(February 27, 2025)—Grants have been in the news lately, including grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Adults reading this in the US support NSF programs every year when we pay federal taxes. Most of us have paid around 44 cents a year for NSF programs, including just over one penny per year for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE, the part of the NSF that includes archaeology). (If you’re interested in where I got this estimate, please see the sources at the end of this post, all of which are nonpartisan.) Because our tax dollars support these grants, it’s natural to wonder: Who decides who gets them?
The short answer is, scientists all over the country, mostly on a volunteer basis. Those grants are hard to get, they’re not awarded lightly, and a bunch of highly qualified experts who generally dislike agreeing on anything have to agree a project is very highly deserving for it to get one. If someone tells you otherwise, they’re mistaken. Or they’re misleading you.
I’ve had the most experience with NSF grants; I’ve applied for them and sometimes received them, I’ve served as an outside reviewer for them, and I’ve been on a review panel a few times. People sometimes ask me how these things work, so I thought I’d share some of my experiences with grant reviewing and with some of the projects they fund.
How Funding Decisions Are Made
Every year, the NSF gets far more proposals than it can possibly fund. In 2024, for example, the SBE Directorate funded 19% of proposals it received. Each proposal is written to follow a set of detailed guidelines about what types of research that program can fund, how much money can be requested, and for what types of uses. Proposals are then submitted to a specific program (such as “archaeology”).
Most of the review of these proposals isn’t done by people working for the NSF. No one person (or handful of people) could possibly have enough expertise to fully evaluate every argument, to accurately appraise each proposed research method’s chances of producing useful data, or to assess whether each proposal author had referenced all of the specialist studies that applied to the new work they were proposing to do.
Instead, the NSF staff get help from outside experts—other scientists from institutions all over the country who have a history of publishing peer-reviewed research on the specific topics each proposal aims to investigate. These scientists have to show they have no conflicts of interest in the review process, like a proposal of their own in the running or a proposal from a former student of theirs to evaluate.
Each NSF program asks the independent reviewers they’ve identified as knowledgeable about a proposal to volunteer their time to read it and evaluate it according to a set of program-specific criteria. One important criterion is intellectual merit, or how much a project will advance scientific knowledge both within its own field of study and across multiple scientific fields. Another is a project’s broader impacts, or how it will benefit society (the 153 million or so taxpayers who’ve each contributed money). Reviewers also assess things like how original the research ideas are, how well planned the research is and how likely it is to succeed, and how qualified the research team is to do the work they propose.
I can attest that reading a proposal and writing a thorough review takes each of the independent reviewing scientists many hours of intense work and thought. We know we’re helping to decide the future of research in our fields, and we care deeply about it. The NSF doesn’t pay scientists for this. If we’re lucky our workplaces consider it part of our work, but many scientists do it for free.
Even with this expert feedback, it’s hard to compare very dissimilar proposals to each other and decide which are most deserving of funding. To address this, NSF programs also assemble a subset of the scientists who review proposals into a panel to rank proposals relative to one another. The panel members spend days reading many proposals and preparing reviews of each of them. There are too many proposals for anyone to read them all, so each person is assigned a group of them, and each is read by several panelists as well as the outside reviewers.
Panels meet for a few days of intense, exhausting discussions about the strengths, weaknesses, and relative merits of each proposal and finally rank them, knowing only the top few projects will be funded. Those discussions are hard. There are so many great proposals that some very, very good ones go unfunded every year. Most of us who apply have to keep revising and resubmitting our proposals for several years, working on them between each review to keep making our research better in response to the reviewers’ comments.
When I hear people say the National Science Foundation has been throwing away taxpayer dollars on silly projects, I think about that review process, and how much time my colleagues and I have spent on it.
When I look up the research produced by a project I suddenly see widely ridiculed as wasteful in mainstream media, I generally find that research has been grossly misrepresented. Try it yourself. Please. The future of science in our country depends on it. I include two examples at the end of this post.
Personal Experience: NSF’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program and Its Impacts
My favorite NSF program has long been Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU for short). This program is dedicated to getting undergraduate students involved in doing scientific research. One of the most common ways for undergrads to get their early experiences in research settings is to volunteer there until they acquire enough skills to get paid positions. That system is tough for students who need to earn money while they’re in college; they may not have enough time to do well in their classes, work an outside job, and also volunteer for research projects as often as higher-income students can, so they’re at a disadvantage when it’s time to get a job or apply to graduate school. The REU program exists to help ensure that all students, regardless of family income, have opportunities to get involved in research.
In archaeology, many students’ first experience as members of a research team comes through attending a field school. This most often means spending six weeks or more away from home in a research setting, working full time on archaeology with a group of fellow students and professionals who are all immersed in the same project and striving towards the same goals. It can be a pretty inspiring setting, but it’s also expensive; most field schools being offered this year cost $4,000 to $6,000. For students who need to work over the summer, that kind of experience is even more difficult to afford than volunteering during the regular semester.
Archaeology Southwest has been fortunate to receive NSF REU grants for our field schools three times. For eight summers, these grants covered our field school students’ attendance expenses and provided them with stipends they could use either to pay summer tuition if they chose, or to cover their expenses from lost summer work time. REU grants come with substantial rules attached to ensure that the money from them goes only to things that directly support students.
Like other grants, they have very limited salary support for the scientists who wrote the grant, and REU grants don’t cover any lab work, report writing, or other tasks that happen outside the field school period or don’t directly involve students. They really do exist only to allow access to research experiences to undergraduate students regardless of income.
I loved teaching those field schools. I loved being able to send the flyer for each year’s program to all of my colleagues at community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, Tribal colleges, and big public universities, knowing that absolutely any of their students who got in would be able to afford to attend. I loved meeting our new students every year—the ones who’d never flown on a plane before, who’d never been away from home before, or who’d traveled widely but who’d never found a group of peers who loved nerd-ing out about anthropological theory before. I loved watching first-generation college students apply to graduate school, and I loved watching them get in even more. And I’ve loved watching so many of our students working professionally in archaeology, moving into leadership positions in government and private cultural resource management agencies.
The National Science Foundation gave all of them a chance to get involved in archaeological research, and the effects have been far-reaching. I can only imagine what it’s done for all the students in all the many scientific fields those grants have supported over the years. I’ve said on many occasions that I believe it’s one of the very best things the National Science Foundation does.
Last year we didn’t have NSF funding, but thanks to a grant from the University of Arizona Foundation and a handful of private donors (including one extremely generous one—I almost fainted when I heard about them!), all 12 students were able to attend at a greatly reduced cost. They only needed to pay for meal plans at Western New Mexico University (WNMU, where the field school is currently based). Like the REU grants, this funding enabled many students to attend who otherwise would not have been able to. Again, I got to teach some students who’d never lived away from home before, and this fall I helped more of our students apply to graduate schools, including low-income and first-generation college students.
Immediately after our program ended, my field school co-director at WNMU and I threw ourselves into submitting an application for our field school to the REU program for 2025. We did our best work, and we held our breath, expecting to hear back in February.
As I write this, in late February of 2025, I don’t know whether the NSF REU program still exists.
Uncertainty and Gratitude
Historically, ensuring that students have access to research opportunities regardless of their income has meant that a more diverse group of people entered our field than otherwise would have, and it’s uncertain whether our current administration’s desire to eradicate programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion will lead it to dismantle this one.
I don’t know what the future holds, for the REU program or for so many others that support scientific research and education. But our students are still out there, doing good work. And for all of us whose tax dollars have included a little bit for NSF programs, I can tell you one thing for sure: Your few pennies each year did SO much good.
My most heartfelt thanks to the Archaeology Southwest member-donors who support our work by being far, far more generous than our government asks us to be, and to the University of Arizona Foundation, which has continued to generously support our students even during lean budgetary times of their own.
And especially now, thank you to the National Science Foundation programs in archaeology (BCS-2312349, BCS-1524079, BCS-1460436, BCS-0542044 ) and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (1851763, 1560465, and 1359458). I’ve watched you change the lives of more than 100 young scientists, and those ripples will keep spreading no matter what happens next.
Sources
I couldn’t find a place to directly look up this information, but here’s how I made the best estimate I could. For every dollar in the federal government’s budget, one cent is spent on science and medical research (1). In 2024, the National Science Foundation’s entire budget was 9.06 billion, or 0.1% of the 6.9 trillion-dollar federal budget (2). Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (the part of the NSF that includes archaeology) received $290.29 million of that budget, about 3% of it. As a rough estimate, last year someone making $100,000 a year who paid $17,053 in federal taxes contributed $65 to science and medical research (3), including 65 cents for the National Science Foundation in total and two cents for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. For a median household income of $78,538 (4), that means $11,464 in federal taxes, $44 to science and medical research, and 44 cents to the NSF, including just over a penny for SBS programs. My calculations may be off, but I’d be surprised if it’s by more than a few cents for most people.
- https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go
- https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2024/appropriations#:~:text=The%20%22Consolidated%20Appropriations%20Act%20of,Related%20Activities%20(RRA)%20account
- https://us.abalancingact.com/federal-taxpayer-receipt
- https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/INC110223#INC110223
Extra Tidbits
If you’ve read that the NSF wasted money to study whether the physics of an Avengers movie is real, the actual study is summarized here, and it will now forever haunt me as an example of how using a fun-sounding “hook” to generate interest in our research can tragically backfire. Another suddenly widely ridiculed NIH-funded study of steroids and aggression in hamsters stopped receiving that funding back in 2017 (not 2024!) and is summarized here.
Links to the studies identified in the captions: