Since January 2023, President Joe Biden's National Science Foundation has spent millions of dollars on grants funded by the American Rescue Plan, Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus package.
The American Rescue Plan, which Biden said would bring "Direct relief to families bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 crisis," sent $600 million to the NSF. The agency pledged to use the funding to "Support groups of individuals and institutions most strongly affected by the pandemic." Three years after Biden signed the legislation, that money is still going out the door-through research grants that aren't COVID-related.
One July 2023 grant, for example, funded a $246,000 Amherst College study meant to "Deepen our understanding of how floodplains have responded to climatic changes." A more than $7 million grant awarded one month earlier to the University of Texas at Austin will help develop "a learning environment that is welcoming to marginalized and minoritized researchers." The NSF sent another $181,000 to California Polytechnic State University in December to investigate "The structural organization, and changes therein, of a school of fish." In total, the agency has awarded more than $23 million in American Rescue Plan grants since January 2023 that are unrelated to COVID, federal spending disclosures show.
In others, recipients of American Rescue Plan funds struggled to spend them in a timely manner.
In the year after the bill's passage, American schools spent just 7 percent of the $122 billion in federal aid the plan allocated to them.
The American Rescue Plan's $2 trillion price tag also contributed to inflation, according to economists.
While Biden last year dismissed the notion that his stimulus spending boosted prices as "Bizarre," his own administration concluded in its annual "Economic Report of the President" that such spending "Could have contributed to high inflation." Other economists were more pointed, with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco saying the American Rescue Plan contributed significantly to inflation.
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