Urge Congress to reject damaging cuts and increase funding for psychological science at the National Science Foundation
NSF recently released its detailed budget for FY19. Although the budget serves primarily as a guide for Congressional funders, the budget requests indicate the priorities of the agencies and administration.
While the overall NSF budget request remains largely flat at $7.5 billion, the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate receives the largest proposed total cut (9.1%) of all directorates, seven times larger than cuts proposed to any other directorate. As a result, SBE programs would lose roughly 11% of their funding for grants and other research activities. The SBE Directorate currently provides funding for more than two-thirds (68%) of basic research funding in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences.
Members of Congress are currently deciding on allocations for the remainder of this fiscal year and next year. Damaging cuts to psychological research funding at a time of increased federal budgets are unnecessarily harmful to the field and hamstring scientific advancement moving forward. Refuting the proposed cuts to SBE funding, and demanding higher levels of SBE, and overall NSF, funding allocations in the upcoming bills protects the field both now and in the future.