# National Science Foundation **Status: stub — expand.** The **National Science Foundation (NSF)** is the independent federal agency created by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 to support basic research and education across every field of science and engineering except medicine, which is [[NIH]]'s domain. It is governed by a Director and the 24-member National Science Board, and it does almost none of its own research: nearly all of its budget goes out as competitive grants and cooperative agreements to universities, colleges, and research institutions, awarded through the merit-review panel process that is the agency's signature contribution to American science administration. That structure made NSF one of the two agencies at the center of the 2025–26 grant-termination record. Reporting through 2025 put roughly 1,300–1,750 NSF awards frozen or terminated, with unspent balances commonly cited between $0.7 billion and $1.4 billion depending on how the tracker counts freezes against formal terminations. Because NSF money is discretionary and competitively awarded rather than distributed by statutory formula, each award is a decision — and a decision can be revisited, which is precisely the vulnerability the [[Federal Grant Lifecycle]] map traces at stage 8. No current officeholders are named here pending verification. ## See also - [[Federal Grant Lifecycle]] — the ASCII map of how NSF money is awarded and stopped - [[NIH]] · [[Indirect Cost Rate]] · [[Uniform Guidance]] - [[Federal Agencies Hub]]