National Science Foundation (NSF)

National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent agency within the executive branch of the federal government.Created in 1950, the NSF awards grants and fellowships to institutions and individuals to support scientific research and science education. Its 2000 budget exceeded $3.9 billion. Policy is set by a twenty‐five–member board named by the president and approved by Congress. While the NSF does not itself conduct research, it does maintain several research centers, such as the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

The foundation's origins are rooted in two contrasting visions, one articulated by the Democratic senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, the other by the scientist Vannevar Bush. Kilgore's proposals, dating from the early 1940s and reflecting his populist belief in broad‐based democratic participation in, and government coordination of, science for public purposes, envisioned a central science agency to set research priorities and to support research that would promote economic growth. Bush, head of the World War II Office of Scientific Research and Development, proposed in Science—the Endless Frontier (1945) an agency controlled by scientists and dedicated to the support of “basic” science.

By the time President Harry S. Truman signed legislation creating the NSF in 1950, many of the functions envisioned by Kilgore had been assumed by other agencies, such as the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Institutes of Health. In its early years, therefore, the NSF largely confined its grants to basic research. From the first, however, it had to justify its funding policies to a utilitarian‐oriented public and Congress.

The Soviets' launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 led to a substantial boost in the NSF's budget and made it a serious player in research funding, responsible for some 13 percent of all federally supported academic research. But the upheavals of the 1960s prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 to sign legislation proposed by Congressman Emilio Daddario, (Dem.‐Conn.) that fundamentally altered the agency's mission in the direction of “applied” research. This set a pattern by which the NSF's funding priorities reflected current congressional and public concerns. During the oil crises of the 1970s, high priority went to developing alternative energy technologies. In the 1980s, worried that the United States was losing economic competitiveness, Congress pushed the NSF to support economically relevant research. In the 1980s, too, engineering, which had remained precarious within the NSF's priorities because of its image as a vocational field rather than a basic research field, gained greater representation and status within the foundation.
See also Cold War; Energy Crisis of the 1970s; National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Science: Since 1945; Sixties, The; Space Program.

Bibliography

Daniel J. Kevles , The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, 1987.
Daniel Lee Kleinman , Politics on the Endless Frontier: Postwar Research Policy in the United States, 1995.

Daniel Lee Kleinman