In response to a growing plan to cut federal money for academics and institutions studying the rising dangers of a warming planet, the Trump presidency has ended National Science Foundation grants for more than 100 climate change research projects.

The move will cut off what’s good to amount to tens of millions of dollars for experiments that were originally approved and, in most cases, already in the works. &nbsp,

Affected projects include efforts to develop cleaner fuels, measure methane emissions, improve understanding of how heat waves and sea-level rise disproportionately harm marginalized groups, and help communities transition to sustainable energy, according to an MIT Technology Review review of a GrantWatch database—a volunteer-led effort to track federal cuts to research—and a list of terminated grants from the National Science Foundation ( NSF ) itself. &nbsp,

The NSF is one of the largest sources of US funding for college studies, so the cancellations will provide a great blow to culture knowledge and clean-energy development.

They are in addition to the White House’s wider efforts to drastically increase university tuition and funding for research and to significantly raise their taxes. The leadership has also strived to slash workers and budgets at national research agencies, block efforts to determine the physical and financial risks of climate change, and locked down labs that have monitored and analyzed the levels of greenhouse gases in the air for decades.

According to Daniel Schrag, co-director of the science, engineering, and public policy programme at Harvard University, which has experienced greater funding cuts than any other school as a result of an escalating legal dispute with the management,” I don’t think it takes a lot of creativity to know where this is going.” ” I believe the Trump administration intends to zero out funding for climate science altogether”.

The NSF claims it is terminating grants that don’t “always align with the agency’s program goals,” including but not limited to those that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion ( DEI), environmental justice, and misinformation/disinformation.

Trump administration officials have argued that DEI considerations have contaminated US science, favoring certain groups over others and undermining the public’s trust in researchers.

According to a report in Science, Michael Kratsios, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said to a group of NSF administrations and others last month that “political biases have displaced the vital search for truth.”

Science v. politics

However, the administration’s anti-DE I filter applied to research projects that weren’t the only victims of the cuts. The NSF has also canceled funding for work that has little obvious connections to DEI ambitions, such as research on catalysts. &nbsp,

Many believe the administration’s broader motivation is to&nbsp, undermine the power of the university system and prevent research findings that cut against its politics. &nbsp,

Trump and his officials have repeatedly argued, in public statements and executive orders, that climate fears are overblown and that burdensome environmental regulations have undermined the nation’s energy security and economic growth.

Alexa Fredston, an assistant professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, describes it as a” constant attempt” to undo any research that goes against the administration. &nbsp,

A group of states sued the NSF on May 28 and claimed that the cuts unlawfully stifled diversity objectives and funding priorities that had been clearly set out by Congress, which regulates federal spending.

A group of universities also filed a lawsuit against the NSF over its earlier decision to reduce the indirect cost rate for research, which reimburses universities for overhead expenses associated with work carried out on campuses. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has also lost a number of research grants, was one of the plaintiffs, along with the California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

( MIT Technology Review is owned by, but editorially independent from, MIT. )

The NSF did not comment.

‘ Theft from the American people ‘

Researchers at rOpenSci, Harvard, and other organizations have made a team effort to monitor the terminations of grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health ( NIH) and the NSF. It draws on voluntary submissions from scientists involved as well as public government information. &nbsp,

A search of its database for the terms” climate change”,” clean energy”,” climate adaptation”, “environmental justice”, and” climate justice” showed that the NSF has canceled funds for 118 projects, which were supposed to receive more than$ 100 million in total. More than 300 research projects were expected to receive more than$ 230 million when searching for the word” climate.” ( That word often indicates climate-change-related research, but in some abstracts it refers to the cultural climate. ) &nbsp,

Some share of those funds has already been issued to research groups. Noam Ross, a computational researcher and executive director of rOpenSci, a nonprofit initiative that promotes open and reproducible science, claims that the NSF section of the database doesn’t include that “outlaid” figure, but it’s typically about half the amount of the original grants.

A search for” climate change” among the NIH projects produces another 22 studies that were terminated and were still owed nearly$ 50 million in grants. Many of those projects focused on the effects of climate change and extreme weather events on mental or physical health.

The NSF more recently released its own list of terminated projects, which mostly mirrored GrantWatch’s findings and confirms the specific terminations mentioned in this story.

In an email response, Ross retorted,” These grant terminations are theft from the American people.” ” By illegally ending this research the Trump administration is wasting taxpayer dollars, gutting US leadership in science, and telling the world that the US government breaks its promises”.

The country’s oldest university, Havard, has suffered the most.

In April, the university sued the Trump administration over cuts to its research funding and efforts to exert control over its admissions and governance policies. In response, the White House has taken the decision to revoke all federal grants to the university, including hundreds of NSF and NIH grants. &nbsp,

All of his grants were terminated, according to Harvard professor Daniel Nocera, who has done ground-breaking work on the concept of “artificial photosynthesis,” a process for making clean fuels from sunlight. &nbsp,

He continued,” I don’t have any research funds.”

Another terminated grant involved a collaboration between Harvard and the NSF National Center for Atmospheric&nbsp, Research (NCAR ), designed to update the atmospheric chemistry component of the Community Earth System Model, an open-source climate model widely used by scientists around the world.

According to the NSF abstract, the research was intended to” contribute to a better understanding of atmospheric chemistry in the climate system and to improve air quality predictions in the context of climate change.” &nbsp,

Daniel Jacob, a professor at Harvard who was the project’s principal investigator, wrote in an email that” we completed most of the work and were able to bring it to a stopping point.” ” But it will affect the ability to study chemistry-climate interactions. And it’s obvious that cutting funding from an existing project is inappropriate.

Plenty of the affected research projects do, in one way or another, grapple with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. There is ample evidence, however, that underrepresented in scientific fields and disadvantaged communities are more susceptible to the effects of energy-sector pollution and are more severely affected by the escalating effects of extreme weather.

One of the largest terminations cut off about$ 4 million dollars of remaining funds for the CLIMATE Justice Initiative, a fellowship program at the University of California, Irvine designed to recruit, train and mentor a more diverse array of researchers in Earth sciences. &nbsp, &nbsp,

The NSF decision occurred halfway into the 5-year program, halting funds for a number of fellows who were in the midst of environmental justice research efforts with community partners in Southern California. The university is attempting to find ways to fund as many participants as possible for the remainder of their fellowships, according to Kathleen Johnson, a professor at UC Irvine and director of the initiative.

” We need people from all parts of society who are trained in geoscience and climate science to address all these global challenges that we are facing”, she says. The people who are most capable of carrying out this work are those who are aware of the needs of the community and work to find equitable solutions, according to the statement.

” Diverse teams have been shown to do better science”, Johnson adds.

In response to inquiries from MIT Technology Review and other researchers who received terminations of their grants, many of them declined to comment. This is in response to growing concerns that the Trump administration will punish scientists or organizations that criticize their policies.

Coming cuts

The administration’s plans to reduce federal funding for climate and clean-energy research just got started with the suspension of existing NSF and NIH grants. &nbsp,

The White House’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year calls for the elimination of tens of billions of dollars in federal funding, specifically mentioning the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s” climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs,”” Green New Scam funds,” and “low-priority climate monitoring satellites” at the Department of Energy, and the NSF’s” climate, clean energy, woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.”

The administration released a more detailed NSF budget proposal on May 30th, which called for a 60 % reduction in research spending and nearly zeroed out the clean energy technology program. Additionally, it suggested cutting funding for the US Global Change Research Program, which conducts regular assessments of climate risk, by 97 % for the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a global network of ocean sensors that monitor shifting marine conditions, and by 40 % for NCAR, an atmospheric research facility.

If Congress approves budget reductions anywhere near the levels the administration has put forward, scientists fear, it could eliminate the resources necessary to carry on long-running climate observation of oceans, forests, and the atmosphere. &nbsp,

The administration also reportedly plans to end the leases on dozens of NOAA facilities, including the Global Monitoring Laboratory in Hilo, Hawaii. The nearby Mauna Loa Observatory, which has been monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for decades, is supported by the lab.

Even short gaps in these time-series studies, which scientists around the world rely upon, would have an enduring impact on researchers ‘ ability to analyze and understand weather and climate trends.

Jane Long, formerly the associate director of energy and environment at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, says,” We won’t know where we’re going. If we stop measuring what’s happening.” ” It’s devastating—there’s no two ways around it” .&nbsp,

Stunting science&nbsp,

Growing fears that public research funding will take an even larger hit in the coming fiscal year are forcing scientists to rethink their research plans—or to reconsider whether they want to stay in the field at all, numerous observers said.

According to Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University,” the amount of funding we’re talking about isn’t something a university can fill in indefinitely.” ” So what we’re talking about is potentially cataclysmic for climate science”.

According to him, “it’s basically a shit show,” and how bad of a shit show it will be will greatly affect what happens in the courts and Congress in the coming months.”

One climate scientist, who declined to speak on the record out of concern that the administration might punish his institution, said the declining funding is forcing researchers to shrink their scientific ambitions down to a question of” What can I do with my laptop and existing data sets”?

The scientist said,” If your goal was to make the United States a second- or third-class country in terms of science and education, you would be doing exactly what the administration is doing.” ” People are pretty depressed, upset, and afraid”.

In light of the mounting difficulties, Harvard’s Schrag fears that the best young climate scientists will choose to pursue careers elsewhere or transition to high tech or to careers where they can earn significantly more money.

” We might lose a generation of talent—and that’s not going to get fixed four years from now”, he says. The irony is that Trump is criticizing the foundations of US science, which figuratively made America great.