NSF Construction Budget Defunded as Trump Challenges ‘Emergency’ Spending
Crews at McMurdo Station in Antarctica work to repair the ice pier in the winter of 2015 after cracks appeared.
Bill Henriksen / USAP
The National Science Foundation’s budget for major construction projects is set to be eliminated for fiscal year 2025 after President Donald Trump canceled some of the “emergency” funds appropriated by Congress last month. Top Senate appropriators argue the action is illegal and puts at risk all $12.4 billion of the emergency funding allocated across agencies including NASA.
If Trump’s decision stands, it is unclear if NSF would be able to transfer money from other accounts to cover the $234 million shortfall in its Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account. This hole in the agency’s budget represents a 2.6% cut to its fiscal year 2024 topline of $9 billion.
Congress funded the MREFC account using emergency funding that was agreed to in a 2023 bipartisan side deal that allowed legislators to exceed spending caps set in law. Appropriators used the same funding method for MREFC in the final spending legislation for fiscal year 2025, enacted last month, which largely carries forward spending levels from the prior year.
Trump wrote to Congress last week declaring that the MREFC funding and 10 other accounts were “improperly designated by Congress as emergency” in the 2023 side deal. “I do not concur that the added spending is truly for emergency needs,” he added.
Appropriators on both sides of the aisle objected to Trump’s move as an encroachment on their spending power. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Patty Murray (D-WA), who lead the Senate Appropriations Committee, sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget stating that the language of the appropriations legislation “has always been interpreted to give the president a binary choice: He must concur with all or none of Congress’s emergency designations.”
Murray highlighted in a press release how the decision jeopardizes the MREFC funding as well as $100 million for procurement and construction projects at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Both Collins and Murray said the availability of all the emergency funding could now be at risk, including the $9 billion that Trump approved, which includes $250 million of NASA’s construction and environmental compliance budget and $450 million for its human exploration budget.
Current MREFC projects
The MREFC account funds major projects that cost over $100 million to construct as well as “mid-scale” research infrastructure that costs between $20 million and $100 million to construct. The $234 million appropriated by Congress for the account in fiscal year 2025 already falls short of NSF’s requested amount of $300 million.
The agency requested $60 million for Antarctic infrastructure upgrades, such as building a new pier at the McMurdo research station to replace the ice pier where resupply vessels offload, which has failed three times in the last 12 years. “If the infrastructure that enables Antarctic science is not kept robust and efficient, [the U.S. Antarctic Program] is at risk of losing science capabilities year over year as facilities, utilities, equipment, and the vehicle fleet degrade,” the agency wrote in its budget request.
NSF also requested $154 million for the Leadership-Class Computing Facility in Texas, which will host an academic research supercomputer that will provide a hundredfold improvement for AI applications compared to NSF’s current leading computing system, according to the agency. NSF previously said that it expected the facility to begin operations in 2026.
NSF further requested $85 million to fund mid-scale infrastructure projects across all research disciplines funded by the agency. Projects recently funded in this category include a new weather radar system, Cosmic Microwave Background astronomy instrumentation, and a compact X-ray free electron laser facility.
Many other major projects have been waiting in the wings for MREFC funding. These include the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope, either of which would require a significant and sustained MREFC budget increase in order to move forward with NSF support — a possibility that now appears even more distant.
NSF declined to comment on how Trump’s decision might affect its infrastructure projects.
