Funding Cuts Hit STEM Career Pipelines

Federal funding cuts are hitting STEM engagement programs across the career pipeline, from K-12 to postdocs and early-career faculty. Almost half of NSF’s mass grant cancellations in April were in the Directorate for STEM Education and dozens of the agency’s most prestigious early-career faculty grants were terminated, according to an agency list reviewed by FYI. Meanwhile, the president’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 proposes cutting STEM engagement programs at a variety of agencies, including a $4.7 billion reduction in funding for general research and education and broadening participation efforts at NSF.

According to a list provided by NSF’s union representative, between April 18 and April 25, NSF canceled more than 1,000 active research grants; this number includes collaborative grants awarded to multiple institutions. Many of these were related to diversity, equity, and inclusion or misinformation, and the agency’s announcement stated that the grants no longer “effectuate” agency priorities. NSF has since stopped disbursing grant funds, including for new grants and yearly allotments for current grants, and begun screening proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities,” Nature reported.

The president’s budget request released today proposes further cuts to “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science” as well as NSF’s “broadening participation” efforts.

The elimination of grants deemed to be related to DEI has disproportionately affected grants for STEM education, with 213 cancellations in the Division of Research on Learning, which supports research on STEM learning and teaching in K-12 schools and other centers for STEM education, such as museums. The canceled grants pursued a range of strategies to engage with new audiences in STEM, such as implementing “inclusive” curricula, developing after-school programs, and shaping students’ professional identity formation. Many focus on women and Black and Latinx learners; NSF’s recent announcement states that it will only fund activities to reach individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM “as part of broad engagement activities” that are “open and available to all Americans.”

The Division of Undergraduate Education had 63 grants canceled, many of which similarly focus on researching or developing racially equitable learning environments. Other grant terminations are less clearly connected to the agency’s new approach to DEI, such as a grant for an experiential learning program to expose undergraduates to the semiconductor industry, which references “systematically embedding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” into its activities “from student recruitment, educational program design, to course design.”

NSF also funds summer research experiences for undergraduates through the REU program, which provides students with stipends and, in some cases, assistance with housing, meals, and travel. Each REU site is located at a university and supports eight to ten students per year from other institutions. Science reported in February that many REU sites seeking renewals for their expiring three-year grants were told that this summer’s program had been canceled due to a lack of funding. On social media, researchers reported that NSF awarded 52 REU grants in 2025, compared to around 200 every year since 2015.

NSF additionally terminated 15 active grants for REU sites in April. Andrew Rice, the principal investigator for the REU site at Portland State University’s Center for Climate and Aerosol Research, received a termination notice on April 25 informing him that the program would not receive the three-year, $500,000 grant that the agency originally agreed to fund. The termination has put an end, at least for this year, to the university’s 10-year-old program.

Rice has notified this year’s accepted students that the program has been canceled, as they no longer have the money to support students’ stipends and housing, he said. “My experience is, if you want to really be very inclusive and allow everybody to do it, you do need to pay students to do that work,” he added.

Rice noted that all REUs are open to all U.S. undergraduate students. Most of Portland State’s REU participants come from two-year community colleges or four-year institutions that have fewer resources to support undergraduate research, and many of the participants have never conducted research before, he said.

The program gives these students exposure to the one-on-one mentorship of graduate programs, Rice said. “It really starts them on the right path,” he added. “And for me, that’s how I got started… I knocked on a bunch of doors until someone took me in, and… that’s where I got hooked. That first research experience, I was like, ‘This is really cool. Do they pay people to do this?’”

The grant terminations also had a significant effect on researchers at the graduate level and beyond, with 51 grant cancellations in the Division of Graduate Education, including 12 postdoctoral fellowships. One Bluesky user shared that his postdoctoral offer was rescinded following the termination of its underlying grant, while another said his wife is no longer receiving a salary after her grant was terminated. NSF also awarded 1,000 graduate research fellowships this year, compared to more than 2,000 every year since 2021. Additionally, 65 CAREER grants, NSF’s most prestigious grants for early-career researchers, have been canceled.

STEM education cuts at other agencies

The president’s budget request proposes eliminating NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement, stating that “NASA will inspire the next generation of explorers through exciting, ambitious space missions, not through subsidizing woke STEM programming and research that prioritizes some groups of students over others and have had minimal impact on the aerospace workforce.”

So far, it is unclear how many STEM engagement grants have been canceled. NASA said in March that it canceled $420 million in “unneeded contracts.” The Department of Government Efficiency database and the NASA Grants database include canceled grants worth over $600,000 total for workshops, conferences, and recruitment for professional societies, including the National Association of Black Physicists and the Society of Women Engineers.

The agency has also canceled two grants under its Science Activation program for community engagement, including the Native Earth | Native Sky project, a five-year grant in its final year that worked to develop and implement culturally relevant STEM curricula for Native American middle school students.

“It’s unclear to me why something like this would be cut. Because what we’re really trying to do from a grand, 40,000-foot view is to get more young students, particularly middle schoolers, interested in all STEM fields,” said Kat Gardner-Vandy, the principal investigator for Native Earth | Native Sky. “So to me, it means the result is fewer students who see themselves as scientists and who see themselves as wanting to grow up and perhaps go into these fields. And if we don’t have that workforce, the United States is really going to fall pretty far behind the rest of the world in terms of STEM.”

Furthermore, NASA appears poised to cancel the Here to Observe program that paired undergraduates from underrepresented groups and at smaller research universities with scientists running NASA missions, Science reported.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the president’s 2026 budget request calls for more than a billion dollars in cuts to NOAA, specifically calling out “educational grant programs [that] have consistently funded efforts to radicalize students against markets and spread environmental alarm.” This may refer to the agency’s Sea Grant program, which allocates millions of dollars a year for education and research at 34 colleges and universities. The agency already moved to cancel Maine’s Sea Grant program, possibly at Trump’s behest after he and the governor of Maine had a public argument, but agreed to “renegotiate” the $4.5 million grant less than a week later.