The Trump administration has canceled a STEM education subsidy of $ 3.7 million for the Fleet Science Center in San Diego, causing new pressure in an establishment that had already declared higher expenses than income from its federal tax declarations.
The National Science Foundation subsidy was to promote STEM education programs in the district in the south-east of San Diego. A separate NSF subsidy of $ 100,000 has also been canceled, said Fleet in a press release.
Similar cuts are underway in the country’s scientific centers, including the science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, which this week lost $ 625,000 in federal subsidies. And the cancellation of the subsidy in the fleet is among the first of the scores that the NSF should do nationally.
Thursday, the Nature Journal reported That the NSF staff had been invited to “stop awarding all financing actions until further notice”. The NSF is among the largest grant agencies in the world, subscribing research on everything, engineering and computer science in psychology, mathematics, astronomy and marine biology.
Such cuts could seriously harm grand research schools like UC San Diego and San Diego State University. Cancellations “have an impact on science teachers in all areas of the country,” said UCSD’s IT biologist Terry Gaasterland on Friday.
The Fleet Science Center, which opened its doors in the Balboa park 52 years ago in the middle of the public fascination for the landings of Apollo Moon, says that it still plans to organize a public event “Celebration of science” on May 10 but will charge modest admission costs.
The cuts of the fleet, as many call it, are “not the news that we hoped to share,” said Vice-President of Center Community Services, Mwenda Kudumbiggs, in a statement.
“In the past 12 years, Fleet has worked with Escondido communities in San Ysidro, and they all have stories to tell about the sciences and scientists in their neighborhood. The intervention of funding and scientific research being publicly devalued, the stories of these communities are more important than ever to inspire the next generation of scientists, “she added.
The fleet has been an icon of San Diego for generations. Although it is still extremely popular, the museum manages an environment of difficult income and expenditure, Recent federal tax documents show.
The center, a 501 non -profit organization (C) (3), said $ 10.5 million in spending and $ 9.5 million in income, according to its latest IRS 990 form. The museum has declared a similar gap the previous year, declaring $ 9.7 million in spending and $ 8.5 million in revenues.
Over the past two years of taxation, the total assets of the museum has increased from $ 12.4 million to June 30, 2022, to just over $ 10.7 million last year, according to tax files.
The president and chief executive officer of the fleet, Steven Snyder, said that the fleet did not spend more than it collects. Budget gaps are rather due to the damping reported for the improvements made to its building in recent years, he said. The accounting practice allows companies to note or depreciate the cost of the main assets over several years.
The two largest sources of income from Fleet Science Center are the services of contributions and programs, according to tax declarations.
The income of the program service – The money that people pay for entry, gifts, courses and others – has significantly increased by just under 4 million dollars during the year 2022 to more than $ 5 million last year, according to files.
During the same two years, public contributions increased from $ 7.3 million in the year ending on June 30, 2022, at less than $ 2.8 million last year.
Snyder said the decline was due to anomalies in previous years that have temporarily increased the museum’s income – millions of dollars in Federal COVID -19 federal rescue funds and a short -term capital campaign that has raised funding for construction improvements.
At the same time, tax declarations show that the museum’s workforce increased from 146 people in 2021 to the 182 employees reported in 2023. During the same period, the number of volunteers exploded, from only 25 during the tax year of 2022 to 300 in its last report.
Originally published: