FY 2027 Annual Performance Plan and FY 2025 Annual Performance Report

NSF investments across all areas of science and technology expand human knowledge and unlock new industries. NSF advances critical and emerging technologies (CETs) via its unique ability to simultaneously empower a wide range of organizations and individuals, position the nation's talent for new jobs and industries, and establish and fortify partnerships across government, industry and nonprofit sectors.

NSF partners with other organizations through direct partnerships⁴ to shape research directions and accelerate translation of knowledge to address society's most pressing needs. In FY 2027, NSF will strategically invest in CETs by leveraging funds across a range of partners, such as early-stage private industry, nonprofits and others. NSF will track both the number of partnerships supporting CETs and the total dollars leveraged from these partnerships.

Both 1.2a and 1.2b are in development. In FY 2026, NSF will analyze prior-year data on partnerships (see Crosscutting strategy section on Page 10) to determine which supported CETs. These data will provide a baseline from which the agency will establish future targets for 1.2a.

NSF support for newly formed businesses, known as startups, is a key strategy to advance CET. Startups have a disproportionately large impact on the economy by creating jobs, generating proprietary knowledge, initiating the commercialization of new technologies, and spurring the development of new industries.⁵ In FY 2027, NSF will monitor the number of startups focused on key CET areas as an indicator of investment in priority areas.

Objective 1.3 Support national security by safeguarding the nation's research enterprise.

As the largest federal funder of basic research in the U.S., NSF is committed to safeguarding the integrity and security of science while preserving the openness and collaboration that drive discovery and innovation. In FY 2027, NSF will continue to take steps to proactively assess its award portfolio for malign foreign influence while disseminating key information to mitigate future risks.

In FY 2025, NSF began developing its capacity to systematically assess proposals in key critical and emerging technology areas to assign them a risk rating and determine mitigation actions. A pilot assessment was done on proposals submitted to a quantum information science program, and it identified barriers that would need to be addressed to apply the method on a larger scale. In FY 2026 and 2027, NSF will apply learning from the FY 2025 pilot and expand to new proposal areas.

Objective 1.4 Support discovery, innovation and national security through impactful investments in research infrastructure.

The research infrastructure made possible through NSF investments, including facilities, equipment and computational tools, enables cutting-edge discoveries and innovations that drive progress across disciplines. In FY 2027, NSF will prioritize investments to balance the operation and maintenance of existing research infrastructure with funding for new projects that advance national priorities.

Promoting maximal use of NSF's research infrastructure portfolio through monitoring the time a facility is available for use ("uptime") ensures NSF research infrastructure can best serve the science and technology community. NSF will begin collecting these data across its Major Facility and Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure Track 2 portfolios in FY 2026.

Some NSF-funded research infrastructure provides opportunities, such as an office supporting translation of work for commercial purposes, potentially expediting the public benefit of the research conducted at the site. Additionally, some NSF-funded research infrastructure develops data products and processes that are used by other federal and state government partners for public safety, national security, or other applications. In FY 2026, NSF is determining how to identify and quantify these opportunities. In FY 2027, NSF will begin to track the availability of these research translation opportunities across its major facility portfolio and encourage the development of translational capacity in facilities that do not yet have this capacity.

Objective 2.1. Support the growth of positions in critical and emerging technologies by developing the next-generation STEM workforce.

To maintain U.S. global leadership in CETs, NSF's investments prioritize domestic talent development at all education and career levels across the country. In FY 2027, NSF will support research, scholarships, internships and other hands-on experiences proven to strengthen STEM pathways, while also rapidly developing and deploying innovative strategies.

NSF's flagship talent development initiatives⁷ bolster the vitality and strength of the U.S. STEM workforce by supporting the work of promising individuals through fellowships, internships and traineeships and preparing them to work at the forefront of CETs. NSF has begun tracking funding allocations in these programs to ensure they support critical workforce needs in CETs, and in FY 2026, will gather data to set targets for future years (2.1a). Together with the overall numbers of trainees supported (2.1b), this will give a sense of NSF's contributions to the U.S. STEM workforce.

For further context on the U.S. STEM workforce, NSF monitors general workforce and demographic trends in STEM occupations to inform the strategies that the agency deploys to strengthen the STEM workforce. In 2023, the latest year of data available, 35.9 million U.S. employees (25.4% of employees) worked in STEM occupations. 2024 data will be available in May 2026 in the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) report, The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2026.

Objective 2.2. Expand opportunities for discovery and innovation by building STEM capacity across regions and a range of organizations, including community colleges, nonprofits and businesses.

Strategic investments in organizations and regions over time can foster competitive innovation ecosystems and generate economic growth that benefits research communities nationwide. Building on its history of cultivating capabilities, forging alliances and sharing proven practices, in FY 2027, NSF will prioritize engagement with organizations and jurisdictions seeking resources and partnerships.

The NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR) seeks to advance research capacity in jurisdictions (states and territories) that receive relatively small proportions of the federal research budget.9 NSF will award at least 18% of its total research funding in NSF EPSCoR jurisdictions in FY 2027.

In FY 2025, NSF set directorate-level targets and conducted outreach and support to EPSCoR jurisdictions, which led to NSF exceeding its EPSCoR funding target with 20.5% of research funding going to institutions in EPSCoR jurisdictions.

Objective 3.1. Advance NSF's mission by ensuring the agility and capability of the agency's workforce.

To fulfill NSF's mission, the agency must ensure the strength of its workforce. Optimized, merit-based hiring practices will provide the talent needed to advance NSF's mission. A fully developed, reshaped workforce will build organizational capacity and enable the agility required to accomplish NSF's strategic, operational, and performance objectives. In FY 2027, NSF will secure top talent by leveraging government-wide tools to make merit-based hiring more efficient and effective and improve the NSF hiring experience for applicants and hiring managers. In order to secure top talent and consistent with Executive Orders 14170¹¹ and 14356¹², NSF will decrease the average number of days to hire staff in General Schedule positions to the government-wide target of 80 days in FY 2027.

Objective 3.2. Ensure accountable agency operations through Gold Standard Science and maintain effective use of federal funds.

To better serve NSF staff and the broader science and technology community, NSF will streamline its policies and procedures, in line with tenets of Gold Standard Science. In FY 2027, NSF will leverage technology and its reorganized structure to enhance operations in the proposal, merit review, and award management life cycle. These changes will reduce administrative burden and achieve resource efficiencies, while prioritizing the most impactful work to fund groundbreaking science and maintain global competitiveness.

NSF's Agency Priority Goal (APG) supports Objective 3.2. By September 30, 2027, NSF will 1) streamline funding opportunities, and 2) simplify proposal requirements and guidance, to reduce burden on applicants and recipients of NSF awards, and ensure more efficient use of and greater accountability for public funds. Over the course of the APG, NSF will reduce the number, length and complexity of Notifications of Funding Opportunities, to make it easier for applicants to identify funding opportunities relevant to their research interests. NSF will concurrently reduce the length and complexity of proposal guidance, to make it easier to find relevant information, and seek opportunities to reduce the burden of proposal requirements.

NSF monitors the time between receipt of a complete proposal and notification of the funding decision to ensure responsiveness to our stakeholders. In FY 2027, NSF aims for its average time to make an award decision, aggregated across all programs, to be six months or less.¹⁴

Partnerships offer opportunities to amplify the economic and societal benefits of NSF's funding across the U.S. by accelerating discovery and the translation of research to practice. NSF is uniquely positioned to harness the strengths of higher education institutions, businesses and nonprofits through partnerships. NSF both partners directly with industrial, federal, nonprofit, and international entities (direct partnerships) and catalyzes partnerships through programs that require grantees to work with nonacademic partners.

NSF leverages funding from direct partnerships to extend the impact of NSF awards and programs. In FY 2027, NSF aims to increase funding that NSF programs leverage¹⁵ through direct partnerships to support the STEM enterprise by 5% from other federal partners and by 20% from industry and nonprofit partners relative to FY 2026.

In FY 2025, NSF exceeded its goal for funding contributed by partnering with other federal agencies due to robust and long-standing interagency support for fundamental and translational research, as well as workforce development initiatives. Going forward, NSF will engage with these partners to address challenges and opportunities to partnering, including an emphasis on a new cohort of quantum industry leaders to further support public-private collaboration in CETs.

In FY 2027, NSF will continue to monitor the development of new direct partnerships and the number of partners to advance agency priorities such as CET.

In FY 2026, NSF is developing an agency-wide approach towards quantifying catalyzed partnerships. NSF will first look at programs that encourage catalyzed partnerships among award recipients to expand the impact of NSF investments.

Discontinued goals and measures

NSF will discontinue reporting of the following performance goals after FY 2025 to focus on the new priorities outlined in the FY 2026-2030 Strategic Plan.

Education and training application (ETAP) usage goals — NSF is changing its focus for talent development performance goals to consider the extent to which these training opportunities support critical and emerging technologies (see Table 2.1a above). NSF will continue to monitor the use of ETAP internally.

NSF met all three ETAP targets in FY 2025 by identifying new opportunities to incorporate the use of ETAP across its programs.

Research infrastructure construction goals — Prior research infrastructure goals focused solely on facilities in the construction phase. With the FY 2026-2030 Strategic Plan, NSF is introducing measures of facility availability and translational capacity to cover facilities in the operational phase (see 1.4a and 1.4b above). NSF will continue to monitor facility construction costs and schedules internally.

In FY 2025, all four major facility projects were on track for cost performance, and three of four – AIMS, ATLAS and RCRV — were on track for schedule. CMS experienced schedule delays due to external dependencies and component technical issues.

In FY 2025, all five of the tracked mid-scale research infrastructure investments (ICNO-U, CXFEL, ASO, SafeInsights and RDE) were on track for cost and schedule performance.

IT service goals — NSF previously reported the availability of its information systems and internal customer satisfaction with IT services.

In FY 2025, NSF met both its IT systems availability and customer satisfaction goals. NSF has historically had high performance on these goals and will continue to monitor them internally but discontinue their status as performance goals to maintain focus on programmatic priorities.

Make timely proposal decisions goal — This goal continues as a priority. In FY 2026, NSF changed the measure used to track performance from "dwell time," the percentage of proposals meeting a target threshold, to average time from proposal submission to award decision (Goal 3.2b).

Ranking in "Best Places to Work" — Scores for this measure were based on data collected by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM ) and used by the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) to rank federal agencies.

In FY 2025, NSF ranked 19th among mid-size agencies. This ranking reflects data collected by FEVS during the spring and summer of 2024 and released in 2025. OPM did not conduct FEVS in 2025.

Customer satisfaction with human capital function — The U.S. General Services Administration's (GSA) "Customer Satisfaction Survey" was the data source for this goal from 2021 to 2025.

In FY 2025, NSF ranked 22nd among similar agencies on human capital functions in GSA's survey. This ranking reflects decreases in scores for specific human capital sub-components in which there were operational and policy changes in recent fiscal years.

Management challenges

The Office of Inspector General identified seven management challenges for NSF in FY 2025. NSF's response to these challenges, including significant activities taken in FY 2025, is included in Appendix 2 of the FY 2025 NSF Agency Financial Report.¹⁷

Low-priority program activities

The President's Budget identifies lower-priority program activities, where applicable, as required under the GPRA "Modernization Act of 2010," 31 U.S.C. 1115(b)(10). The public can access the volume at whitehouse.gov.

Performance data verification and validation

Unless otherwise noted, measures included in this annual performance plan and report rely upon data from NSF administrative systems. NSF ensures the reliability of performance information through a verification and validation process that assesses each measure for completeness, consistency, accuracy, timeliness and validity.

For other information that is presented in this annual performance report, the underlying source of the information is noted in the discussion of each measure. Several measures are drawn from established publications (such as reports from NCSES, which have undergone rigorous review prior to publication). For indicators developed specifically for the ”Annual Performance Plan and Report” NSF employs a verification and validation process that includes the aspects described above to ensure the completeness and reliability of the information presented.