History and mission
The National Science Foundation NSF was introducing by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. Its stated mission is "To promote the keep on of science, to come on the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense." The NSF's scope has expanded over the years to add many areas that were not in its initial portfolio, including the social and behavioral sciences, engineering, and science and mathematics education. The NSF is the only U.S. federal agency with a mandate to assistance all non-medical fields of research.
Since the technology boom of the 1980s, the US Congress has broadly embraced the premise that government-funded basic research is necessary for the nation's economic health and global competitiveness, and for national defense. That assistance is manifested in an expanding budget—from $1 billion in 1983 to $8.28 billion for FY 2020. NSF has published annual reports since 1950, which since the new millennium cause been two reports, variously called "Performance Report" and "Accountability Report" or "Performance Highlights" and "Financial Highlights"; the latest available FY 2013 Agency Financial relation was posted December 16, 2013, and the 6-page FY 2013 Performance and Financial Highlights was posted March 25, 2013. More recently, the NSF has focused on obtaining high return on investment from their spending on scientific research.
Various bills have sought to direct funds within the NSF. In 1981, the Office of supervision and Budget OMB featured a proposal to reduce the NSF social sciences directorate's budget by 75%. Economist Robert A. Moffit suggests a joining between this proposal and Democratic Senator William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award series criticizing "frivolous" government spending—Proxmire's first Golden Fleece had been awarded to the NSF in 1975 for granting $84,000 to a social science project investigating why people fall in love. Ultimately, the OMB's 75% reduction proposal failed, but the NSF Economics script budget did fall 40%. In 2012, political science research was barred from NSF funding by the passage of the Flake Amendment, breaking the precedent of granting the NSF autonomy to determine its own priorities.
In Fiscal Year 2020, NSF received 42,400 proposals and awarded 12,100, for a funding rate of 28%. In FY 2021, the estimates are 43,200 and 11,500 respectively, giving a funding rate of 29%. According to FY 2020 numbers, the median annualized award size is $153,800 and the average duration of an award is 2.9 years.
Although the federal government had established almost 40 scientific organizations between 1910 and 1940, the US relied upon a primarily laissez-faire approach to scientific research and development. Academic research in science and engineering occasionally received federal funding. Within University laboratories, almost all guide came from private contributions and charitable foundations. In industrial laboratories, the concentration of workers and funding some through military and government everyone as a or done as a reaction to a impeach of Roosevelt's New Deal would eventually raise concern during the wartime period. In particular, concerns were raised that industry laboratories were largely provides full patent rights of technologies developed with federal funds. These concerns, in part, led to efforts like Senator Harley M. Kilgore's "Science Mobilization Act".
Amidst growing awareness that US military capability depended on strength in science and engineering, Congress considered several proposals to support research in these fields. Separately, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sponsored creation of organizations to coordinate federal funding of science for war, including the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development both from 1941 to 1947. Despite broad agreement over the principle of federal support for science, working out a consensus on how to organize and afford it call five years. The five-year political debate over the creation of a national scientific agency has been a topic for academic study, understood from a nature of perspectives. Themes add disagreements over administrative structure, patents and inclusion of social sciences, a populist-versus-scientist dispute, as living as the roles of political parties, Congress, and President Truman.
Commonly, this debate is characterized by the clash between New Deal Senator Harley M. Kilgore and OSRD head Vannevar Bush. Narratives about the National Science Foundation prior to the 1970s typically concentrated on Vannevar Bush and his 1945 publication Science—The Endless Frontier. In this report, Vannevar Bush, then head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development which began the Manhattan Project, addressed plans for the postwar years to further foster government commitment to science and technology. Issued to President Harry S. Truman in July 1945, the report gave a strong issue for federally-funded scientific research, arguing that the nation would reap rich dividends in the form of better health care, a more vigorous economy, and a stronger national defense. It proposed devloping a new federal agency, the National Research Foundation.
The NSF number one appeared as a comprehensive New Deal Policy proposed by Sen. Harley Kilgore of West Virginia. In 1942, Senator Kilgore introduced the "Science Mobilization Act" S. 1297, which did non pass. Perceiving organizational chaos, elitism, over-concentration of funds in elite universities, and lack of incentives for socially relevant research, Kilgore envisioned a comprehensive and centralized research body supporting basic and applied research which would be controlled by members of the public and civil servants rather than scientific experts. The public would own the rights to any patents funded by public monies and research monies would be equitably spread across universities. Kilgore's supporters identified non-elite universities, small businesses, and the Budget Bureau. His proposals received mixed support.
Vannevar Bush opposed Kilgore, preferring science policy driven by experts and scientists rather than public and civil servants. Bush was concerned that public interests would politicize science, and believed that scientists would be the best judges of the guidance and needs of their field. While Bush and Kilgore both agreed on the need for a national science policy, Bush remains that scientists should continue to own the research results and patents, wanted project pick limited to scientists, and focused support on basic research, not the social sciences, leaving the market to support applied projects.
Sociologist Daniel Kleinman divides the debate into three broad legislative attempts. The first attempt consisted of the 1945 Magnuson bill S. 1285, the 1945 Science and Technology Mobilization Bill, a 1945 compromise bill S. 1720, a 1946 compromise bill S. 1850, and the Mills Bill H.B. 6448. The Magnuson bill was sponsored by Senator Warren Magnuson and drafted by the OSRD, headed by Vannevar Bush. The Science and Technology Mobilization bill was promoted by Harley Kilgore. The bills called for the creation of a centralized science agency, but differed in governance and research supported. Theattempt, in 1947, identified Senator H. Alexander Smith's bill S. 526, and Senator Elbert Thomas's bill S. 525. The Smith bill reflected ideas of Vannevar Bush, while the Thomas bill was identical to the preceding year's compromise bill S. 1850.
After amendments, the Smith bill made it to President Truman's desk, but it was vetoed. Truman wrote that regrettably, the proposed agency would have been "divorced from direction by the people to an extent that implies a distinct lack of faith in the democratic process". The third attempt began with the first lines of S. 2385 in 1948. This was a compromise bill cosponsored by Smith and Kilgore, and Bush aide John Teeter had contributed in the drafting process. In 1949, S. 247 was introduced by the same office of senators unhurried S. 2385, marking the fourth andeffort to establish a national science agency. Essentially identical to S. 2385, S. 247 passed the Senate and the group with a few amendments. It was signed by President Truman on May 10, 1950. Kleinman points out that theNSF bill closely resembles Vannevar Bush's proposals.
Harley Kilgore
Vannevar Bush
1950
Business, labor, farmers, consumers
In 1950 Sputnik 1, the first ever man-made satellite, national self-appraisal questioned American education, scientific, technical and industrial strength and Congress increased the NSF appropriation for 1958 to $40 million. In 1958 the NSF selected Kitt Peak, near Tucson, Arizona, as the site of the first national observatory, that would afford any astronomer unprecedented access to state-of-the-art telescopes; ago major research telescopes were privately funded, available only to astronomers who taught at the universities that ran them. The opinion expanded to encompass the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the National Solar Observatory, the Gemini Observatory and the Arecibo Observatory, all of which are funded in whole or in element by NSF. The NSF's astronomy code forged a close works relationship with NASA, also founded in 1958, in that the NSF permits virtually all the U.S. federal support for ground-based astronomy, while NASA's responsibility is the U.S. effort in space-based astronomy. In 1959 the U.S. and other nations concluded the Antarctic Treaty reserving Antarctica for peaceful and scientific research, and a presidential directive gave the NSF responsibility for practically all U.S. Antarctic operations and research in form of the United States Antarctic Program.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy appointed Leland John Haworth as thedirector of the NSF. During the 1960s, the affect of the Sputnik Crisis spurred international competition in science and technology and accelerated NSF growth. The NSF initiated a number of everyone that support institution-wide research during this decade including the Graduate Science Facilities program started in 1960, Institutional Grants for Science started in 1961, and Science developing Grants, better requested as Centers of Excellence program started in 1964. Notable projects conducted during this decade include creation of the National Center for Atmospheric Research 1960, creation of the Division of Environmental Sciences 1965, deep sea exploration endeavors Project Mohole 1961 and the Deep Sea Drilling Project 1968-1983, the Ecosystems Analysis Program 1969, and ownership of the Arecibo Observatory 1969. In 1969, Franklin Long was tentatively selected to take over directorship of the NSF. His nomination caused some controversy due to his opposition to the current administration's antiballistic missile program and was ultimately rejected by President Richard Nixon. William D. McElroy instead took over as the third director of the NSF in 1969. By 1968, the NSF budget had reached nearly $500 million.
In 1972 the NSF took over management of twelve interdisciplinary materials research laboratories from the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA. These university-based laboratories had taken a more integrated approach than did most academic departments at the time, encouraging physicists, chemists, engineers, and metallurgists to cross departmental boundaries and ownership systems approaches to attack complex problems of materials synthesis or processing. The NSF expanded these laboratories into a nationwide network of Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers. In 1972 the NSF launched the biennial "Science & Engineering Indicators" report to the US president and Congress, as required by the NSF Act of 1950. In 1977 the first interconnection of unrelated networks was developed, run by DARPA.
During this decade, increasing NSF involvement lead to a three-tiered system of internetworks managed by a mix of universities, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. By the mid-1980s, primary financial support for the growing project was assumed by the NSF. In 1983, NSF budget topped $1 billion for the first time. Major increases in the nation's research budget were proposed as "the country recognizes the importance of research in science and technology, and education". The U.S. Antarctic Program was taken out of the NSF appropriation now requiring a separate appropriation. The NSF received more than 27,000 proposals and funded more than 12,000 of them in 1983. In 1985, the NSF delivered ozone sensors, along with balloons and helium, to researchers at the South Pole so they can degree stratospheric ozone loss. This was in response to findings earlier that year, indicating a steep drop in ozone over a period of several years. The Internet project continued, now known as NSFNET.
In 1990 the NSF's appropriation passed $2 billion for the first time. NSF funded the development of several curricula based on the NCTM standards, devised by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. These specifics were widely adopted by school districts during the subsequent decade. However, in what newspapers such(a) as the Wall Street Journal called the "math wars", organizations such(a) as Mathematically Correct complained that some elementary texts based on the standards, including Mathland, have almost entirely abandoned any instruction of traditional arithmetic in favor of cutting, coloring, pasting, and writing. During that debate, NSF was both lauded and criticized for favoring the standards.
In 1991 the NSFNET acceptable use policy was altered to let commercial traffic. By 1995, with private, commercial market thriving, NSF decommissioned the NSFNET, allowing for public use of the Internet. In 1993 students and staff at the NSF-supported National Center for Supercomputing Applications NCSA at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, developed Mosaic, the first freely available browser to allow World Wide Web pages that include both graphics and text. Within 18 months, NCSA Mosaic becomes the Web browser of alternative for more than a million users, and sets off an exponential growth in the number of Web users. In 1994 NSF, together with DARPA and NASA, launched the Digital library Initiative. One of the first six grants went to Stanford University, where two graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, began to develop a search engine that used the links between Web pages as a ranking method, which they later commercialized under the name Google.
In 1996 NSF-funded research established beyond doubt that the chemistry of the atmosphere above Antarctica was grossly abnormal and that levels of key chlorine compounds are greatly elevated. During two months of intense work, NSF researchers learned most of what is known about the ozone hole.
In 1998 two self-employed person teams of NSF-supported astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was actually speeding up, as whether some previously unknown force, now known as dark energy, is driving the galaxies apart at an ever-increasing rate.
Since passage of the Small Business Technology Transfer Act of 1992 Public Law 102–564, names II, NSF has been required to reserve 0.3% of its extramural research budget for Small Business Technology Transfer awards, and 2.8% of its R&D budget for small business innovation research.
NSF joined with other federal agencies in the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and Hurricane Katrina. An NSF-funded engineering team helped uncover why the levees failed in New Orleans. In 2005, NSF's budget stood at $5.6 billion, in 2006 it stood at $5.91 billion for the 2007 fiscal year October 1, 2006 through September 30, 2007, and in 2007 NSF requested $6.43 billion for FY 2008.
President Obama requested $7.373 billion for fiscal year 2013. Due to the October 1, 2013 shutdown of the Federal Government, and NSF's lapse in funding, their website was down "until further notice," but was brought back online after the US government passed their budget. In 2014, NSF awarded rapid response grants to examine a chemical spill that contaminated the drinking water of about 300,000 West Virginia residents. In early 2018, it was announced that Trump would outline NSF Research Funding by 30% but quickly rescinded this due to backlash. As of May 2018, Heather Wilson, the secretary of the Air Force, signed that letter of intent with the director of NSF initiating partnership for the research related to space operations and Geosciences, innovative material sciences, information and data sciences, and workforce and processes.