With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.

[12] Economist Robert A. Moffit suggests a connection 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.

[14] In 2022 the NSF has started funding open source software as part of their Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program.

In industrial laboratories, the concentration of workers and funding (some through military and government programs as a result of Roosevelt's New Deal) would eventually raise concern during the wartime period.

In particular, concerns were raised that industry laboratories were largely allowed full patent rights of technologies developed with federal funds.

[18] Amidst growing awareness that US military capability depended on strength in science and engineering, Congress considered several proposals to support research in these fields.

[19] The five-year political debate over the creation of a national scientific agency has been a topic for academic study, understood from a variety of perspectives.

[20] Themes include disagreements over administrative structure, patents and inclusion of social sciences,[20] a populist-versus-scientist dispute,[21] as well as the roles of political parties, Congress, and President Truman.

[22] Narratives about the National Science Foundation prior to the 1970s typically concentrated on Vannevar Bush and his 1945 publication Science—The Endless Frontier.

[23] 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.

Vannevar Bush opposed Kilgore, preferring science policy driven by experts and scientists rather than public and civil servants.

While Bush and Kilgore both agreed on the need for a national science policy,[22] Bush maintained that scientists should continue to own the research results and patents, wanted project selection limited to scientists, and focused support on basic research, not the social sciences, leaving the market to support applied projects.

Truman wrote that regrettably, the proposed agency would have been "divorced from control by the people to an extent that implies a distinct lack of faith in the democratic process".

[25] (Harley Kilgore) (Vannevar Bush) 1950 Business, labor, farmers, consumers In 1950 Harry S. Truman signed Public Law 507, or 42 U.S.C.

After the 1957 Soviet Union orbited Sputnik 1, the first ever human-made satellite, national self-appraisal questioned American education, scientific, technical and industrial strength and Congress increased the NSF appropriation for 1958 to $40 million.

[30][29] 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.

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.

NSF funded the development of several curricula based on the NCTM standards, devised by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

However, in what newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal called the "math wars", organizations such as Mathematically Correct complained that some elementary texts based on the standards, including Mathland, had almost entirely abandoned any instruction of traditional arithmetic in favor of cutting, coloring, pasting, and writing.

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.

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.

In 1998 two independent teams of NSF-supported astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was actually speeding up, as if some previously unknown force, now known as dark energy, is driving the galaxies apart at an ever-increasing rate.

NSF joined with other federal agencies in the National Nanotechnology Initiative, dedicated to the understanding and control of matter at the atomic and molecular scale.

[34] During 2004–5 NSF sent "rapid response" research teams to investigate the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster[35] and Hurricane Katrina.

In 2014, NSF awarded rapid response grants to study a chemical spill that contaminated the drinking water of about 300,000 West Virginia residents.

[42] It does not operate its own laboratories, unlike other federal research agencies, notable examples being NASA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

[59] Scientists from research institutions can join the NSF as temporary program directors, called "rotators", overseeing the merit review process and searching for new funding opportunities.

[83] Source[96] In May 2011, Republican Senator Tom Coburn released a 73-page report, "National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope",[97][98] receiving immediate attention from such media outlets as The New York Times, Fox News, and MSNBC.

In 2013, the NSF had funded the work of Mark Carey at University of Oregon with a $412,930 grant, which included a study concerning gender in glaciological research.

[104] The NSF was certainly not the primary government agency for the funding of basic science, as its supporters had originally envisioned in the aftermath of World War II.