Pentagon abruptly ends all funding for social science research

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is ending all of its funding for social science research, stopping 91 ongoing studies related to threats such as climate change, extremism, and disinformation. In a press release issued late on Friday, the department wrote that it would “focus on the most impactful technologies” and that research it funds “must address pressing needs to develop and field advanced military capabilities.”

“[DOD] does not do climate change crap,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X on Sunday. “We do training and war fighting.”

The cuts include the entire Minerva Research Initiative, a landmark project established in 2008 “to help DOD better understand and prepare for future challenges.” (ScienceInsider first reported on cuts to Minerva on 2 March.) The initiative’s website, including reports on finished and ongoing projects, has since gone dark.

“The Pentagon’s decision to scrap its social science research portfolio … is short-sighted and harmful to U.S. national security,” says Jason Lyall, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Many of the canceled projects focused on how new technologies such as artificial intelligence are shaping modern battlefields, Lyall notes. “How do you know what’s ‘impactful’ if you don’t do the research? How do you anticipate countermeasures and consequences of their use?” he asks. “I’m worried that without this portfolio, we lose a critical source of impartial evidence about national security, leaving the Pentagon more susceptible to companies selling ‘revolutionary’ but unproven technologies.”

The move “suggests they don’t care about better understanding threats the U.S. faces,” says Josh Busby, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior adviser for climate at DOD in 2021–22. Busby had a small grant to study the U.S. dependence on critical minerals from China for the clean energy transition, a project scheduled to wrap up this summer after a tabletop exercise at the U.S. Naval War College. That is now unlikely to happen, Busby says. “It’s baffling that our project was terminated early since the focus on critical minerals and dependence on China is what they say they care about.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/pentagon-abruptly-ends-all-funding-social-science-research