Ashley Dayer’s dream to win a subsidy from the National Science Foundation to continue the discoveries of bird conservation began when she was a professor at the start of a career with a baby in her arms and a laboratory budget.
Competition is intense for NSF subsidies, a key source of funding for scientific research in American universities. It took three requests for failure and years of preliminary research before the agency awarded one.
Then, an email on Monday informing the day of the day that the administration of President Donald Trump reduced funding, apparently because the project investigating the role of bird feeders addressed themes of diversity, equity and inclusion.
“I was shocked and saddened,” said DAYER, professor at the Virginia Tech fauna department. “We were just at the top to be able to bring together our results and do our whole analysis. There are many feelings of sorrow. “
Hundreds of other university researchers had their national funding from the National Science Foundation on Friday to comply with Trump’s directives to end the support of research on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as the study of disinformation. It’s Trump’s last front Anti-DEI campaign who also has gone University administrations, medical research and the private sector.
The director of the NSF, Sethuraman Panchanathan, defended the priorities of the agency but then leave ThursdaySaying that he had “done everything I can to advance the critical mission of the agency”.
Until now, more than 380 grant projects have been reduced, including work to combat internet censorship in China and Iran and a consulting project for Aboriginal communities to understand environmental changes in the Alaska region. A student computer scientist how artificial intelligence tools could alleviate prejudice in medical information, and others were trying to help people detect depth fascines generated by AI. A certain number of subsidies finished aimed to expand the diversity of people who study science, technology and engineering.
NSF, founded in 1950, has a budget of $ 9 billion which can be a rescue buoy for teachers running out of resources and young researchers they recruit from their teams. He has changed the priorities over time, but it is very unusual to put an end to so many mid -road subsidies.
Some scientists have seen the cups to come, after the American Republican Senator Ted Cruz reported thousands of projects funded by the NSF last year which, according to him, reflected an awakened “Marxist agenda”, including some, but not all the projects cut on Friday.
However, DAYER said that she was “incredibly surprised” that her bird project was chopped. A collaboration with other institutions, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, it appeared in Project Feederwatch, a website and an application to share bird observations.
The DAYER team had collected data from more than 20,000 Americans on their bird observation habits, offering information on how outstage feeders affect fauna, but also people’s mental well-being.
The only mention of the word “diversity” in the summary of subsidies concerns bird populations, not people. But the project explicitly sought to initiate more people with disabilities and people of color. This corresponds to the long -standing requirement of NSF according to which the projects funded must have a broad impact.
“We thought, if something, we may tell us not to do these wider impacts and to delete this from our project,” said Dayer. “We do not expect the whole grant to be funded.”
Doge says that the “Waspill Dei subsidies” were cut as the NSF head leaves
The day the subsidies ended, Panchanathan, director of the NSF since 2020, said on the agency’s website which he always supported “research on the expansion of participation”, but these efforts “should not prefer certain groups to the detriment of others, or exclude individuals or groups directly / indirectly”. Less than a week later, Panchanathan had announced his resignation.
The NSF refused to share the total number of discomforts canceled, but the Trump government ministry, managed by billionaire Elon Musk, posted on X that NSF had canceled “402 useless Dei subsidies” for $ 233 million. It didn’t say how it had already been spent. The subsidies generally last for several years.
Caren Cooper, professor of forestry and natural resources at the Northern Carolina State University, said that she expected her work to be targeted after making Cruz’s list. His grant project also aimed to include people of color and disabled people in participatory scientific projects, in collaboration with the company Audubon and in order to engage those who have historically been excluded natural spaces and bird observation groups.
A doctoral student had left his job and moved his family to North Carolina to work with Cooper on an allowance that the grant helped finance.
“We tried to make emergency plans,” said Cooper. “Nevertheless, it is an illegal thing. This violates the terms and conditions of the reward. And it really harms our students. ”
Cut the disinformation work
In addition to eliminating Dei’s search, NSF said that it would no longer “support research in order to combat” disinformation “, disinformation” and “malinformation” which could be used to infringe on the rights of speech protected by the constitution of American citizens in the United States in a way that advances a favorite story on important questions of public debate. »»
Several researchers said they did not know why their funding was interrupted, except that their summaries included terms such as “censorship” or “disinformation”.
“The lack of transparency around this process is deeply worrying,” said Eric Wustrow, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose subsidy aims to study and fight against internet censorship in countries like China and Iran. “Do they just have Ctrl + F for certain words, ignoring the context?”
NSF said on his website that “there is no list of words” to avoid, but that the search for disinformation is no longer aligned with the priorities of the NSF.
Wustrow has said that his research supports freedom of expression and access to information around the world, and he plans to appeal the decision to terminate funding. Meanwhile, he plans to work potentially for free this summer without a subsidy to finance his salary.
Even for those who intended to fight against disinformation, the cuts seemed to miss the point.
Casey Fiesler, from the University of Colorado Boulder, had a project focused on the dissipation of the false IA ideas and the improvement of the literacy of AI – also a priority of the Trump Department of Education. Drew Margolin of Cornell University said that his work was planning to help people find ways to combat social media harassment, hate speeches and disinformation without the help of content moderators or government regulators.
“Irony is that it is like a way of freedom of expression to treat discourse,” said Margolin.
Do more cuts arrive?
The NSF refused to say if other cuts arrive. The terminated funding reflects cuts prior to financing for medical research from the National Institutes of Health.
A group of scientists and health The groups continued the NIH Earlier this month, arguing that these cuts were illegal and threatened medical remedies.
Until now, NSF cuts have been a small part of all the agency’s subsidies, amounting to 387 projects, said Scott Delaney, researcher at the School of Public Health from Harvard University who helps follow the cuts to help researchers defend themselves. Some have received dismissal letters even if their projects had already ended.
“It’s very chaotic, which is very consistent with what is happening at NIH,” said Delaney. “And it is really clear if that’s all that will end or if it is only the burst of opening.”
DAYER is always to know what to do with regard to the loss of financing of the Bird Feeder project, which reduces part of the summer financing of four teachers in three universities and their respective student teams. It is particularly worried about what it means for the next generation of American scientists, including those who still decide their career path.
“It’s just this outright attack on science right now,” said Dayer. “It will have lasting impacts for Americans and for science and knowledge in our country. I am also afraid that people will not enter the field of science. ”
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The writer Associated Press Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.