NEWS03 November 2026The US National Science Foundation is a major funder of economics and archaeology research but in 2026 awarded no new grants in those disciplines.ByDan Garisto0Dan GaristoDan Garisto is a freelance reporter in Syracuse, New York.View author publicationsSearch author on: PubMed Google ScholarView saved researchThe future of US archaeology is cloudy after the collapse of the main federal funding source for social sciences.Credit: Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald/GettyAfter 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 initiativeThe 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.Compared with other disciplines, the social sciences are unusually reliant on the NSF. Until late September, the NSF’s social, behavioural and economic sciences (SBE) directorate advertised that it “provides 63% of the funding for all academic work in social and psychological sciences in the US”. That statement has since vanished from the NSF website, and the White House has stated that it wants to eliminate the directorate altogether.The SBE’s potential dissolution creates uncertainty for entire disciplines. It throws into question projects that the SBE has long supported, such as decades-long surveys on US political attitudes and behaviours. Such surveys are “facing an existential crisis right now”, says Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.Without an intervention, “these projects that NSF has funded for a long time will just wither away and die”, says Mark Solovey, a historian at the University of Toronto in Canada, who wrote Social Science for What?, a 2020 book on the history of social science at the agency.In response to Nature's request for comment, the NSF said that White House budget request for fiscal year 2027 “does not include continued funding for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate” and said the directorate has not been shut down. The agency also said that as part of planning to implement President Trump's agenda, “NSF regularly evaluates its portfolio of funding opportunities to ensure alignment with agency priorities.”Social science shutdownThe White House has characterized the SBE’s portfolio as “woke” and, in an April budget proposal, said it would eliminate the directorate altogether. Congress has not yet weighed in on the directorate’s fate — but the administration of US President Donald Trump has pressed ahead with cuts to the SBE’s spending all the same.The SBE’s total spending on new grants fell from an average of US$247 million per fiscal year during 2021–24 to $94 million in 2026. The NSF has allowed the SBE to award new grants only in White House-approved areas, such as artificial intelligence and cognitive science, according to reporting in Science. The SBE now has fewer than a dozen staff members, down from around 50 at the start of Trump’s current term, which began in 2025, and it has no active calls for funding or review panels.Surveys under threatThe largest projects funded by the SBE are the ‘big three’ researcher-run surveys, which have been ongoing for decades: the American National Election Studies (ANES), which tracks trends in political engagement and attitudes; the General Social Survey (GSS), a biennial study of the American public’s behaviours, opinions and experiences; and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which collects economic data.White House rolls out AI funding — and signals a new era for US scienceThese data sets are “a really critical shared public good”, says Pamela Herd, a sociologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a co-principal investigator on the SBE grant for the GSS. The surveys are also expensive to maintain, in part because they still incorporate face-to-face interviews. Each survey requires several million dollars per year — a funding level out of reach for social-science philanthropy.doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-03540-ySubjectsArchaeologyGovernmentEconomicsPoliticsSocial sciencesLatest on:ArchaeologyGovernmentEconomicsJobs Distinguished Professors, Young Faculty, Postdoctoral ResearchersJob applicants with a solid Biology, Biology & Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, Brain–Computer Interface background and systematic research training100, Science Avenue, School of Life Sciences, Zhengzhou, ChinaSchool of Life Sciences Zhengzhou UniversityPostdoctoral researchers and Junior group leadersJunior group leader positions (4 positions) and Postdoctoral Researcher positions (4) in the fields of Science, Medicine and TechnologyTurku (Kaupunki), Varsinais-Suomi (FI)University of Turku