The Trump administration has cut billions of dollars in research funding nearing Donald Trump’s first 290 days in office of his second term. These disruptions to federal research funding have impacted research activity at UC Santa Barbara as millions of dollars in grants have, at one point or another, been revoked from researchers and faculty at UCSB. 

UCSB history professor Juan Cobo Betancourt was one of those directly affected by the cuts to research funding. The work affected by funding cuts mainly concerns the digital humanities, in particular the digitizing of important collections and materials from Latin American institutions. 

“By the time we got the green light to begin work, we got the award letter on April 1 of this year. On April 2, we received a letter saying that our grant had been terminated,” Cobo Betancourt said. “This was part of the broader attack on the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) by the Department of Government Efficiency, in which they basically went in and closed a whole series of offices, including the Office of Digital Humanities, shut down a long list of programs and placed a lot of people who worked for the NEH on furlough.” 

In the face of these cuts, academic associations have responded with lawsuits interdicting the cuts and restoring their funding, at least for now. For example, funding cuts from the NEH have been put on hold after the Authors Guild and several NEH grantees filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s mass termination of their grants. A federal judge temporarily blocked the cancellations, but the grant money has not yet been paid out while the case remains in litigation.

However, other grants have now been permanently cut by the federal government. For example, professors whose projects were funded by grants from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have been forced to abandon their projects due to stop-work orders from the federal government. Stop-work orders are notices from the government that require a temporary halt to all or part of a project’s activities.

Professor Mark Buntaine of the UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management was one such beneficiary from USAID funding. Buntaine conducted research in improving soil quality in Malawi and reducing farmers’ reliance on coca production in Peru with funds from USAID. However, earlier this year, he received stop-work orders from the federal government and the projects, especially in Malawi, were enormously disrupted. 

“Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, certainly in the bottom 10 countries in terms of per capita income,” Buntaine said. “People were promised modest but significant payments for keeping trees alive [for] over two years, and those payments are to this point not able to be met because we don’t have the funds in place with the cancellation of this award.” 

In Peru, Buntaine’s work may continue at a smaller scale with limited university support. “In terms of the work in Peru, we were able to find some limited support on campus to continue with the research work and hire a graduate student for one quarter to help us continue with the analysis, but it did slow us down significantly.”

Beyond the immediate loss of individual projects, the cuts pose a threat to the structure of academic research, particularly the pipeline of doctoral education.

“The federal government has been a major supporter of doctoral education across the country,” Buntaine said. “As that support diminishes, I think there are a number of challenges facing doctoral programs around the country.” 

Without the consistent funding of federal grants, which typically pay for a doctoral student’s tuition, stipend and benefits — a cost that can approach $100,000 per year — universities are struggling with how to sustain their programs. 

“You are seeing programs grapple with what doctoral education looks like when there is less funding available from the federal government,” he explained, noting that many institutions are already “cutting the sizes of their doctoral classes.”

Private donors, though willing to sponsor some projects, are not able to fill the role previously occupied by the federal government. 

“The other thing that is challenging is that private donors, in my experience so far, are less willing to sign up for the bargain of funding graduate students and doctoral students in particular,” Buntaine said. 

For faculty, the loss of these research grants means losing the very engines of their research: the graduate students and post-doctoral scholars who dedicate blocks of time to data management, analysis and execution. As a result, faculty are being forced to shift their programs. Professors like Buntaine have reduced the scope of their projects and began focusing on new, domestic projects like climate adaptation.

“I have shifted some of my research focus to other areas, recognizing that there are going to be fewer opportunities to do research on our foreign aid programs that have supported environmental management activities around the world. And so I’ve taken up and tried to build out projects related to climate impacts and climate adaptation, some of which are actually local,” Buntaine said. “People, like myself, are going to need to broaden what it is that they do with their time.” 

The Gevirtz Graduate School of Education (GGSE), having lost grants targeted toward improving bilingual and mental health education, has worked to contort itself to the standards of the new administration. 

“[Many grants] have to do with expanding the ability of educators and mental health practitioners to support all students … [DEI has] kind of become a synonym for, we’re going to do something just for this group of students. And we’re going to do something just for this group of students which is against the intent,” Jill Sharkey, associate dean for research and outreach at the GGSE, said. “The current administration sees that as potentially being biased and serving only certain communities. So we’re trying to reframe the work to make it clear that it’s inclusive.” 

Moreover, GGSE is also grappling with how to maintain its programs with limited university support. 

“We are going to get recommendations from the [UCSB] Graduate Division on how many students we can support with the block grants they’ll allocate. And then we have to look and analyze our available TAs and make a little logic puzzle of ‘How many students can we support?’ So we’ve already kind of shrunk our grad student population,” Sharkey said. “The thing that the campus is going to ensure is that the funding for our current graduate students is not impacted. Whatever it takes, we’re dedicated to that.”

The UAW 4811 union, which represents postdocs and other academic workers in the UC system, has been on the front lines, fighting cuts through legal action, state-level lobbying and local organizing. Tessa Cookmeyer, who serves as the unit chair for UCSB postdocs, described the union’s multi-pronged strategy. 

On the legal front, the union has joined lawsuits against the termination of grants.

“Across the UC system and other interested parties have filed lawsuits that our union has joined onto and individual postdocs have joined as plaintiffs to these lawsuits. So we’re trying to pursue getting that grant funding restored in court through supporting these lawsuits,” Cookmeyer said. 

According to Cookmeyer, to combat the federal gap, the union has focused heavily on the state level. “[Y]ou may have heard that the governor’s office, Governor Newsom, proposed cutting the UC budget by 8%. And our union was one of the interested parties that lobbied really hard to get that reversed,” Cookmeyer said. 

“We’re really trying to secure the future of California research … through supporting this bond initiative to create this California science research agency that would fund research in the state,” Cookmeyer said. The bond is expected to go before voters next year.

Furthermore, the union is pushing the university to protect international academic workers, who face specific threats under the current administration. 

“Our union circulated a petition and had more than 10,000 people sign on to it … The first is that we want a legal defense fund for international workers who lose their job or have threats to their immigration status, so that’s to help them get legal counsel so that they can pursue the remedies in court. We also want them to provide financial support to workers who lose their jobs due to visa-related issues. If the Trump administration decides to revoke some particular person’s visa, we don’t want that person to not be able to continue to live,” Cookmeyer said. 

“And then we want them to not allow [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and other federal agents onto campus without judicial warrants … And then the last one is affirming and defending the rights of international workers and students [to] free speech and academic freedom.”

While the full extent of federal funding cuts and their ramifications remains undecided as the government remains shut down, the moves made by the Trump administration so far have rattled the foundations of academia within and outside UCSB. The future of research remains uncertain. 

According to Cookmeyer, the message from organized labor is one of resolve. 

“Our union is fighting back against these cuts in a variety of different ways. And a lot of our efforts have been successful in the short term, and we’re hopeful they’ll be successful in the long term. We’re not giving in. We’re fighting back,” Cookmeyer said.

A version of this article appeared on p. 12 of the Nov. 6 print edition of the Daily Nexus.