President Donald Trump’s administration wants to gut the social sciences. 

In its proposed 2027 budget for the National Science Foundation, the White House seeks to eliminate the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences division of the National Science Foundation. 

But even if eliminating that division doesn’t happen, grants to social science researchers have all but dried up this year. 

Just  9 grants have been issued so far in 2026, compared to 475 for all of 2025, and an average of 797 a year from 2021-2024. By way of explanation, a White House spokesman claimed innovation is created in “hard sciences, not in ideologically-driven ‘social sciences.’”

I am not arguing that we trade the hard sciences for the soft. I am arguing that the distinction was always false, and that pretending otherwise is a strategic error.

I have spent my career studying the very thing this plan assumes we don’t need to understand — the impact of social forces. My research focuses on the social, cultural, and personal experiences of high-achieving Black students in mathematics and STEM in order to understand what factors shape their success. 

That work has taught me that we cannot have hard sciences without cultivating the conditions that produce the people who engage in them.

The Science of How Scientists Get Made

As a part of my work, I sat down with eight Black undergraduates majoring in mathematics, every one of them taking courses beyond the calculus sequence, carrying grade-point averages most of us would envy. 

I wanted to know a simple thing: What made them succeed where so many equally capable students do not? 

Studying them is not ideology. It is the science of how a scientist gets made.

Their mathematical ability was never in question. What I found is that whether that ability survived contact with the world depended almost entirely on factors no equation can capture.

It depended on a mother who talked her daughter’s way into the gifted and talented math track in third grade after the placement test would have shut her out. 

It depended on a teacher who, when one young woman insisted “I’m not smart enough to do it,” simply answered “yes, you are” and repeated that answer until the student believed her.  

For another student, it depended on finding a college study group of “people just like me,” so that, in his words, “Now I’m not the outcast.” 

These are not soft factors. They are measurable, decisive conditions under which mathematical talent either flourishes or quietly disappears. 

And studying them is not ideology. It is the science of how a scientist gets made.

Context and Conditions Help Determine Success

The charge that the social sciences are ideological deserves a direct answer, because the truth runs the other way. For most of the last century, the research on Black children in mathematics was itself ideological, a long catalog of deficiency, telling a story of low ability and failure that confused the conditions students were given with the talents they possessed. 

Disciplined social science corrected that bias. It revealed the gap in the access, the expectations, the support networks, and the cultural capital that some students were granted and others denied. 

Defunding this work does not remove ideology from the study of human beings. It removes the only thing that is consistent in the study of science: the people and perspectives that create the science.

For this reason, anyone who is concerned about the future of hard sciences must be interested in the conditions that foster the success, persistence, and ultimately the well-being of those who do it. We lose an enormous amount of scientific talent in this country because of conditions we can diagnose and change if we study them. 

The students in my study recognized this. When I asked one of them why she stayed in mathematics despite the challenges, she said, “What happens to the little black girl who wants to be a math major, and doesn’t see anybody who’s one?”  

This student knew the importance of context and conditions — in this case seeing other Black mathematicians is considered success. 

Science Is Fundamentally Human

Every brilliant student, specifically Black student, who walks away from STEM because no path is visible to her is a forfeited return on every dollar we have poured into the systems that have supported her. 

This is why a coalition of some 40 so-called hard science organizations, led by the Computing Research Association, warned Congress in May 2026 that losing the social science division could do “long-lasting, potentially permanent” damage to U.S. research as a whole.  

They understand what the budget framing misses: The barriers to progress in fields like artificial intelligence, biotech and medicine — those hard sciences the administration wants to fund — are, in their words, “fundamentally human.” 

The system that produces scientists is built out of families, classrooms, mentors, peer communities, and the cultural messages a child absorbs about who belongs in a laboratory.

The hardest question in any technology race is the oldest one in my field: Who will do the science? You cannot answer it by building better instruments while defunding the very research that studies the people who expected to use and refine them.

I am not arguing that we trade the hard sciences for the soft. I am arguing that the distinction was always false, and that pretending otherwise is a strategic error. The physical sciences tell us what is possible. Understanding the social, cultural, and historical conditions of human beings tells us under what conditions this possibility lives for all people, specifically those who have been historically marginalized.  

A country serious about the future of scientific innovation would fund both types of scientific inquiry, thereby creating a balanced understanding of not only what science to engage in but how to expand and replenish the pool of scientists who do the work.