The House majority leader for the 112th congress, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) has proposed an "experiment" where citizens decide on how to reduce federal spending through voting on various programs, an idea he has cleverly named "YouCut". 

Most recently, he has proposed applying "YouCut" to awards granted by the NSF. On this webpage: 
http://majorityleader.gov/YouCut/Review.htm he encourages people to search through NSF Awards and report "questionable" research. From those grants deemed questionable, the House will vote on which grants to possibly eliminate funding for.

The research that receives funding from the NSF has been approved after evaluation by those who are qualified to make judgments on the scientific merit of the research. Grants that receive funding have been accepted over 75% of proposals received. It is ridiculous to ask the general American public to evaluate the merit of research based on searching through the NSF database for "questionable" proposal titles.

It is equally ridiculous to pretend that allowing the American people to vote on such measures for cutbacks does anything other than make us FEEL as though we are helping eliminate our national debt. The 2010 budget for the NSF was $7 billion; this is 0.5% of the $1.4 trillion federal discretionary budget. Even if the entire NSF were eliminated, 99.5% of the discretionary budget is ignored for consideration in such a cutback program.