Trump science cuts roil university labs, targeting bird feeder research, AI literacy work and more

This July 2023 photo provided by Ashley Dayer shows Dayer in the Adirondacks, N.Y. (Ashley Dayer). Adirondacks in 2023

Ashley Dayer’s dream of winning a National Science Foundation grant to pursue discoveries in bird conservation started when she was an early-career professor with an infant in her arms and a shoestring laboratory budget.

Competition is intense for NSF grants, a key source of funding for science research at U.S. universities. It took three failed applications and years of preliminary research before the agency awarded her one.

Then came a Monday email informing Dayer that President Donald Trump’s administration was cutting off funding, apparently because the project investigating the role of bird feeders touched on themes of diversity, equity and inclusion.

“I was shocked and saddened,” said Dayer, a professor at Virginia Tech’s department of fish and wildlife conservation. “We were just at the peak of being able to get our findings together and do all of our analysis. There’s a lot of feelings of grief.”

Hundreds of other university researchers had their National Science Foundation funding abruptly canceled Friday to comply with Trump’s directives to end support of research on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as the study of misinformation. It’s the latest front in Trump’s anti-DEI campaign that has also gone after university administrations, medical research and the private sector.

More than 380 grant projects have been cut so far, including work to combat internet censorship in China and Iran and a project consulting with Indigenous communities to understand environmental changes in Alaska’s Arctic region. One computer scientist was studying how artificial intelligence tools could mitigate bias in medical information, and others were trying to help people detect AI-generated deepfakes. A number of terminated grants sought to broaden the diversity of people studying science, technology and engineering.

NSF, founded in 1950, has a $9 billion budget that can be a lifeline for resource-strapped professors and the younger researchers they recruit to their teams. It has shifted priorities over time but it is highly unusual to terminate so many midstream grants.

Some scientists saw the cuts coming, after Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz last year flagged thousands of NSF-funded projects he says reflected a “woke DEI” or Marxist agenda, including some but not all of the projects cut Friday.

Still, Dayer said she was “incredibly surprised” that her bird project was axed. A collaboration with other institutions, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, it tapped into Project Feederwatch, a website and app for sharing bird observations.

Dayer’s team had collected data from more 20,000 Americans on their birdwatching habits, fielding insights on how outdoor feeders were affecting wildlife, but also people’s mental well-being.

The only mention of the word “diversity” in the grant abstract is about bird populations, not people. But the project explicitly sought to engage more disabled people and people of color. That fit with NSF’s longtime requirement that funded projects must have a broad impact.

“We thought, if anything, maybe we’d be told not to do that broader impacts work and to remove that from our project,” Dayer said. “We had no expectation that the entire grant would be unfunded.”

NSF and DOGE say they were “wasteful DEI grants”

On the day the grants were terminated, Sethuraman Panchanathan, the NSF’s director since 2020, said on the agency’s website that it still supported “research on broadening participation” but those efforts “should not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”

The NSF declined to share the total number of canceled grants, but Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, run by billionaire Elon Musk, posted on X that NSF had canceled “402 wasteful DEI grants” amounting to $233 million. It didn’t say how much of that had already been spent. Grants typically last for several years.

Caren Cooper, a North Carolina State University professor of forestry and natural resources, said she expected her work would be targeted after it made Cruz’s list. Her grant project also sought to include people of color and people with disabilities in participatory science projects, in collaboration with the Audubon Society and with the aim of engaging those who have historically been excluded from natural spaces and birdwatching groups.

One doctoral student had left her job and moved her family to North Carolina to work with Cooper on a stipend the grant helped to fund.

“We’ve been trying to make contingency plans,” Cooper said. ”Nonetheless, it’s an illegal thing. It’s violating the terms and conditions of the award. And it really harms our students.”

Cutting misinformation work

Along with eliminating DEI research, NSF said it will no longer “support research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

Several researchers said they weren’t sure why their funding was terminated, other than that their abstracts included terms like “censorship” or “misinformation.”

“The lack of transparency around this process is deeply concerning,” said Eric Wustrow, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose grant aims to study and combat internet censorship in countries like China and Iran. “Did they just Ctrl+f for certain words, ignoring context?”

NSF said on its website that “there is not a list of words” to avoid, but that misinformation research is no longer aligned with NSF’s priorities.

Wustrow said his research supports free speech and access to information around the world, and he plans to appeal the decision to terminate the funding. Meanwhile, he’s looking at potentially working for free this summer without a grant to fund his salary.

Even for those who did intend to address misinformation, the cuts seemed to miss the point.

Casey Fiesler, of the University of Colorado Boulder, had a project focused on dispelling AI misconceptions and improving AI literacy — also a priority of Trump’s education department. Cornell University’s Drew Margolin said his work set out to help people find ways to combat social media harassment, hate speech and misinformation without the help of content moderators or government regulators.

“The irony is it’s like a free speech way of addressing speech,” Margolin said.

Are more cuts coming?

The NSF declined to say if more cuts are coming. The terminated funding mirrors earlier cuts to medical research funding from the National Institutes of Health.

A group of scientists and health groups sued the NIH earlier this month, arguing that those cuts were illegal and threatened medical cures.

The cuts at NSF so far are a tiny portion of all of the agency’s grants, amounting to 387 projects, said Scott Delaney, a research scientist at Harvard University’s school of public health who is helping to track the cuts to help researchers advocate for themselves. Some received termination letters even though their projects had already ended.

“It is very chaotic, which is very consistent with what is happening at NIH,” Delaney said. ”And it’s really unclear if this is everything that’s going to get terminated or if it’s just the opening salvo.”

Dayer is still figuring out what to do about the loss of funding for the bird feeder project, which cuts off part of summer funding for four professors at three universities and their respective student teams. She’s particularly worried about what it means for the next generation of American scientists, including those still deciding their career path.

“It’s just this outright attack on science right now,” Dayer said. “It’s going to have lasting impacts for American people and for science and knowledge in our country. I’m also just afraid that people aren’t going to go into the field of science.”

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Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.

Matt O’brien, The Associated Press