Concerned. Uncertain. Worried. Unsure.
These were the most common words members of the Science Societies — including American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and Soil Science Society of America — participating in an Aug. 13 webinar used to describe the current agricultural research funding world they live in today.
“There has been a lot of disruption in the normal funding process, especially at USDA,” said Julie McClure, agricultural policy expert with Torrey Advisory Group and the Societies, who MCed the webinar. “There have been a lot of actions taken by this administration that have implications for the research enterprise.”
Those actions included the deferred resignation program offered to federal employees in late January and the late February requirement that all federal agencies plan for and implement reorganizations and reductions in force. On July 8, USDA issued a guidance that, among other things, restricts who federal researchers can co-author research articles with. By the July 24 announcement of USDA’s planned reorganization, it had already shed over 15% of its total workforce.
According to panelists, the on-the-ground results have been the chilling effect of uncertainty, lost research, lost opportunities for students, and a potential future where public-private partnerships in ag research are in doubt and research is driven by politics rather than science.
Uncertainty abounds
The sharp reductions in staffing at USDA agencies have left university researchers awash in uncertainty according to panelists. For example, Michael Thompson, a soil science professor at Iowa State University and past SSSA president, described his experience at Iowa State University where soil scientists collaborate closely with colleagues in USDA agencies and programs.
“The USDA reductions in force have affected personnel and programs in the National Cooperative Soil Survey Program,” he explained, describing it as a collaborative initiative of local, state, federal agencies and experiment stations that improves soil maps around the country.
“Because of the reductions in personnel and the potential reorganization, there’s really a lot of concern that USDA’s larger plans for reorganization could reduce or eliminate the National Cooperative Soil Survey Program,” he added. “The future of that kind of federal-state collaboration is certainly in serious doubt.”
The funding disruptions have also cast doubt beyond just academia, according to panelist Colin Campbell, vice president of research, development, engineering and software at Meter Group, an agricultural and environmental research and technology company.
“USDA funding is a big part of how we fund our research to make more instrumentation,” he said. Campbell described worry over if already granted funding or personnel will be pulled as resulting in inaction. “For example, the Climate Smart Agriculture grant that we worked really heavily on and all got funded, but now the work’s not getting done.”
Lost opportunities
Panelists talked about lost opportunities. In some cases, finished government-funded research cannot cross the proverbial finish line because of recent changes, according to Thompson, pointing to the recent guidance that bars USDA employees from “authoring or co-authoring a scholarly publication” without some logistically taxing requirements.
“Completed research projects cannot now be published,” he said of the situation.
Panelists cited the obvious loss of research opportunities as well; canceled grants and pulled funding. Thompson said there had been 14 projects canceled or stopped permanently, including two in his soil science department. One project that dealt with renewable natural gas production from anaerobic digestion of biomass and manure mixture, while the other focused on training technical service providers about soil sampling for carbon content.
“The loss of funding led to the layoff of a professional soil scientist in our department and to shifting support for grad students to other projects.”
The impact on students was a point of concern for panelists. Diane Rowland, director of the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station at the University of Maine, described the impact on workforce development as huge.
“We’re training the next generation that will feed into the workforce,” she said.
Questions about the future
On Aug. 7, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that changed oversight processes for federal grants. Very generally, it requires federal agencies to appoint one or more senior appointees to review federal grant applications to ensure they “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.” This was an area of uncertainty for the future.
“There are a lot of questions about exactly how this executive order will be enacted, what that means for particularly universities that receive a lot of federal funding through different grants,” McClure noted. “I do think this will add significant time to the process of grant review and funding distribution. And obviously a lot more scrutiny, and scrutiny that won’t be scientific in nature, it will be more of a political scrutiny.”
She said her understanding is that, for the USDA specifically, very few of the necessary appointees that have either been made or cleared through Congress where applicable.
“There are just so many hours in the day that a single person can be reviewing what are often very technical proposals,” she said, adding that reports of delays on grant funding or responses on grants are unsurprising in that situation.
Thompson also raised concerns about the future of independent science with the closing of EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which began in July.
“That office was EPA’s independent science arm that conducted research on detecting pollutant mobility and toxicity in soils and water,” he said, adding the office informed policy decisions and funded many soil- and water-related grants at universities like ISU.
“While it’s possible that a new EPA office on applied science and environmental solutions may be created, its science is not going to be politically independent like the office of research and development was,” he said. “A lot of soil scientists like me have had funding from EPA. The future of that funding is in serious doubt.”
