Casey Fiesler suspects she wound up in the federal government’s crosshairs for attempting to combat misinformation.
The ɲٳ a $268,428 grant in the fall of 2024. The funds were slated for a project teaming up CU media and communication students with information science students to create educational social media content about artificial intelligence.
Scholars well-versed in communication would learn more about the complicated nature of AI. Information science students would learn how to become better science communicators. And social media users would benefit from accurate, compelling information.
That was the goal.
But Fiesler was among the legion of academics whose research was . The grant terminations stalled or stopped progress on scholarship that the Trump administration deemed out of alignment with its mission — largely, research surrounding , misinformation and climate change.
“The project just died, and my assumption is the reason it got cut was the abstract had the word ‘misinformation’ in it,” Fiesler said. The Trump administration focused on canceling grants across the country , stating this kind of research could infringe on protected speech rights.
In Colorado, more than $375 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, , and the were disrupted — either terminated and reinstated through , or axed altogether — in the first 18 months of the Trump administration, according to the .
Some of the terminated grant money has since been reinstated, and some , but Colorado academics say the damage is far-reaching beyond the individual grants. When federal money dried up, some schools let researchers go. Others chose to leave, unwilling or unable to deal with the months of financial uncertainty.
The loss in funding hurt researchers’ careers and stunted young scholars from entering the profession, experts say. But, in the bigger picture, in rescinded research dollars across the nation blighted scientific progress and innovation for years to come, academics said.
“The U.S. has for a long time been a respected source of innovation in knowledge generation, and thatap what we’re losing,” said Lynn Schofield Clark, a professor at the who lost a $150,000 grant last year. “That’s something we can’t get back.”
Getting ‘DOGE’d’
More than 170 grants were disrupted in 2025 among Colorado research institutions CU Boulder, DU, Colorado State University and the Colorado School of Mines, according to those schools.
At CU Boulder, a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant intended to reduce racially biased beliefs through teaching human genetics in high school biology was axed. At CSU, a $6 million grant studying the growth of artificial joints to help osteoarthritis patients met its demise. At Mines, $105,000 toward increasing degree completion for underrepresented students in STEM was terminated.
DU’s Schofield Clark, a journalism and media studies professor, lost a grant from the for her work incorporating local Chicano history into common curriculum classes at the university, so all students had the chance to learn Chicano history in general education courses.
“We wanted to see if we could look into resources and generate new resources and teach our students by enabling them to have direct contact with the cultural arts scene, the history scene and hear from people who had an impact on shaping this area,” Schofield Clark said.
The program, which reached about 350 DU students, kicked off in the spring semester of 2023. The grant funding allowed Schofield Clark to take DU students to local Chicano festivals, the History Colorado museum and music events, and to bring Chicano community members to campus to tell their stories directly to students.
It was going so well that last year, Schofield Clark and two of her graduate students went to a Chicano studies academic conference to present their work. At the conference, they learned their grant funding had been “DOGE’D,” as Schofield Clark and other researchers called the federal funding terminations.
The , or DOGE, was one of Trump’s first initiatives during his second term, initially spearheaded by Elon Musk. The initiative, which , was “maximizing governmental efficiency and productivity.” The department is responsible for mass federal layoffs and the termination of more than 15,800 federal grants across agencies totaling about $49 billion, .
Many of those terminations targeted grants associated with marginalized populations — like researching how a new drug might affect women or how to better recruit and retain students of color in science programs.
Schofield Clark’s vision of bringing the Chicano community to DU students put a target on her back. The professor recalled receiving a termination letter from the federal government with a “very insulting” tone similar to “we are rescinding this grant and giving it to people who are more worthy,” she said.
“That definitely derailed things,” Schofield Clark said.
The program slowed. The university funded what it could, Schofield Clark said.
At DU, 21 grants were terminated under the Trump administration, though all but five have been reinstated, said Corinne Lengsfeld, the university’s vice provost for research and graduate education.
Still, Lengsfeld said research expenditures at the university have decreased “significantly,” about 20%, during Trump’s second term, as faculty continue to face long delays in federal grant approvals and ongoing uncertainty.
“Because of all this, we are not going to be a top, intellectually rich country soon, and that is concerning,” Lengsfeld said.
Schofield Clark’s grant could now be reinstated.
After losing in court following the agency’s termination of more than 1,400 grants, the National Endowment for the Humanities started offering terminated grant recipients the
Schofield Clark hopes to receive the rest of her funding and continue the work. She wants to share her history curriculum with other universities so they can implement similar programs — a step she wasn’t able to take after the funding loss.
While her own funding loss was frustrating, Schofield Clark noted broader implications. Within the past decade, she said, researchers have contended with the reality that so much academic scholarship has advanced through a white, Western lens.
“We’ve had a lot of knowledge gaps, and we need to address those because thatap part of who we are as a country,” Schofield Clark said. “This was a major disruption and a major slap in the face for a large population of people who have every right to have more knowledge about their history and health and everything.”
‘The disruptions have been real’
Full grant terminations have not been the only hit to academic research under the Trump administration.
Rescinded grants that ultimately were reinstated through court challenges left universities in limbo long enough to either force them to lay off researchers or cause frustrated faculty to quit or go elsewhere, said Cass Moseley, CSU’s vice president for research.
“A lot of faculty are trying to either pivot to slightly adjacent work thatap maybe more fundable for the federal government or seeking non-federal sources, although we know non-federal funding cannot replace federal money,” Moseley said.
CSU saw nearly 70 grants disrupted since last year, totaling more than $84 million, according to university tracking. Many of those were climate-related or tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion, Moseley said.
Even so, Moseley said there are huge delays in grant approvals and more complicated processes to apply for and receive federal funding, straining a nation that was once a thriving research enterprise.
“The disruptions have been real,” said Massimo Ruzzene, CU Boulder’s vice chancellor of research and innovation.
Ruzzene is worried about the hit to workforce development. Young academics just starting their research careers were seeing their work halted by funding cuts before they even got started, Ruzzene said.
“This impacts the training of a new generation of scientists and scholars,” Ruzzene said.
Postdoctoral scholar Alice Taylor was thrilled to be hired to work on a DU project researching anti-authoritarian movements led by women and LGBTQ+ activists worldwide.
In April of 2025, the $486,000 National Science Foundation grant that funded Taylor’s position was terminated, and the emerging scholar was left scrambling to pay rent.
“There’s a reason why authoritarian regimes go after universities first,” Taylor said. “Whatap happened with Trump and DOGE is straight from authoritarian playbooks. Universities have the potential to stand up and be leaders and defend what universities are best at: freedom of speech, having robust faculty unions, high-quality, critical education.”
A new threat
The Trump administration is trying to assert even more control over academic research as the proposes — a framework governing how federal agencies administer funds.
Colorado academics, , spoke of the overhaul in cataclysmic terms, noting the proposed guidelines would politicize research and innovation in a way that would be hard to pull back.
The proposal would authorize federal agencies to change or cut awards based on shifting presidential priorities and take away existing appeals processes, academic experts said.
“Those terms and conditions reflect the presidentap agenda in some ways that are quite hard for universities,” Moseley said.
The Trump administration said the changes are intended to improve transparency, accountability and oversight for federal grants.
Meanwhile, the the “harmful” proposal would be “extremely disruptive to the lifesaving research that the federal government funds and oversees.”
These overarching observations about the federal government’s impact on life-saving, innovative, revolutionary academic research are what most concerned the Colorado academics who spoke to The Denver Post.
“The loss in funding, of course, will have immediate operational impacts for students and researchers,” Ruzzene said. “It will also have scientific impacts as researchers cannot do their work. It will have workforce impacts. There will be less innovation — less products, less patents, less industry partnerships. This erosion will be difficult and take a long time to rebuild. That will have an impact on our ability to be prosperous economically as a nation, to fund careers for our children, to have scientific progress.”
“While we are in challenging times, we need to keep focus on what we do best, which is creating knowledge and transferring that knowledge to our students,” Ruzzene said.
