The Trump administration cut the number of NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (GRFP) by a third in 2025 — but increased the total funds obligated for new awards. Grant Witness has found that NSF obligated 2.3 times the funds per fellowship in 2025 compared to previous years, using “forward funding” — obligating all three years of each fellowship up front rather than annually. This allows the administration to appear to spend the GRFP budget while in practice supporting far fewer students.
The GRFP has supported high-potential STEM graduate students since 1952. Over the past year the administration has waged a multi-front assault on the program: delaying the solicitation leaving only weeks to apply before deadline, narrowing eligibility, slashing the number of fellowships from 2,300 to 1,500, skewing the awards toward AI and quantum science, and rejecting applications without review.
The forward-funding shift is a tactic that the administration has used across multiple agencies to cut the number of awards while maintaining the appearance of spending the same amount of money. At the National Institutes of Health, a requirement that 50% of new awards be funded was imposed in the latter half of 2025, resulting in a 15% drop in the number of new awards according to NIH’s own analysis. The administration has also used forward funding to cut the number of awards at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Department of Defense’s research agencies.
This also shows how forward funding is being used beyond the National Institutes of Health. While the FY2026 appropriations bill put some guardrails on this strategy for NIH, it did not do so for NSF, perhaps because NSF has long used forward funding for the majority of its grants.
NIH itself describes the drop in new awards in 2025 as being to due to the increase in forward funding.
The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act reauthorized the GRFP with the target of supporting over 3,000 new fellows annually by 2026. Congress appropriated $325 million for the program in both FY2024 and FY2025. The FY2026 appropriation dropped to $285 million. With continued forward funding, we would expect only about 1,100 awards this year. The administration’s budget request was just $128 million - 60% below this the 2025 funding level and 76% below the CHIPS Act target. Combined with forward funding, this would likely have resulted in fewer than 500 new awards in 2026, fewer than any year since the program began in 1952. <–! Note, this is a bit of a stretch as the ongoing costs would be lowered. I could run some calculations to estimate this. –>
The table below shows how this works. In 2022–2024, NSF obligated roughly $110,000–$112,000 per new fellowship, consistent with funding one year of support at a time. In 2025, that figure jumped to $258,000 — more than double — even as the number of new awards dropped from over 2,000 to 1,500. Total new obligations actually rose to $387 million, the highest in the table, despite the program awarding the fewest fellows. Meanwhile, total outlays — the funds actually paid to universities — remained roughly flat around $215–$229 million across all years, reflecting that students draw down stipends at a steady rate regardless of how the obligations are structured.
| Fiscal Year |
New GRFP Obligations |
Total GRFP Outlays |
New GRFP Awards |
Obligation per new Fellowship |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $386,745,785 | $229,094,538 | 1,500 | $257,831 |
| 2024 | $228,336,076 | $215,991,989 | 2,036 | $112,149 |
| 2023 | $271,552,115 | $215,032,281 | 2,555 | $106,283 |
| 2022 | $245,765,637 | $212,648,998 | 2,193 | $112,068 |
This is not a matter of a change to who is recieving the awards or which institutions’ tuition is paid. The pattern holds at the institution level. For schools with enough GRFP history to compare over time, the amount obligated per fellowship in 2025 was 2.6 times greater than in 2022–2024. Obligations are for both new and continuing awards, but as large institutions typically have similar numbers of new and continuing fellows each year. Wwe would expect the obligation per new fellow to remain steady year-to-year. Instead, we see that the obligation per new fellow jumped dramatically in 2025 for each institution. This is consistent with a shift to forward funding for new awards in 2025.
| Institution | Obligation per Award 2022-2024 |
Obligation per Award in 2025 |
Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts Institute Of Technology | $204,345 | $435,598 | 2.1 |
| University Of Washington | $209,275 | $388,508 | 1.9 |
| Northwestern University | $169,326 | $531,170 | 3.1 |
| California Institute Of Technology | $150,777 | $290,459 | 1.9 |
| University Of Chicago | $154,882 | $503,011 | 3.2 |
| Duke University | $169,245 | $353,961 | 2.1 |
| University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill | $164,785 | $407,729 | 2.5 |
| Vanderbilt University | $116,757 | $323,942 | 2.8 |
| University Of Maryland, College Park | $231,789 | $560,584 | 2.4 |
| New York University | $253,077 | $465,792 | 1.8 |
NSF uses forward funding for many of its grants, and multi-year obligation can be a fiscally prudent strategy. However, the rapid shift to forward funding, as the administration has enacted here and elsewhere has the effect - and likely the intent - of cutting the number of awards while maintaining the appearance of spending the same amount of money. Even if, after a period of transition, forward-funding would cover the same number of awards, the interim period creates a permanent impact on scientific capacity, with fewer students starting careers in science.
For this reason, the administration reportedly fought hard in the FY2026 spending bill to retain the ability to use multi-year funding.
number of fellows:
April 2025: NSF announced it would award only 1,000 fellowships, less than half the ~2,300 in prior years. After public outcry, 500 more were added — but tilted heavily toward AI and quantum science, shutting out the life sciences entirely.
2025: Former program officers Susan Brennan and Gisèle Muller-Parker document how the 2025 cycle shifted from awarding fellowships based on student potential to favoring specific fields aligned with the administration’s priorities.
September 2025: NSF released the 2026 solicitation nearly two months late with dramatically narrowed eligibility. Second-year graduate students — previously told they could apply — were suddenly excluded. Students who had withdrawn 2024 applications expecting to reapply were locked out. When eligibility was last changed in 2016, NSF gave seven months’ notice and grandfathered affected students.
February 2026: NSF began rejecting applications without peer review. Grant Witness has analyzed at least 50 such rejections, most involving proposed research in the life sciences — including proposals nearly identical to ones that earned honorable mentions the year before.
FY2026 budget: The administration requested just $128 million for the GRFP — a 60% cut from FY2025 and 76% below the CHIPS Act authorization.
The GRFP is funded out of NSF’s STEM Education accounts, which also funds education research in the STEM Education Directorate, which was targeted for massive grant terminations in 2025.
Other notes
According to the NSF GRFP Administrative Guide, “Funds on expiring awards and/or award amendments or supplements that are not fully expended are forfeited by the IHE in the absence of an NCE…. Forfeited funds will be subtracted from Fellowship funding provided in the next new award.” A no-cost extension is allowed if there are still fellows or a new fellow is expected to enroll. The first NCE does not require NSF approval, it is grantee-approved. Awardee IHEs are not authorized to extend an award that contains a zero balance. An additional NCE requires NSF approval.
Methods
We determined NSF GRFP obligations and outlays using data from USAspending.gov, downloading all awarding data for NSF GRFP awards and summing total obligations and year-end outlays for each financial year. To determine the outlays per award, we used NSF’s published list of awardees for 2022 to 2025, counted awards per institution and year, and merged these with the USAspending data.