A University of Maine initiative exploring ways to bring renewable energy to Indigenous and rural communities was gaining momentum this spring when the Trump administration abruptly cancelled its $1 million federal grant.

The Environmental Protection Agency award is one of dozens of federal grants to Maine research institutions that have been cancelled or paused as the Trump administration cracks down on what it sees as wasteful spending. This includes cuts targeting environmental justice initiatives and climate change research. 

The UMaine project, which was in its second year of a Science to Achieve Results award, had pulled together more than 100 people from the Wabanaki Nations and rural communities throughout Maine to discuss local renewable energy goals and pathways to reach them. 

Over $900,000 of the award was unused at the time of the cancellation, according to project lead and University of Maine professor Sharon Klein. 

“We’ve been really smart with our money,” Klein said. “It was definitely a big blow to get the termination because we felt like we were… kind of just hitting our stride.”

The grant was briefly reinstated on June 5 — only to be revoked again four days later. 

“There was no explanation for anything,” Klein said. “You just get these emails. So they’re like, ‘It’s terminated,’ ‘Nope, it’s back,’ ‘Nope, it’s terminated again.’”

The EPA did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

Without that funding, Klein fears that some renewable energy projects in rural and Indigenous communities may never get off the ground. Local opposition to solar and wind projects is common, and the development process is burdensome. She’s still meeting with community members and advising them on grant applications, but she’s spread thin.

“We risk communities being unprepared for the disasters that are coming for them with climate change, because they haven’t had the capacity to… prepare,” Klein said.

While much of the initiative’s efforts have been curtailed by the grant cancellation, one of the positions it funded has been salvaged by a grant from the Maine state government: the coordinator for climate and energy resilience projects with the Wabanaki Nations.

The coordinator, Kelsey Flores, continues to support the first update to the Penobscot Nation’s strategic energy plan in 20 years, training of new technicians to install energy-efficient appliances, and recently secured $15,000 for emergency preparedness kits for households. 

Though the swift rescission of the STAR grant caused the cancellation of emerging energy projects, Flores says there’s still hope to bring electric heat pumps, solar and other projects to Wabanaki communities.

The grant cancellation “is affecting almost every initiative that we have,” Flores said, “and we really are trying to restructure things so that we can still move forward.”

The University of Maine isn’t the only research institution that has seen cuts to federally funded climate change initiatives.

Down the coast in Portland, the nonprofit Gulf of Maine Research Institute has had $4 million in federal awards paused or terminated since February, according to the organization’s chief scientific officer Janet Duffy-Anderson.

Federal funding supports between 40 and 50 percent of the institute’s budget, and abrupt changes this spring meant interruptions to long-term climate research projects that require consistent data collection.

One of the early casualties involved the institute’s “energy solutions” program, said Dave Reidmiller, the nonprofit’s chief impact officer. That included an initiative to understand concerns lobster and groundfish fishermen might have with the development of offshore wind projects. 

The program received two federal awards — one from the EPA, another from the Department of Energy. Both awards were frozen after Trump took office, halting GMRI’s engagement work with the fishing industry. The DOE grant was restored months later, but the EPA grant was terminated.

“They were really intended to elevate the interests and concerns of the fishing industry in the offshore wind development process,” said Reidmiller. “A core piece of that was making sure that the best available science and technical information was in their hands to weigh in in an informed manner with the federal decision makers.”

In addition to the stop-and-go pauses and termination of existing awards, research institutions across the country have been grappling with a longer review process that federal agencies are now instituting before releasing funds. 

This includes funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where awards over $100,000 have to be reviewed and approved by the head of the U.S. Commerce Department, Axios reported in April.

Any funding pauses could interrupt the institute’s ongoing monitoring of ocean conditions and the effects of climate change, according to Duffy-Anderson. Such interruptions cause mariners to lose access to buoy data that informs how they navigate the ocean, and could diminish the accuracy of GMRI’s long-term forecasts and projections.

“Not only are your weather forecasts going to be probably less skillful and less accurate, but the model forecast for the longer term (models) are going to be inhibited as well,” said Reidmiller. “So it’s a real disservice to anybody who cares about the weather.”

Researchers are concerned about what these changes and the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts suggest for federal funding opportunities going forward, including at other nonprofit research outfits like the Downeast Institute.

“NOAA in general funds so many important programs across the nation and we hope that funding will continue to flow,” said Kyle Pepperman, associate director of the Downeast Institute. “We are worried but we are also very diversified so we should be able to weather this storm.”

Duffy-Anderson with GMRI was blunt about the impacts reduced funding opportunities would have on her institution and beyond. GMRI is part of a broader research ecosystem that is studying the impacts of climate change along Maine’s coast. 

“If we don’t have opportunities for continued research,” Duffy-Anderson said, “it really slows that information exchange and is going to have a significant impact in the future.”

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.