The National Science Foundation is seeking to hire after last year’s cuts went too far.
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The National Science Foundation’s chief management officer says the agency, a major federal research funder, is seeking approval to hire more employees after the Trump administration’s cuts last year left it without enough staffing.
Micah Cheatham also told the National Science Board, which approves NSF policies, at Wednesday’s board meeting that the agency is trying to “consolidate” solicitations for grant awards to half, or less, of the usual amount of these funding opportunities—raising concerns that fewer researchers will receive funding. Cheatham said this move would reduce workload, but also help applicants.
“The fewer solicitations you have, the less time grant applicants have to figure out which of our pigeonholes they fit into,” he said.
Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, a board member and the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s vice chancellor for research, expressed concern that fewer solicitations will lessen junior faculty’s ability to receive awards that jump-start their careers. She also said the agency’s practice of frontloading the funding of previously multiyear grants further reduces how many researchers receive grants in a year.
To this, Brian Stone—who is essentially the NSF’s acting director while that position remains vacant—replied that solicitations will be “broader.”
“In the past, a solicitation might have been for an individual program, which means it’s attached to an individual program officer and a specific dollar amount,” Stone said. Now, instead of going to one program officer’s area, he said the NSF will use technology to better “route” applications to wherever within the agency they can best be reviewed.
“People have told us that their first challenge is figuring out: Where do I actually send this?” Stone said. “Like, who’s the [program officer] that’s going to take in my particular piece of research?”
As for the staffing issues, Cheatham said, “We are at about 1,300 on rolls, which is a 35 percent reduction from where we were this time last year, which is too low.” He didn’t say how many employees he wants to hire, and an agency spokesperson didn’t provide a figure Wednesday.
Cheatham said “almost all” of the agency’s staffing cuts “came through voluntary actions.” The NSF had three rounds of the deferred resignation program, through which employees typically resigned or retired as of Sept. 30, 2025, he said.
The second-largest source of cuts was to the agency’s “temporary workforce,” he said, adding that the agency retained employees “contributing to these sort of core fundamental priorities, primarily AI and quantum.” He informed the board about a new management structure that prioritizes those two areas.
Cheatham also said layoffs within the “senior executive cadre” were reversed by the courts, but “they did help people to make the decision to participate in the deferred resignation program, or otherwise transfer out.”
He said the NSF had, at one point, one executive for every 17 nonexecutives, which was “extreme.” The ratio at other science agencies was a minimum of one to 30, he said, and the NSF is now at a one-to-23 ratio.
“While most employees at this time last year had five layers of management between the head of the agency and themselves, now today most employees just have three layers, and we aim to maintain that sort of much flatter organization,” he said.
Wednesday’s employment figures came as the NSF continues to lack a director. Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump appointed in his first term, resigned in April after layoffs and Department of Government Efficiency–involved grant terminations had already started.
Not long after Panchanathan’s exit, Trump proposed cutting roughly $5.2 billion from the NSF, or 57 percent of its budget, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s appropriations tracker. But Congress only cut the NSF’s budget by $310 million for fiscal year 2026.
Last week, the White House confirmed that Trump is nominating Jim O’Neill as the NSF’s next director. O’Neill was dismissed earlier this month from leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a position he had only held since late August.