Latest news with #GrantWatch
Boston Globe
27-05-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
A Harvard scientist built a database of 2,100 NIH grant terminations. Then his own funding was cut.
Two scientists — Scott Delaney and Noam Ross — took it upon themselves to document the extent of NIH grant terminations. By combining government information with crowdsourced submissions, the pair have gathered what appears to be the most detailed, public accounting of projects halted by the world's largest funder of biomedical research. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'The community of affected scientists is really what drove this. That's really what created it. We wouldn't have been successful if folks weren't willing to step forward,' Delaney said. Most researchers are uncomfortable openly discussing political issues, he added. 'Yet they did, because they shared their information with us. They let us post it publicly online for everybody to see, and many of them even stepped forward and started taking more prominent roles in advocacy, talking to lawmakers, to interest groups, to journalists.' Advertisement The Advertisement Now, Delaney himself has been swept up in the wave of grant cancellations because of the administration's targeting of funding for Harvard University. He is a research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and all the grants supporting his research, which examines the ways that climate change can exacerbate Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's, were terminated this month. STAT spoke to Delaney last week about the impetus for Grant Watch, and the escalating battle between the Trump administration and Harvard. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Hearing you say that you study climate change-related health disparities feels like a lot of buzzwords that this current administration doesn't prioritize. When I say it's health disparities and it's climate change, that's jargon. What I'm really talking about is making sure that everybody has an equal opportunity to be well. So that's the health disparities piece. Some groups don't have an equal opportunity, and we can use more jargon, like socially marginalized, this, that, and the other. But the bottom line is not everybody has the same equal opportunity to be healthy because of the communities that they live in or based on where they live, based on laws. I don't think what I do, when I speak plainly, is controversial. I hope this isn't naive, but I don't think that trying to help folks with Alzheimer's be healthier, have better days, should engender controversy. One thing that we can do to ensure that we communicate what motivates us every day better is to stop using these weaponized words that weren't controversial but are now and just have a more kind of simplified conversation about why I get out of bed every day, why I sit down and analyze data every day, and why I write every day, Advertisement When did you have the idea for Grant Watch? At the very beginning of March, there were news stories that I had read that said the federal government was terminating a large number of NIH grants. As I read these stories, my first question was, 'Which grants?' You want to know that, especially because I don't necessarily trust everything the government says. I looked, and there wasn't much information. There were only a couple of folks that had been willing to go on their record and share their story. So there were only, you know, a few examples of grants that I could find. My first thought was, 'This is surely illegal,' but it's going to be really hard to file a lawsuit if we don't have a record of what's happened. We need details. Litigation, especially at the trial court, is fact-intensive. I put my lawyer hat back on, and I thought if there was a way that anybody was going to bring a lawsuit, or if there was a way that anybody was going to sort of organize any other kind of advocacy … we needed a common factual record, and that's why I started it. You mentioned litigation — what do you view as your goal in the next couple of months? Advertisement Right now, our core goal continues to be to curate a record. It's really important to document and establish what happened in the first place. I think that's especially important because the government has taken steps that obscure that record. Through the beginning of April, not so much anymore, the government was putting forth information about which grants it terminated. They stopped doing that. But for five or six weeks, they did do that. The only thing that they've done since then is updated the document … by removing grants that had been reinstated. So if there's a lawsuit, and there's an injunction in a particular lawsuit, and there's a court order that says 'reinstate this grant,' then what the government does is they comply, they reinstate the grant, but they remove it from any federal database and from any other record any indication that it was terminated in the first place. So unless you have our Last week, I assume, this became very personal for you, watching . Can you walk me through what last week was like for you? Last week was surreal for a couple of reasons. Because I've been tracking these grants, I have a front-row seat to everything that the NIH has been doing to science generally. That includes grant terminations. That also includes these grant freezes. So they've said in a couple of instances, we're freezing all the grants to specific universities. What they mean by that is that they stopped paying their bills. They stopped paying out money on grants. So if a scientist spent some money, either on salary or for supplies or for whatever it was, then they would submit that, basically an invoice to the government, usually on a monthly basis, and then the government would pay them. When they freeze payments, they stop those payments. Advertisement The federal government had already frozen payments on all NIH grants, as well as many other types of grants, to Harvard back in April. And the reason that that matters is that the terminations from last week, on some very practical level, didn't have a huge impact. Things were already frozen. It was always going to take a court order or a negotiated settlement, which probably wasn't going to come to undo the freeze. It's still going to take a court order or a negotiated settlement to undo the terminations. All the grants were terminated, but the request from Harvard [to scientists] is to continue doing the research as if the grants were not terminated. That's important, because if you stop doing that research, and then later the court orders the government to start paying its bills again, then you can't collect, right? You can't collect money for work you didn't do. So it's a very long way of underscoring that the practical impact of the terminations was limited, and yet they had a huge impact for a couple of reasons. The terminations felt like a much bigger deal, and a freeze always felt temporary, whereas the terminations felt in some sense final. Even though I know on some cognitive, intellectual level that there wasn't a huge impact, it shook me. I told my colleagues, I was like, I know this doesn't change much, and yet I'm gutted. I just had to take some, take some time away, get outside. On my colleagues, it had a really, really, really profound impact, and was extremely demoralizing. Advertisement But the other thing that it did was it sharpened people's response. During a freeze, it feels a little temporary. We're still kind of moving along as if things are going to be unfrozen, maybe we'll reach a settlement. It didn't have that finality. As a consequence, I don't think people were ready to stand up and fight, not like they are now. These grants are the manifestations of a life's worth of work. You terminate that and now everybody's ready to fight. It takes a minute, right? It takes getting knocked down. You get the wind knocked out of you. But then when you get up, you're ready to go, frankly, in a way that people weren't before.
Miami Herald
14-05-2025
- Science
- Miami Herald
Three-fourths of NSF funding cuts hit education
The outlook for federal spending on education research continues to be grim. That became clear last week with more cutbacks to education grants and mass firings at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that supports both research and education in science, engineering and math. A fourth round of cutbacks took place on May 9. NSF observers were still trying to piece together the size and scope of this wave of destruction. A division focused on equity in education was eliminated and all its employees were fired. And the process for reviewing and approving future research grants was thrown into chaos with the elimination of division directors who were stripped of their powers. Meanwhile, there was more clarity surrounding a third round of cuts that took place a week earlier on May 2. That round terminated more than 330 grants, raising the total number of terminated grants to at least 1,379, according to Grant Watch, a new project launched to track the Trump administration's termination of grants at scientific research agencies. All but two of the terminated grants in early May were in the education division, and mostly targeted efforts to promote equity by increasing the participation of women and Black and Hispanic students in STEM fields. The number of activegrants by the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM within the education directorate was slashed almost in half, from 902 research grants to 461. Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms. Combined with two earlier rounds of NSF cuts at in April, education now accounts for more than half of the nearly 1,400 terminated grants and almost three-quarters of their $1 billion value. Those dollars will no longer flow to universities and research organizations. Cuts to STEM education dominate NSF grant terminations The post Three-fourths of NSF funding cuts hit education appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
Miami Herald
04-05-2025
- Science
- Miami Herald
Education research takes another hit in latest DOGE attack
Education research has a big target on its back. Of the more than 1,000 National Science Foundation grants killed last month by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, some 40 percent were inside its education division. These grants to further STEM education research accounted for a little more than half of the $616 million NSF committed for projects canceled by DOGE, according to Dan Garisto, a freelance journalist reporting for Nature, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that also covers science news. The STEM education division gives grants to researchers at universities and other organizations who study how to improve the teaching of math and science, with the goal of expanding the number of future scientists who will fuel the U.S. economy. Many of the studies are focused on boosting the participation of women or Black and Hispanic students. The division had a roughly $1.2 billion budget out of NSF's total annual budget of $9 billion. Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms. Neither the NSF nor the Trump administration has provided a list of the canceled grants. Garisto told me that he obtained a list from an informal group of NSF employees who cobbled it together themselves. That list was subsequently posted on Grant Watch, a new project to track the Trump administration's termination of grants at scientific research agencies. Garisto has been working with outside researchers at Grant Watch and elsewhere to document the research dollars that are affected and analyze the list for patterns. "For NSF, we see that the STEM education directorate has been absolutely pummeled," Noam Ross, a computational disease ecologist and one of the Grant Watch researchers, posted on Bluesky. At least two of the terminated research studies focused on improving artificial intelligence education, which President Donald Trump promised to promote in an April 23 executive order,"Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth." "There is something especially offensive about this EO from April 23 about the need for AI education… Given the termination of my grant on exactly this topic on April 26," said Danaé Metaxa in a post on Bluesky that has since been deleted. Metaxa, an assistant professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, was developing a curriculum on how to teach AI digital literacy skills by having students build and audit generative AI models. Related: Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3 Another canceled grant involved college students creating educational content about AI for social media to see if that content would improve AI literacy and the ability to detect misinformation. The lead researcher, Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, was almost midway through her two-year grant of less than $270,000. "There is not a DEI aspect of this work," said Fiesler. "My best guess is that the reason it was flagged was the word 'misinformation.'" Confusion surrounded the cuts. Bob Russell, a former NSF project officer who retired in 2024, said some NSF project officers were initially unaware that the grants they oversee had been canceled. Instead, university officials who oversee research were told, and those officials notified researchers at their institutions. Researchers then contacted their project officers. One researcher told me that the termination notice states that researchers may not appeal the decision, an administrative process that is ordinarily available to researchers who feel that NSF has made an unfair or incorrect decision. Related: DOGE's death blow to education studies Some of the affected researchers were attending the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Denver on April 26 when more than 600 grants were cut. Some scholars found out by text that their studies had been terminated. Normally festive evening receptions were grim. "It was like a wake," said one researcher. The Trump administration wants to slash NSF's budget and headcount in half, according to Russell. Many researchers expect more cuts ahead. Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@ This story about NSF education research cuts was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. The post Education research takes another hit in latest DOGE attack appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
