Science bloggers are leaping to the defense of National Science Foundation, which is under attack through the You Cut scheme announced by House Science and Technology committee member Adrian Smith (Republican of Nebraska). His launch video calls for the public to search the NSF database of awards for “questionable projects” that waste tax dollars. Suggested search terms include “success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus.” A search by Nature using all those terms brings up a $500,000 award to the University System of Maryland’s Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation as the top project. That project attempts to improve the graduation rates of underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Other projects in the top ten include research into earthquakes, and on bioreactors as a source of energy.

As Chris Mooney, the author of The Republican War on Science, points out, asking the public to nominate projects for the axe using politically loaded terms is a problematic substitute for peer review as a way of identifying sound science.

Cantor’s examples of wasteful projects include $750,000 for research into methods of determining the contributions of football players on a pitch. Live Science leaps to this work’s defense, pointing out that the same method can be used to calculate the relative contributions of members of teams in any workplace.

The You Cut effort is reminiscent of attacks on scientific projects by John McCain following the stimulus bill.