Rhode Island programs find they can no longer count on feds to keep existing commitments, never mind future support
By Colleen Cronin / ecoRI News staff
“Long before they canceled the program,” Porder said, “they
just stopped responding and paying any bills, which, of course, shuts down any
work that you can do because you can’t front, you know, tens of thousands or
hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Porder is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology,
as well as environment and society, at the Ivy League institution. (“My
professor title is like five words too long,” he joked.)
He is also Brown’s associate provost for sustainability,
although he spoke to ecoRI News only in his capacity as a professor, not as an
administrator at the Providence university.
For a long time, his research focused on tropical
rainforests and agriculture, but recently it has come to include more work on
sustainability, he said, including his work on the USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities grant
program.
Eventually, in mid-April, the Trump administration canceled
the grant program altogether, just one part of the millions of dollars of
spending that has been stalled or outright axed by the federal government
because it includes climate and environmental research.
“USDA Cancels Biden Era Climate Slush Fund, Reprioritizes
Existing Funding to Farmers,” the headline on the USDA press release stated, announcing the cancellation of
Porder’s grant and many others.
The irony, Porder said, is that there was plenty of funding for farmers in the project. Porder declined to go into details about the canceled grant because the USDA has said it will allow them to reapply, although he isn’t confident in that process.
“We’re hemorrhaging the future of science in our country as we refuse to support things that have nothing to do with whatever AI buzzword the government, at the moment, seems to be using to filter these things out.”
— Stephen Porder, Brown University professor
For the post-doctoral students on the project, the funding
pause and then cancellation has thrown their careers and lives into
uncertainty.
“For several months we said to them, ‘Well, we’re not sure
if we can pay you.’ And then we sort of struggled to find some bridge funding
and an exit ramp,” Porder said.
Porder believes that a large part of the reasons for the
program’s cancellation is about targeting people the administration doesn’t
agree with, because the process of cancellations itself has wasted money, an
idea allegedly antithetical to President Donald Trump’s stated mission of
efficiency and cost savings.
“If you get a $7 million grant and you spend $3 million of
it, it means you’ve started and you’re on your way to completion,” Porder said.
“Then, if they cancel the last bit, you’ve essentially thrown $3 million down
the drain because you can’t finish what you started.”
During a Zoom interview, Porder spoke to ecoRI News from
France. Usually when he goes abroad, foreign researchers ask him about Ph.D.
and post-doctoral opportunities in the United States.
“This time,” he said, “nobody wants to come.”
Some academics Porder has spoken with told him they are
being advised not to travel to the United States.
“We don’t know what the future holds, but I am not
optimistic that American leadership in science will continue in the face of
this,” he said. “And this is not just about environment, obviously, but it’s
about everything.”
In addition to pauses and cancellations of funding at the
USDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Trump
administration is also halting some work at the Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health, as well as targeting higher
educational funding more broadly.
Brown University stands to lose half a billion dollars in federal funds, on top of grants
it has already lost, if the government follows through with its threat to take
away money for the country’s top institutions.
Although the Trump administration has specifically targeted
Brown and other Ivy League schools, it’s also going after spending at
departments that impact other large research institutions, including the
University of Rhode Island.
Rainer Lohmann is a professor of oceanography at URI and
runs the Sources,
Transport, Exposure & Effects of PFASs (STEEP) center. Although
Lohmann isn’t working specifically on climate change issues, his work is still
being impacted by federal pauses and cuts to environmental research spending.
“Initially it was the panic, and now it’s basically just
uncertainty, because nothing that I have has been officially cut,” he said in a
recent phone interview. “And now it seems as if things will keep as they have
been, I assume, at least for this fiscal year.”
“I’m guessing,” he added.
However, colleagues who he works with at the U.S. Geological
Survey and EPA aren’t certain how long they will keep their jobs.
For example, Lohmann said he suspects that one of his grad
students who is an EPA fellow will likely be terminated by the end of the
summer.
“We assume we have a few months and then things will start
falling apart,” he said.
He’s spoken with his doctoral students and told them they
should consider getting a master’s degree instead because he can’t guarantee
funding their positions to finish out their Ph.Ds.
Lohmann described the situation for URI graduate students as
triaging: as more funding gets cut, those who are closest to getting their
doctorates will be the most likely to keep their funding, while those who are
the farthest away will probably be the first to lose it.
“Some of my new students were in the first or second year,”
he said, “I have no guarantee anymore that I can pay them for the three or four
or five years.”
If they get their master’s along the way, and the government
cancels their funding, he’s told them, “at least you’ll have a degree.”
As of last week, none of Lohmann’s funding had been cut, but
other academics at URI have already lost grants or seen work stalled while the
government evaluates its research priorities.
Jaime Palter, an associate professor of oceanography at URI,
said she has been affected by the funding cuts, even though they haven’t hit
her directly yet.
She has a National Science Foundation grant application
examining ocean oxygenation “that’s been just pending for ages.”
Palter said she’s also awaiting word about another grant she
applied to NOAA for in November. (“It’s not really even about climate change,”
she said. The grant would look at the intensification of storms in the Gulf
Stream.)
Although some programs and grants aren’t being explicitly
canceled, budget reviews, firings, and resignations are stalling the process.
“The program manager at NOAA that runs another one of my
grants was fired. The deputy program manager was fired,” she said, “and the
[person] that was running the program that I applied to that I haven’t heard
back from, she resigned, she said, for health reasons.”
The grant applications are starting to feel like time and
money wasted, Palter added.
“It’s normal to not get funded, they might have a 20% or 30%
success rate or less. That’s fine,” she said, but to see whole programs left
completely unfunded is “a little disheartening.”
Palter is on a URI committee that has to let talented
graduate applicants know they won’t be accepted, even though they are
qualified, because of budget constraints and uncertainty.
“I’m trying to understand our planet, trying to help plan
for a future that might be — that will be — altered by the changes that we’re
making to the atmosphere,” Palter said, “and exposing students to how we think
about these things and how scientists approach these questions and the possible
solutions.”
She said Trump’s attack on research funding undermines her
work and the work of future generations of scientists.
“Being in an atmosphere where that work feels unvalued …
it’s not the best feeling,” Palter said.
