Update: On May 28, the NSF OAM removed the “Future Organizational Awards Pending” rating for Duke, Harvard, and Yale from its database. And a few grants have gone to researchers at Harvard and Duke, according to agency staffers who spoke to Nature.
The United States National Science Foundation (NSF) — a major funder of basic research — limited the flow of new research grants to a group of elite universities, Nature learned.
Internal agency documents obtained by NatureThe press team reveals that on April 9, the NSF Office of Award Management (OAM), which finalizes grants and manages their finances, imposed limits on new funding for Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Princeton University in New Jersey; and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. A rating applied to these universities in an NSF database reads: “Future Awards to a Pending Organization.” Since then, little new funding has been made available to these institutions by the NSF.
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It is unclear why the NSF, which has an annual budget of $8.8 billion, is limiting new funding to these particular universities or when this restriction will end. The agency declined a request for comment from Nature.
Last year, the administration of US President Donald Trump frozen or ended research funding for several US institutionsalleging violations of federal anti-discrimination policy, such as failure to protect students from anti-Semitism. Some establishments reached agreements with the administration to restore funds. Harvard, which had about 75 percent of its research grants cut by the NSF, sued. A federal judge ruled last September that the firings were illegal and permanently barred U.S. agencies, including the NSF, from taking similar action against Harvard in the future.
Lawyers who spoke with Nature say the latest restriction on new funding by the NSF may be in violation of that ruling. “The administration has bent itself into pretzels to continue its actions against universities it doesn’t like, even in the face of court orders,” says David Super, an administrative law specialist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
The White House has denied that the administration is taking action against the four universities.
Pending search
An internal NSF list obtained by Nature shows that the OAM blocked 33 research proposals from researchers at the four universities or their collaborators. Grantmaking to the NSF has been slow this fiscal year due to a 43-day government shutdown at the end of 2025 And White House delays release of agency budgetbut within OAM processing has been consistent, with research grants taking an average of ten days to finalize.
However, the proposals from scientists at Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and their collaborators have been accepted by the office for an average of 91 days. Many of them were blocked even before the April 9 suspension was applied to these universities.
To reach OAM, proposals must be evaluated and deemed meritorious by a panel of independent scientists, then vetted by NSF program managers and approved by agency leadership. Agency staff members who spoke to Nature speaking on condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation, say the type of hold placed on the four universities’ new funds is rare and used only in extreme situations, such as when a university closes its doors or fails an audit.
Scientists at Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale frequently receive NSF grants; in 2024, these universities received a total of 218 new grants from the agency. Currently, researchers receiving these grants can still access funds when needed. But new subsidies have been slowed. So far this fiscal year, the four institutions have received a total of 13 new grants. And no awards have been given to Duke or Harvard scientists since the April 9 freeze.
Princeton research dean Peter Schiffer said in a statement that the agency “has not informed us of any general actions involving our pipeline of NSF-funded projects.” The other three universities had not responded to questions by the time this article was published.
Academic uncertainty
Researchers from relevant universities whose proposals are under review were reluctant to speak to Nature. Nobody knew about the blockage of new funding before Nature extended his hand to them.
About 85% of blocked proposals concern mathematics, physical sciences and engineering, and several of them concern quantum information science, that the Trump administration has said it wants to prioritize. They include a five-year grant that would fund a promising early-career researcher, and a grant to support a quantum center at Yale.
New grants may not be the only ones affected: At least one “continuing grant” that receives money each year as part of a multi-year grant is also in limbo. The Viral Emergence Research Initiative (VERENA), a multidisciplinary program led by Yale that aims to predict upcoming pandemic threats, is still awaiting payment of more than $2 million from the NSF last year. Agency staff members said Nature that the increase was approved by a program official on January 20, but is still awaiting processing at OAM. Ecologist Colin Carlson, who runs VERENA at Yale, says many members of the 40-person team have left the program and that he will have to lay off the rest at Yale in the coming months if the money is not released.
Duke, Harvard, Princeton and Yale aren’t the only institutions being singled out by the NSF in 2026. Last month, the agency suspended 18 research grants to the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), as first reported Berkeley sidea nonprofit news media outlet.
The suspension letter sent to UC Berkeley by OAM on April 13, seen by Naturealleges that the principal investigators of each of the grants failed to “properly disclose all sources of foreign funding” from countries including France, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Markita Landry, a biochemist at UC Berkeley, is the principal investigator on one of the suspended grants, which proposed using nanoparticles to provide molecular genome editing tools to plants. The letter states that the suspension of her grant was due to undisclosed funding from the UK, which baffled her: “I don’t remember any funding I ever received from the UK,” she says.
The NSF declined to comment on the suspension of grants to UC Berkeley.
This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time May 27, 2026.