"The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is planning to expropriate money from its core science programmes to fund an initiative from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Nature has learnt. The move would strain budgets that are already tight and force the agency to rescind funding for research proposals that are nearly finalized.

NSF staff members — who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation — and an internal NSF ledger seen by Nature suggest that the NSF plans to claw back around US$500 million that has already been distributed to grant-making divisions. That money would be withdrawn from three of the NSF’s eight main areas, or directorates: engineering; computer and information science and engineering; and mathematical and physical science.

To accommodate the expected funding withdrawal, programme officers, who handle grant proposals, at the three directorates are being required to pull back proposals that have already passed peer review and have been recommended for funding. More than 100 proposals have been affected; many of the researchers who submitted those proposals had already been informally notified of their awards, according to agency staff members.

The revocation of funds would add to the squeeze on the NSF. The US Congress trimmed the agency’s total funding for this year by roughly 3% from 2025 levels, to $8.75 billion, but internal budget numbers seen by Nature indicate that about $1 billion of that money never made it to the directorates."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02135-x

#USA #NSF #Science #Trump

"This #ocean observatory program
⚡is authorized, it’s funded, & for the admin🚨to shut it down w/o direction from Congress is supreme stupidity & a violation of the fund separation of powers in our CON."
-Sen Merkley

A group of Dem senators & one R, & two Dem House CMTEs, sent letters Mon to the #NSF asking it to reverse course on its plan🚨to dismantle a ocean monitoring NET, w HSE Reps going further & accusing the agency of acting illegally.

#Climate #Environment #USPol
https://apnews.com/article/ocean-observatories-initiative-trump-congress-9b306cb05ec3c824f5e034821add6ad2

#SciAM:
"
Trump administration takes aim at crucial ocean monitoring network

.. OOI has been collecting data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for the past decade
"
".. ships will be dispatched .. to remove the more than 900 deep-sea instruments .."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administration-takes-aim-at-crucial-ocean-monitoring-network/

2.6.2026

#AMOC #ClimateResearch #Klimaforschung #Klimawandel #NSF #Ocean #oceanography #OOI #Ozean #science #Sea #USA #Wissenschaft #Wissenschaftsfeindlichkeit

…The #Trump admin has repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80% in both 2025 & again in 2026. #Congress pushed back, restoring the
money.

To try to reduce costs, managers turned off some of the instruments & collected less data, acc/to a December 2025 presentation about the observatories at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit organization of scientists.

Still, the #NSF moved ahead to decommission the observatory network.

#ocean #climate

The station in the Irminger Sea has been key to understanding changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current [#AMOC], a global conveyor belt of water that some scientists are concerned may be weakening as a result of #GlobalWarming. A collapse of the current could have severe #weather effects.

#ClimateChange #Ocean #MarineLife #MarineEcosystems #NSF #ClimateCrisis #reasearch #science #Trump

Scientists have used data from the system to understand how the #ocean is absorbing #GreenhouseGases from the atmosphere, how changes in #OceanTemperature such as marine heat waves might affect #fisheries or signal bigger shifts in the #climate, & coastal #flooding along the East Coast.

#ClimateChange #MarineLife #MarineEcosystems #NSF #ClimateCrisis #Trump

The #Trump admin is dismantling a $368 million deep #ocean observation system put in place a decade ago to monitor #coastal #environments, #MarineEcosystems & powerful currents that affect the global #climate.

The National Science Foundation [#NSF] said it would send ships in June to begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, & an area between Greenland & Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.

#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis

🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨

#Trump Administration to Dismantle #OceanMonitoring System

The $368 million network of instruments collecting data in both the #Atlantic & #Pacific has been #critical to #climate & #ocean #research.

There’s no reason to do this other than to be destructive & evil.

#ClimateChange #MarineLife #MarineEcosystems #NSF #ClimateCrisis
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatories-initiative.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

#Trump ousts National #Science Board members

Members of the independent board that guides the National Science Foundation [#NSF] said they received a notice from the White House that their positions were being terminated.

Multiple #scientists who serve on an independent board established to guide the nation’s nearly $9 billion basic science funding agency were terminated from their positions Friday by Trump.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026/04/25/national-science-board-members-dismissed/

"Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01105-7

"For the second year in a row, US President Donald Trump has proposed significant cuts to the budgets of major US science agencies…[The plan] includes a ban on using federal funds for subscriptions and publishing fees for some academic journals…Some of the steepest cuts would be made to the National Science Foundation (#NSF) and the Environmental Protection Agency (#EPA): the budgets of both would fall more than 50% in 2027 compared to their current levels…The budget for the US National Institutes of Health [#NIH] would drop 13%…The budget would increase funding for…the military, which would receive US $1.5 trillion, a 44% increase."

#DefendResearch #Funding #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics

#NSF #NSFFunding #funding #FederalFunding #GrantFunding #science #ScienceFunding #AntiScience #AntiIntellectual #USPol

https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/113197090927589168

Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI

With the growing attention and investment in recent AI approaches such as large language models, the narrative that the larger the AI system the more valuable, powerful and interesting it is is increasingly seen as common sense. But what is this assumption based on, and how are we measuring value, power, and performance? And what are the collateral consequences of this race to ever-increasing scale? Here, we scrutinize the current scaling trends and trade-offs across multiple axes and refute two common assumptions underlying the 'bigger-is-better' AI paradigm: 1) that improved performance is a product of increased scale, and 2) that all interesting problems addressed by AI require large-scale models. Rather, we argue that this approach is not only fragile scientifically, but comes with undesirable consequences. First, it is not sustainable, as its compute demands increase faster than model performance, leading to unreasonable economic requirements and a disproportionate environmental footprint. Second, it implies focusing on certain problems at the expense of others, leaving aside important applications, e.g. health, education, or the climate. Finally, it exacerbates a concentration of power, which centralizes decision-making in the hands of a few actors while threatening to disempower others in the context of shaping both AI research and its applications throughout society.

I've heard through the grapevine that US federal grantmaking agencies like the #NSF (National Science Foundation) are also consolidating around generative AI. This trend is evident if you follow directorates like CISE (Computer and Information Science and Engineering). A friend told me there are several NSF programs that tacitly demand LLMs of some form be used in project proposals, even when doing so is not obviously appropriate. A friend of a friend, who is a university professor, has said "if you're not doing LLMs you're not doing machine learning".

This is an absolutely devastating mindset. While it might be true at a certain cynical, pragmatic level, it's clearly indefensible at an intellectual, scholarly, scientific, and research level. Willingly throwing away the diversity of your own discipline is bizarre, foolish, and dangerous.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ML