"Awards that are not aligned with NSF's priorities have been terminated, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation," said NSF’s webpage, Updates on NSF Priorities. 

Nature reported that 80% of all grants terminated by NSF were found on the database Texas Sen. Ted Cruz released in October of 2024 and re-released on Feb. 11. On that database, 38 of MSU’s NSF grants were flagged. 

Julie Libarkin, who the State News first spoke to after four of her grants were flagged by Cruz, has now had two NSF grants officially terminated. The first, STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellows in Participatory and Community-Engaged Research, funded six postdoctoral scholars to do STEM education research within and alongside indigenous communities. 

As a result of the termination, the six postdoctoral scholars are likely to lose a portion of their salaries, though they will end up getting their contracts paid out, Libarkin said. Additionally, the program manager for the project will lose her job.

Alongside the monetary losses, the scholars will lose connections with the community partners they've been working with. 

"We cannot spend any more money on the activities that they were conducting research in, and so that relationship with our community partners is broken…" Libarkin said. "It really damages more than just the people who are paid directly for the work."

Libarkin is also worried about the future of another one of her projects, which uses an NSF grant to fund postdoctoral researchers. 

The postdocs are researchers who have recently completed their PhD and have tenuous positions at the university, compared to permanent faculty members. When grants that fund their work are terminated, they will likely lose their position and pay at MSU. 

Vice President of Research and Innovation Doug Gage said junior researchers are some of the most vulnerable as the university is facing these sweeping cuts.

"We’re all in research because we love to better understand how the world works and so that’s what we do," Gage said. "It’s really upsetting to those of us who have been in research for a long time, but I think in particular to faculty who are just beginning."

Another grant terminated helped fund MSU Department of Sociology professor Stephanie Nawyn’s project, STEM Intersectional Equity in Departments. This project was part of a larger NSF program, ADVANCE, whose goal was to create organizational change for gender equity in STEM academic professions. 

Nawyn’s five-year project was focused on transforming departmental culture to be more inclusive of diverse viewpoints with the hope of creating better work environments for everyone. The three issues the project intended to target related to how faculty are assessed, how faculty workload is distributed, and how leadership opportunities are available, Nawyn said. 

The project was done in collaboration with two other groups at Wayne State University and Ohio State University. The team was in the process of creating a toolkit when they received the termination notice on April 25. 

Nawyn said she suspected their work would be targeted at some point when policy changes began after Trump took office on Jan. 20. 

She thought that, if their funding was stopped, it would be done at the two-year mark in September of this year — when the team’s work would be reviewed to receive funding for years three through five of the project. In anticipation of this, Nawyn and her counterparts at Wayne State and Ohio State were working to have something done by September. Instead, they received their termination notice much earlier than expected. 

"We were hoping we would at least have something that our own individual institutions could use and then we think about, OK, is there a way to promote this with no funding or much less funding," Nawyn said. "At this point though, we’re going to struggle to have a finished product at all."

Now the team is scrambling to simultaneously close down the project and file an appeal against the termination notice. Libarkin is also trying to appeal her grants' terminations. 

Nawyn is doubtful the appeal will be successful, but said it is a vital step nonetheless. If anything, the process will bring the scientific community together across institutions as others file appeals. 

"When things happen like this, where the lawfulness is even in question, let alone, is this in the best interest of science — I don't think you just accept it at face value and shrug your shoulders," Nawyn said. "…I think we have to do what we can to make a stand."

Engaging in the appeal process requires significant labor, alongside the work to close down projects and the emotional toll that losing vital funding and work has. Libarkin said the past few weeks and months have been traumatic. 

"I feel it physically in my body," Libarkin said. "Waiting for the next shoe to drop, for my next grant to get terminated … it is its own form of harm."

While MSU is doing its best to support faculty members who are losing their grants, Gage said, there is no way for the university to make up for all of the funding that has been lost.

Alternative sources of funding, such as private foundations, are another possible option. However, getting grants is a long, competitive process, Gage said.

Additionally, private funding won't be able to make up for the federal funding that has been lost, Nawyn said. 

"The amount of money that foundations have to give to different research and programs that faculty and the university are doing is a drop in the bucket compared to what the federal government funds," she said.