Over a hundred federal research grants have been terminated or issued stop work orders across Universities in Virginia under the Trump administration, and funding for these grants represents over a hundred million dollars.
That’s based on what research universities across Virginia have reported to radioIQ. Virginia Tech is seeing the largest number of affected grants, followed by the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
George Mason University reported that fewer than 19 grants have been affected but didn’t say how much money that includes.
Four other research universities in Virginia did not respond to requests from radioIQ, so there may be even more of an impact than is being reported in this initial story.
Universities aren’t providing many specifics about which projects are being affected, but radioIQ has spoken with several researchers, both on and off the record. Some people said many of the terminated grants appear to include some aspect of diversity and inclusion into their research. Researchers have shared that some of the studies affected explore how conspiracy theories and misinformation gets spread.
But many of the affected projects appear to have been targeted at random, without any clear link to why. Some examples include studies that look at silica dust inside mines, which cause the worst black lung cases among coal miners. Another is a project that studied birding.
Ashley Dayer is an associate professor at Virginia Tech in the department of fish and wildlife conservation, and she recently learned that three of her studies had been unexpectedly terminated through the National Science Foundation. She said she received no explanation about why her grants were terminated.
One of Dayer’s studies included participants from across the country who document the types of birds they can see visiting their bird feeder. She and other researchers were exploring how when people feed birds and observe birds it may affect their mental well-being.
Some of the participants were fourth grade students in a Blacksburg school. Dayer visited their class and gave presentations about how to look for birds, how to use binoculars, and asked the students to document the types of birds that visited their feeder.
The students’ teacher, Myra Leland, said the students appeared engaged and interested in the project. “A few of the students who need quiet moments to recenter, they get overwhelmed a little easily, that need a quiet moment,” Leland said. “And so they would ask if they could use the binoculars to watch the feeder during those moments and it became their way of resetting themselves.”
Leland said she really had hoped to do this project with her students again this spring, so when she learned it was cut she felt disappointed. They still have the birdfeeder Dayer provided outside her classroom, and they still fill it with birdseed, but the students aren’t recording bird sightings anymore for Dayer’s research.
This study was for three years and awarded $1.6 million, and Dayer said the project is about halfway through and they’ve already spent a good bit of that.
“Which is a big waste of taxpayer money in my mind that we have collected nearly all of the data,” Dayer said. “And the grant is terminated before we’re able to analyze the data.”
There are economic impacts to these cuts beyond just the researchers’ jobs, their graduate students and post-doctorate fellows who do much of the work in their labs. One study published last year in the journal “Studies in Higher Education” estimated for every million dollars in research funding, 9-10 jobs are created throughout the community, so there may be trickle down impacts in the service industry and other industries in towns and cities that surround research universities.
We'll be updating this story as more information and numbers become available.
If you’re a researcher in Virginia affected by federal cuts, you can share your story with Roxy Todd, either anonymously or on the record. She’s at roxytodd000@vt.edu or on signal @roxytoddNPR.01
