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In an unexpected turnaround, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) on Sunday handed out a record 2,599 of its prestigious graduate fellowships to young researchers — after briefly slashing the number to a low of just 1,000 last year.

The rebound “is a significant boost for early-career researchers and the future of US science,” says Joshua Weitz, a biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The surprise increase comes at a time when many in the US science community have been worrying about the fate of the NSF, a major funder of basic science, and its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Last year, and again this year, the administration of US President Donald Trump called to cut the NSF’s budget by more than half.

The GRFP seemed to be in further trouble when the call for the programme’s 2026 applications went out more than two months late, and the eligibility criteria for the fellowships changed. As of this year, undergraduates and first-year master’s and PhD students can apply — but second-year graduate students, as had been the norm for decades, cannot. Between January and April, at least 65 applications were also ‘returned without review’ (sent back to applicants without a score), according to data shared with Nature by Grant Witness, a watchdog project that tracks changes to research funding. This has sparked concerns that the type of science that NSF would fund had also changed.

But some of these worries have been allayed with the announcement of a record-breaking number of GRFP awardees this year.

Brian Stone, who is standing in as NSF director until a permanent one is confirmed, said in a statement that the continuation of the programme reflects the Trump administration’s “strong focus on building talent and investing in individual researchers”. He added: “I’m excited to see how these emerging STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] leaders will shape the future.”

The agency did not respond to Nature’s queries about changes to the programme or applications returned without review. On its website, the NSF states that “the number of applications returned without review this year has not changed substantially since last year.”

Award winners

Almost 14,000 young researchers applied for a 2026 GRFP award, submitting a research plan and personal statement that were reviewed by an independent panel of researchers. Typically, only about one in every six applicants receive one of the prestigious fellowships.

In addition to covering tuition, the fellowships come with an annual stipend of US$37,000 for three years. Since 1952, when the GRFP began, it has supported more than 70,000 researchers, and at least 40 of those have gone on to receive Nobel prizes.

After rumours swirled that the Trump administration would request a massive cut to the NSF’s approximately $9-billion budget for the 2026 fiscal year, in April last year, the agency cut in half the approximately 2,000 GRFP awards usually handed out. Months later, however, 500 awards were added — mostly in areas in which the Trump administration wants the United States to be a world leader, including artificial intelligence and quantum science — bringing the total to 1,500.

In February this year, NSF leaders announced at a board meeting that they intended to reshape the agency to fund more research on quantum science and AI, something reflected in the newly announced awards. Fifty-three of the latest GRFP awards are categorized as being for quantum science, a 39% increase from the previous year, and 103 are listed under AI or machine learning, a 17% increase.

Meanwhile, research fields funded by the agency’s engineering directorate saw the largest boost in GRFP awardees in 2026, from 406 (or 27% of the total) last year to 914 (or 35% of the total) this year.

But there were gains in other fields, too. Research funded by the biological sciences directorate rebounded, going from 214 awardees (or 14% of the total) last year to 486 (or 19% of the total) this year. Many researchers had been particularly worried about the biological sciences, given the reorientation of the NSF to focus on quantum and AI. With the exception of 2025, biological sciences applicants have received between 21% and 27% of the GRFP awards during the past decade.

After the awards were announced on Sunday, many of the awardees from the record-breaking cohort took to the Internet to celebrate. “Beyond grateful and still in disbelief,” posted Lena Kemmelmeier, a psychology PhD student at the University of California, San Diego, on the social-media platform Bluesky. “Thank you to my wonderful lab mates.”

Another student, posting anonymously on the social-media platform Reddit, where many GRFP hopefuls have commiserated, shared their excitement: “I’m a first-gen PhD student, and this is such a huge accomplishment for me!! I’m tearing up in the middle of writing this, and my hands are shaking!”

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