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US social sciences face existential crisis after NSF cuts
Dan Garisto is a freelance reporter in Syracuse, New York.
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The future of US archaeology is cloudy after the collapse of the main federal funding source for social sciences.Credit: Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald/Getty
After a long day excavating a prehistoric campsite in eastern Wyoming, Todd Surovell would lie down in a tent and imagine a former era. “I would think about what it would sound like to hear a mammoth walk by, to put yourself in that world,” he says. “How would you behave? What would your social network look like?”
Now, Surovell, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, lies awake for a different reason. The funding source that enabled much of his research so far, and that of generations of US archaeologists, economists and other social scientists, is being dismantled.
NSF plans cuts to core science programmes to fund White House initiative
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has long provided the bulk of US research funding for the social sciences. “For a lot of economists, it’s really the NSF or nothing,” says Michael Woodford, an economist at Columbia University in New York City, who won a share of the 2026 Nobel prize in economic science for his contributions to fiscal-stability theories.
But that support has plummeted over the past two years. In the 2026 fiscal year, which ended 30 September, the agency funded fewer than 100 new social-science grants, compared with a historical average of roughly 850 per year, according to data from Grant Witness, a non-profit organization tracking US research funding, and from the NSF.
The agency awarded no new grants at all in dozens of programme areas, including archaeology and economics — although it proudly announced in October that the number of Nobel-winning economists who have had NSF support now stands at 75. Woodford, who is laureate number 75, started his career with an NSF graduate research fellowship and went on to receive ten more awards from the agency.
The US National Science Foundation has zeroed out the number of new grants in some programme areas of the social sciences and sharply cut others.