real problems. The so-called replication or reproducibility crisis has done grave damage to the reputation of psychology. No discipline of reasonably long standing has been more of a punching bag than sociology (the subject of the first event in a series at AEI on the state of the academic disciplines). And the kudzu of diversity, equity, and inclusion keeps spreading, to the detriment of scholarship from the fuzziest humanities to the supposedly hardest sciences, very much including the social sciences, which have arguably been especially culpable.
The elimination of SBE does not mean that no social sciences will be funded in the coming year: To quote the NSF’s budget request, “Continuing grants that align with Administration priorities, such as in behavioral and cognitive science, … will be transferred to other parts of the agency.” But what about non-continuing grants?
As I have said, for the current government to show disdain for the social sciences is not surprising. But taken too far, it will be a mistake. To be sure, I have personal reasons for saying this: A graduate fellowship from the NSF generously funded my Ph.D. in linguistics, and I have enjoyed and taken seriously the privilege of being a reviewer for NSF proposals. The larger issue, though, is that, for all the junk that passes as scholarship these days and that the NSF has until recently funded, there remain outstanding researchers across the social scientific spectrum. In a time of crisis, it is especially important that the highest quality work be rewarded, and publicly so—if not by the NSF, then by some other Washington-based agency.
I believe in private philanthropy. At the same time, I also believe strongly that the government should fund the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. Not necessarily to the tune of billions of dollars and definitely not indiscriminately. But, as scientists are now regularly pointing out, it would be suicidal for our country to risk ceding our dominance in science to, say, China. Meanwhile, the rise of artificial intelligence should be making the humanities ever more important, lest we fail to recognize and value our uniquely human characteristics, and the arts bring (or at least should bring) beauty to our lives.
And the social sciences? To err is human—and that’s why we need scholars who are willing and able to investigate (quasi-)scientifically what happens when our social selves do what we always do, namely, fail to perform optimally. How do languages change? What are the economic consequences of our inability to make purely rational decisions? Why do people remain single if, as my sociologist colleague Brad Wilcox argues, marriage “saves civilization”?
Over in England, Eric Kaufmann’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, launched in 2024, offers a model for how to move forward in a world where “the social sciences have been distorted by excessive normative barriers to publication as well as by political prejudice.” For all its efforts to clean the Augean stables, our government would do well to recognize that its own political prejudice has the potential to hurt America rather than help.