In late July, the Trump Administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released an annual memorandum with guidance for research and development (R&D) priorities. Federal agencies use the memo to shape their fiscal year 2028 (FY28) budgets. The memo includes a section on implementation, directing federal agencies to submit action plans, within 90 days, to identify how FY26 and FY27 programs can execute these priorities. This is perplexing in that FY26 ends on September 30 and the FY27 program development was informed by the FY27 R&D priorities memo. The priorities, listed below, are overlapping, poorly defined, and heavily weighted towards technological advancements, often in contrast to many of the actions taken by this administration.
The memo is organized in nine priority areas:
- Rebalancing R&D portfolios toward foundational research and the physical sciences and engineering
- Advancing national S&T missions
- Applying AI and emerging technologies to accelerate American research and innovation
- Expanding R&D infrastructure for broader ecosystem use,
- Translating scientific advances into stronger regional ecosystems and broadbased prosperity
- Considering new funding mechanisms and institutional models to support frontier science
- Exploring better ways to identify and develop scientific talent
- Rigorously studying, evaluating, and improving how Federal science is funded
- Integrating Federal R&D into the broader S&T enterprise.
Under rebalancing research portfolios toward fundamental research, the memo lists physical sciences, chemistry and material science, mathematics and computer science, engineering sciences, and biological sciences — reflecting the disciplinary Directorates at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with the exception of the geophysical sciences and social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Under the biological grouping, the memo calls for the prioritization of “neuroscience and the neural basis of cognition and behavior; and microbiology and quantitative biology. These fields underpin biotechnology and biomanufacturing, neurosciences and brain-machine interfaces, and human health and therapeutics.” Apart from this brief mention of FABBS sciences, the memo shows little understanding of the ways the behavioral and brain sciences serve as the underpinning for a majority of the FY28 priorities.
The memo states, “Agencies should adopt a deliberate, portfolio-based approach that matches funding mechanisms to the S&T challenges they seek to address, maximizing Federal return on investment through an explicit mix of modalities, risk profiles, and time horizons.” However, the reorganization of NSF has done the opposite, moving away from a portfolio-based approach. Additionally, the priorities of ‘Applying AI’ and ‘Rigorous evaluation’ beg insights and input from the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences Directorate at NSF. So, too, does the charge to establish metascience capabilities that evaluate what programs actually work and drive organization-wide reforms depend heavily on behavioral and social sciences.
FABBS will be working to demonstrate the value and opportunities to leverage the behavioral and social sciences in support of the stated priorities.
