by Ashley Dayer’s dream of gaining a scholarship from the National Science Foundation to pursue discoveries in bird protection, began as an early-career professor with a child in her arms and a crushed lab orbudget.
The competition is intensive for NSF subsidies, an important source of financing for scientific research at US universities. It took three failed applications and preliminary research for years before the agency gave her one.
Then an e -e -mail came on Monday, in which the dayer was informed that President Donald Trump’s administration broke off the financing, apparently because the project, which examines the role of bird feeder, touched topics of diversity, justice and inclusion.
“I was shocked and sad,” said Dayer, professor at the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation by Virginia Tech. “We were currently at the peak to bring our results together and carry out all of our analyzes. There are many feelings of grief.”
Hundreds of other university researchers had their funding from the National Science Foundation abruptly canceled on Friday in order to observe Trump’s guidelines in order to end research on research, justice and inclusion as well as to investigate misinformation. It is the latest front in Trump’s anti-dei campaign, which also went according to the university administration, medical research and the private sector.
So far, more than 380 grant projects have been shortened, including work to combat internet censorship in China and Iran and project advice with indigenous communities to understand the environmental changes in the Arctic region in Alaska. A computer scientist examined how artificial intelligence tools could alleviate the distortion of medical information, and others tried to help people detect depth factors with ai-generated manner. A number of grants completed to expand the diversity of people, science, technology and engineering.
NSF, which was founded in 1950, has a budget of $ 9 billion, which can be a lifeline for professors of resources and the younger researchers that they hire for their teams. It has shifted the priorities over time, but it is very unusual to end so many Midstream subsidies.
Some scientists saw the cuts after the Republican US Senator Ted Cruz had reported thousands of NSF-financed projects last year, which he said, a “Woke Dei” or a Marxist agenda, including some, but not all projects that were cut on Friday.
Nevertheless, Dayer said that she was “incredibly surprised” that her bird project was enlarged. Cooperation with other institutions, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has reported Project Feedwatch, a website and app to replace bird observations.
The DAYER team had collected data from more 20,000 Americans about their bird watching habits and received an insight into the effects of feeders outdoors on wildlife, but also from the intellectual well -being of people.
The only mention of the word “diversity” in the Grant Award concerns bird populations, not for humans. But the project expressly tried to include more disabled people and people with colors. This fits the long -term requirement of NSF that financed projects must have a broad influence.
“We thought, if at all, maybe we are told that we should not do this more comprehensive effects and remove this from our project,” said Dayer. “We had no expectation that the entire grant would not be financed.”
NSF and Doge say that it is “wasteful Dei subsidies”
On the day the grants were terminated, Sethuraman Panchanathan, the director of the NSF since 2020, said on the agency’s website that they continued to support “research to widen participation”, but “should not exclude some groups at the expense of other or directly/indirect persons or groups”.
The NSF refused to share the total number of cancellated grants, but Trump’s efficiency of the government, which was operated by the billionaire Elon Musk, placed on X that NSF “402 Walsfur dei -Di -Gumper” in the amount of $ 233 million had canceled. It didn’t say how much of it had already been spent. Grants usually take several years.
Caren Cooper, a professor of forestry and natural resources from North Carolina State University, said she expects her work to be attacked after the task of Cruz’s list. Her grant project also wanted to include people with color and people with disabilities in participatory science projects, in cooperation with the Audubon Society and the aim of dealing with those who were historically excluded from natural spaces and bird observation groups.
A doctoral student had left her job and moved her family to North Carolina to work with Cooper on a scholarship that helped the grant to finance.
“We tried to create emergency plans,” said Cooper. “Nevertheless, it is an illegal thing. It violates the conditions of the award. And it really harms our students.”
Cut off misinformation work
In addition to the elimination of the research research, NSF said that it would no longer support research with the aim of fighting “misinformation”, “disinformation” and “painting”, which could be used to violate the constitutionally protected language rights of American citizens in the United States, which promised a preferred stories about significant matters of public debates. “
Several researchers said they were not sure why their financing was ended, except that their abstracts included terms such as “censorship” or “misinformation”.
“The lack of transparency in relation to this process is deeply worrying,” said Eric Wostrow, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose scholarship should study and combat the Internet censorship in countries such as China and Iran. “Did you only test Ctrl+F for certain words and ignore the context?”
NSF said on his website that “there is no list of words”, but that misinformation research no longer corresponds to the priorities of NSF.
Wustrow said his research supported the freedom of speech and access to information all over the world, and he plans to appeal the decision to terminate the financing. In the meantime, he tries to work free of charge this summer without financing his salary.
Even for those who intended to tackle misinformation, the cuts seemed to miss the point.
Casey Fiesler from the University of Colorado Boulder had a project that concentrated with the department of AI mission and improving the AI alphabetization -also a priority of Trump’s educational department. Drew Margolin at Cornell University said that his work had made it available to help people find paths to combat social media harassment, hate speech and misinformation without the help of content moderators or government supervisory authorities.
“Irony is that it is like a freedom of speech to speak to language,” said Margolin.
Are there more cuts?
The NSF refused to say if further cuts come. The termination financing reflects earlier cuts in medical research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
A group of scientists and health groups sued the NIH at the beginning of this month and argued that these cuts were illegal and endangered medical remedies.
The previous cuts at NSF are a tiny part of all grants from the agency that correspond to 387 projects, said Scott Delaney, a research scientist at the School of Public Health at Harvard University, who pursues the cuts to help researchers. Some received termination letters, although their projects had already ended.
“It is very chaotic, which corresponds very much, what happens to Nih,” said Delaney. “And it is really unclear whether this is all that is ended or whether it is only the opening salvo.”
Dayer still finds out what to do with the loss of financing for the Bird Feder project, which lowers part of the summer financing for four professors at three universities and their respective teams of students. She is particularly concerned about what it means for the next generation of American scientists, including those who still choose their career path.
“It is precisely this direct attack on science,” said Dayer. “It will have a permanent impact on the American people and science and knowledge in our country. I am also only afraid that people will not go into the field of science.”
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Associated Press Writer Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.
