The day he took office, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order aimed at terminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which the administration viewed as “immense public waste and shameful discrimination.”

The directive reversed years of public and private sector efforts, including an executive order issued by former President Joe Biden in 2021, designed to bolster opportunities for populations that have long been underrepresented, particularly in STEM fields.

President Trump’s order has had a broad impact on institutions around the country, with agencies including NASA and the National Institutes of Health altering websites and eliminating requirements for inclusivity. To align with the new edict, researchers in Maine are changing the way they talk about their work.

Scientists told The Monitor they have rewritten grant proposals to remove language that, in many cases, before January would have been required to secure funding but now is considered a disqualifier. They deleted, for example, verbiage around diversity, supporting underrepresented individuals and similar “broader impact” considerations.

“The minute the election happened, we started trying to change how we spoke about our work,” said Deborah Bronk, president and CEO of Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay.  

“You can justify our work many different ways, whether it’s climate change or fisheries or the economy or coastal resilience. We are not talking about climate change a lot these days with most audiences because that’s verboten right now.”

Other researchers reported similar changes. 

“We have been making more of an effort to look at the types of language that we include in our grants,” said Jessica Chertow, vice president of research at MaineHealth Institute for Research in Scarborough, the research arm of Maine’s largest health care provider. The research institute relies on federal funding for nearly half of its $52 million budget, according to Chertow.

“We are trying to adhere to the rules and guidance of the new administration but also maintain our beliefs and our values,” said Chertow.

Most of the MHIR’s federal funding comes from the NIH, which recently terminated two grants the institute had been awarded, including one that provided support for early-career investigators. A key word search led NIH officials to mistakenly conclude the funding was being used to support work on vaccine hesitancy, even though the topic had not been studied in years, according to Chertow. The cancelled grant meant the loss of $1.46 million over two years.

At MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor, President Hermann Haller said he and his colleagues are ensuring grant proposals are submitted with language that reflects the priorities of the current administration. 

“It’s really about ideology, and that’s fine,” said Haller. “We have also re-written proposals that had been funded to fit the current goals of this administration.”

Several organizations said they have also changed the balance between fundamental research — sometimes referred to as high-risk, high-reward research — and more applied, translational work that can more quickly be transformed into practical health interventions or commercial applications.

“We did a strong pivot towards more applied, more commercially relevant research,” said Bronk, noting that the organization was in the middle of a strategic planning exercise when President Trump was elected last November. “We definitely are taking a different tack.”

Bigelow Lab, like other groups heavily reliant on federal funding, is also looking to other sources of revenue, such as increasing use of its fee-for-service analytical facilities and leasing out laboratory space to entrepreneurs working in related fields, said Bronk.

Both Haller, of MDI Bio Lab, and Chertow, of MHRI, said they are similarly shifting what they emphasize.

“Rather than pivot, it’s more about diversification,” said Chertow. “We’re very strong on the basic science side. We have an enormous opportunity to grow the clinical and translational research we do…to build up the clinical research arm of the Institute by leveraging our strengths — access to clinical data and access to patient populations.” 

Like her colleagues, Chertow is also focused on new revenue sources, including philanthropy and more robust industry partnerships. 

“I’m encouraging the researchers and the [principal investigators] within the Institute to really start thinking in a broader sense about their research funding portfolios.”

For the past 25 years, NIH support has allowed MDI Bio Lab to host promising undergraduates for summer research fellowships. The Lab depends on federal grants and contracts to cover about 44 percent of its $18 million operating budget. When the NIH funds for summer fellowships were unexpectedly blocked earlier this year, Haller and his team scrambled to launch an emergency fundraising campaign to avoid having to cancel the program. 

Thanks to philanthropic contributions, MDI Bio Lab ultimately was able to preserve the program, with 23 students spending the summer gaining bench experience at its Bar Harbor campus. 

“Independent research organizations like ours depend on federal funding,” Haller said. “Today, there’s enormous uncertainty: What will be funded in the future?”

Funding cuts, executive orders sow uncertainty

The close knit community of independent scientific research centers in Maine typically lacks the tuition revenues and large endowments universities count on to help buffer the blow of federal funding cuts. In the past decade, federal agencies have funded more than a billion dollars in biomedical research in the state, according to a Monitor analysis of federal data. 

That has made it particularly challenging for Maine organizations to navigate the abrupt, often unexplained cuts and delays in federal funding and executive orders that have upended the way science has been supported in this country for decades. 

The turmoil has been “gut-wrenching,” said Bronk, of Bigelow Laboratory.

According to Bronk, about half of Bigelow’s $20 million annual budget is supported by federal funding, including from the National Science Foundation, NASA and NOAA, among others. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency cancelled a multi-year grant to Bigelow without explanation, only to reinstate the funding weeks later, said Bronk.

“The big impact to us is just the uncertainty.”

Long a champion of federal support for science, Sen. Susan Collins (R) has tried to use her clout as chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations to serve as a bulwark against the worst cuts. But the ability of the state’s senior senator to insulate Maine scientists from the whiplash of federal funding is limited.

“There is no investment that pays greater dividends to American families than our investment in biomedical research,” Collins said in a statement to The Maine Monitor. “The deep funding cuts proposed by the Administration would undo years of Congressional investment. We also risk falling behind China and other countries that are increasing their investment in biomedical research and recruiting U.S. scientists and researchers.”  

The Trump administration has proposed reducing federal support for scientific research by more than 30 percent in the fiscal year that begins October 1. Some NIH institutes would vanish under a proposed reorganization that would consolidate the agency’s 27 institutes and centers into just eight. When the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, funds in the budgets of NIH and other research agencies that remain uncommitted will expire.

Under Collins’ leadership, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted in July to reverse the cuts. Still, the full Senate must vote to restore funding, after which they will have to reconcile differences with the House.

Scientists are also anticipating changes in the process for awarding federal research grants. An executive order issued in early August will have political appointees review and approve funding opportunities and awards for “consistency with agency priorities and the national interest.” 

This is a major shift in the decades-old grant-making process, in which career civil servants have overseen such decisions.

“Science should not be political,” said Bronk. “I’m speaking out more and more, not to be disrespectful of the current administration. They were elected. They have a right to put their fingerprint on our federal government. What I try to focus on is: these are the consequences of federal actions.” 

Researchers prepare for loss of foreign talent

Scientific organizations around the state have also been bracing for a loss of foreign talent. A combination of State Department staffing cuts, travel bans, and the perception that America has become hostile to foreign-born workers resulted in a drop in international students at campuses around the country this fall, particularly in graduate programs and especially in the STEM fields, according to reporting by NPR.

So far, the drop has yet to materialize in Maine, which has fewer international students than the rest of the country. Scientific research organizations said they have seen some defections but are wary of more. 

Haller, of MDI Bio Lab, said at least one foreign postdoctoral scientist decided not to join his lab because of the environment, and Bronk said her institute lost a promising postdoc who was already on staff because the person didn’t “feel welcome in this country anymore.” 

European institutions are actively recruiting the best U.S.-based scientists, said Haller. In the past, foreign organizations trying to lure investigators from American labs found it difficult to attract the best researchers. Now, said Haller, they have more applicants than they can accommodate. 

“We have an excellent reputation in the field, and we have a really lovely culture, so we are a highly desirable destination if you are a marine scientist,” said Bronk, of Bigelow Lab. “But we can’t counter the fear of being detained at an airport and being shipped off somewhere without due process, so it’s just going to get harder.” 

Losing foreign-born and trained scientists, she added, risks losing the diversity of perspectives that makes American scientific institutions so impactful.

“Part of the magic of cutting-edge research is lots of different ways of thinking coming around the table. If we fill all the spots with Americans, we will have lost this critical part of our secret sauce.” 

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.