Stories the budget tells

NSF is almost entirely discretionary research funding, and the FY2027 request proposes the sharpest reduction in its modern history — represented here exactly as the source states.

The request also restructures directorates: it consolidates STEM Education (EDU) into R&RA and proposes eliminating the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences directorate. Those are the source's own figures, shown neutrally.

NSF moves the great majority of its money out the door as grants and cooperative agreements to thousands of universities and research institutions. It has earned a clean audit opinion every year for nearly three decades.

The agency has posted a decades-long streak of clean opinions, with no material weaknesses or significant deficiencies in the latest report. Over the same window the Department of Defense — the largest federal department — has never earned one.

Two very different organizations, opposite outcomes. The difference is whether financial data traces, reliably, from a recorded transaction back to its source — the same discipline every figure on this monitor practices. The full record is on the audit page.

The topline is authority; this is execution. In FY… NSF obligated … across the whole agency (USAspending toptier 049) — and the instrument mix is the story.

Unlike the Department of War, NSF publishes award detail without a 90-day OPSEC delay, so the feed trails only by normal USAspending reporting lag. Both the grant and contract tables are on the spending page.

NSF budget authority grew steadily for decades — and OMB's Historical Tables carry the whole arc back to FY1976.

The one-time FY2009 spike is the Recovery Act; the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 authorized a steep ramp that appropriations only partly followed. The series is nominal: OMB's Table 5.2 publishes no constant-dollar basis, and we do not synthesize one.

See the full arc on the history page.