In the summer of 1945, four days after Japan’s official surrender and a few weeks into the Atomic Age, President Harry Truman began floating the idea of an agency guided by “the free intelligence of the scientist” that would fund investigations into how the world works. As of 2024, the agency that Truman had envisioned, the National Science Foundation, supplied about one in every 10 federal research dollars going to U.S. universities. Its Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences division funds roughly 63 percent of academic research in the psychological and social sciences, according to the NSF.The Trump administration now seems determined to shrink the NSF—and to quash its ability to fund social sciences. The Trump administration has proposed cutting the agency’s budget in half and eliminating the SBE division altogether in the next fiscal year. Congress would need to approve those changes, and it may not: Last year, when President Trump also requested drastic cuts to the NSF, Congress rejected them and warned the White House against cutting federal research dollars for any one division by more than 5 percent. But already, change has come. On April 24, Trump fired all 22 members of the NSF’s board, which must approve any major changes at the agency. They have not been replaced. (The NSF did not respond to requests for comment.)The outlook is especially grim for social sciences. In response to a detailed list of questions, the White House spokesperson Kush Desai told me in an email that the administration “is committed to cementing America’s dominance in cutting-edge technologies of the future—innovation that is being driven by advancements in hard sciences, not in ideologically-driven ‘social sciences.’” In an all-staff meeting last month, a group of NSF leaders said that the SBE division would shut down. According to two current agency employees (who, like other government employees I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of retribution), the leaders also announced at the meeting that experts who review grant proposals related to the social sciences would be reassigned to different departments within the agency. Some staff have already moved, the two employees said.Staff at the NSF learned last month, too, that the SBE division’s research budget for the current fiscal year is two-thirds smaller than last year’s, several current employees told me—and last year, funding was already at historic lows. Even that money seems not to have been passed on to researchers. By late May in a normal year, the NSF would give out about 250 social-science awards. This year, it has distributed five, according to Grant Witness, an effort that tracks federal research spending.Social scientists have been alarmed about the National Science Foundation for months. Beginning last year, the agency ended its support for doctoral-dissertation research in archaeology, linguistics, geography, and anthropology. That funding had been a lifeline in some fields. “Now it’s much less clear how independent research by early-career anthropologists can be supported,” a current NSF employee told me. Last month, 160 behavioral and cognitive scientists attended a Zoom meeting to discuss how they might save the SBE division. (Among the academics whose fields are under threat, behavioral and cognitive researchers may have the least reason to worry: Trump’s budget request calls for sparing some funding for this type of research, possibly because of its utility in developing AI.) National organizations that represent NSF-funded academics communicated the “devastating implications” of Trump’s proposed changes to the agency’s board—which soon would cease to exist. “This is their only place in the federal government to get support,” Antoinette WinklerPrins, a geographer and senior official at the SBE division until last April, told me. “If that money is gone, that is just devastating to those sciences.”If the National Science Foundation does stop funding social scientists, experts told me, our 5,000-foot-view of American life will get foggier. The NSF, through the SBE division, is the primary funder of the “big three” social-science surveys, which have enabled the work of several generations of academics, economists, and policy wonks. The surveys are run out of university centers, but the agency helps offset the massive cost of executing them, including by funding database upkeep, compensation for thousands of participants, and the surveys’ ground game. (All three still conduct face-to-face interviews.) At times, support for these surveys has accounted for roughly one-sixth of the NSF’s entire social-science budget; according to two NSF employees I spoke with, there has been no indication that the surveys would be insulated from larger cuts.One of these projects is the world’s longest-running survey of families, which allows for the study of economic mobility and the long-term effects of child poverty; at least nine federal agencies rely on its data. Another is the General Social Survey, which asks about virtually every aspect of domestic life, including respondents’ pets, cultural values, credit history, and general satisfaction. Without federal money supporting this data collection and the SBE division’s other research, the American Political Science Association said in a statement last month, academics’ ability to understand shifts in American attitudes would “undoubtedly weaken.” The last survey is the American National Election Studies database, which has tracked American voting behavior since 1948. In the 1990s, it showed a growing mistrust of government and animosity between parties, which helped birth the study of political polarization. (Polarization is one of many “DEI” words on a list that Senator Ted Cruz’s office compiled last year to flag NSF proposals for extra scrutiny, two former agency employees told me.)The NSF also has already effectively blocked grant making in at least one area that the foundation has historically supported: science and technology studies, an interdisciplinary field that examines issues in how research is done and the societal ramifications of new technologies. The field tends to engage with thorny social and political questions using theoretical frameworks such as feminism and structural inequality—both words on Cruz’s DEI list. Usually, outside advisers review grant proposals at an annual spring meeting, but those advisers have been told that this year’s meeting for science and technology studies has been canceled, according to an email from NSF leadership that I reviewed and that contains no explanation for the decision. “There’s no indication another meeting will be held,” Martha Kenney, one of the field’s reviewers, told me. “That was the thing that was the most alarming.” Without that meeting, grants in the field seem to have no pathway for being funded.The social sciences can get a bum rap for lacking rigor, and for being frivolous. Accurately measuring emotions and attitudes is notoriously difficult, and many studies in these fields cannot be reliably replicated. Accordingly, debates have raged for decades about whether the federal government has any business funding such squishy lines of inquiry. The Truman White House initially was in favor of the NSF funding the social sciences, but backed down after conservatives objected. In 1975, William Proxmire, a Democratic senator with a zeal for accounting, gave out his inaugural Golden Fleece award—recognizing the most useless government-supported research—to the NSF for funding a study on why people fall in love. Several years later, President Ronald Reagan proposed cutting social-science funding at the agency by 75 percent.But Reagan’s position softened. Jolted by the proposed cuts, social scientists made the case to Congress that understanding how society functions is good for the economy (which was then in a recession). Lobbyists used social-science research to advance anti-tax policies. Ultimately, government funding for social sciences doubled during the Reagan years.Some analysts at conservative think tanks are making similar arguments in favor of the social sciences today, despite a general furor among Republicans for mocking ridiculous-sounding research. Michael Strain, the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote on X that “if you care about giving businesses and policymakers the information they need to understand the world,” you should care about the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences division staying. Joshua Katz, a senior fellow at the institute who has helped review NSF grant proposals in linguistics, thinks the federal government should continue to fund good social-science research even if it lacks immediate practical benefits. “There are actually quite a lot of sociologists I like, which is not the sort of thing that you would perhaps expect to hear from somebody like me,” Katz, who has critiqued “hyper-woke” excesses in academia, told me. “A civilized society,” in his view, should earmark at least some money to understanding the human past through fields such as archaeology and anthropology.Plenty of NSF-funded social science has turned out to have concrete benefits. In the 1990s, NSF funded economics research that was then used to create a far more efficient national kidney-donor-matching system. U.S. families now save more for retirement because an NSF-funded study by a tax researcher discovered the right tactics to nudge them. Even the work of the much-ridiculed love researchers has remained relevant. Twenty years after being awarded the Golden Fleece, one came up with the idea of emotional contagion, a theory for how exposure to others’ feelings influences our own. (They never received NSF funding again; one of the researchers credits the loss of her dog, marriage, car, and shot at an early retirement to the Fleece.) That concept has since been used to study the impact of social media on mental health—something that the Trump administration has said requires urgent attention.A coalition of about 40 organizations representing hard-science disciplines, led by the Computing Research Association, recently told Congress, too, that losing the SBE division could lead to “long-lasting, potentially permanent” damage to national research as a whole. The stickiest barriers to progress in areas that the administration wants to prioritize—AI, biotechnology—are “fundamentally human,” the organizations argued. The SBE division often funds tacking a social scientist onto interdisciplinary research projects, Sara Kiesler, a former SBE-division head whose own research has focused on how the adoption of email changed the workplace, told me. And because other NSF divisions would still need to understand how humans interact with technical systems, they might essentially create their own in-house SBE divisions anyway. Whether this administration recognizes it or not, rigorously studying how our society works is possible, and helpful.