By Erik Stokstad
Georg Jander was delighted in May when a grant he’d submitted last year to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to study how maize responds to attacking insects received favorable reviews. But now, 4 months later, he still doesn’t know whether it will be funded. The same cloud of uncertainty hangs over the heads of many agricultural scientists, as USDA continues to postpone grant decisions and fails to announce many new funding opportunities. Jander, a Boyce Thompson Institute plant biologist, says he and “a lot of other people are just frustrated because we don’t know what to do next.”
USDA typically awards more than $1.7 billion in funding each year for a wide range of research on food, nutrition, and agriculture. But by the end of this fiscal year it will have awarded just over $1 billion, according to its public database. Some approved grants have yet to receive a single dollar for work that was expected to begin earlier this year. “We’ve missed an entire field season,” one agricultural researcher says.
It’s not unusual for new administrations to review funding programs. But after President Donald Trump took office in January, his administration went further. It ordered USDA to freeze funding of all awarded grants, a stoppage that lasted for much of the first half of the year. The aim was to identify grants that included work related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, which were canceled wholesale. The agency also canceled grants to universities for research related to climate-smart agriculture. And it stopped awarding new grants.
Other funding agencies took similar steps. But USDA remains behind even as other agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, have ramped up grant funding in recent months. “It’s been very, very delayed,” says Julie McClure of the Torrey Advisory Group, which lobbies on behalf of the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America. (USDA did not respond to a request for comment.)
Competitive grants, which fund research at universities and other organizations, have fared the worst. As of 16 September, with 2 weeks left before the end of this fiscal year, USDA’s center for extramural research funding, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), had awarded just 558 competitive grants, according to its public database. That’s 68% fewer than during the prior fiscal year—and $741 million less in competitively awarded research funds. In contrast, the $800 million of so-called capacity funds, which are largely distributed by formulas to certain universities, has all been committed.
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