2025-05-08: Thank you to NEH, IMLS, DoD Minerva, and NSF

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I have the distinction, or dis-honor, of having all of my active federal research grants terminated by the current administration. None of the grants were researching anything especially controversial, but they were all funded by programs that have been effectively shut down. To add insult to injury, the termination letters each stated that our research project no longer “effectuates” the goals of the funding program and, in one case, "no longer serves the interest of the United States," which feels a bit harsh. Further, we were given no advance notice -- the terminations were effective on the same day we received notice (one of which was at 4:30pm on a Friday).

I apologize for the length of this post (I am a professor, after all), but I've broken things up into sections so you can skip around as desired. 

Executive Summary: Academic research is essential for the advancement of technology and scientific/medical breakthroughs and is how we train the next generation of researchers. American research universities have become the envy of the world largely thanks to the support of the US federal government through the awarding of highly-competitive research grants. I am greatly saddened by what already enacted and proposed future cuts will mean for basic research and research universities in the US.

Background on Academic Research Funding

I'm planning to share this with friends outside of academia, so here's some background on how academic research funding works. 

Faculty Summer Salary. Most faculty at research universities like ODU have 9-month contracts with the university. We are expected to fund our summer salaries by obtaining research grants, most often from federal and state agencies and sometimes from private foundations or through industry contracts.
 
Graduate Student Stipends and Tuition. More importantly, we use research funding to provide stipends and tuition support throughout the year for the graduate students who are working with us on research. PhD students in STEM fields, like computer science, generally do not pay for graduate school themselves. They are employed as research assistants (paid by research grants) or teaching assistants (paid by state funds) and paid a relatively meager stipend with full tuition support. This not only provides critical support to advance research projects, but also provides hands-on research training that contributes to marketable skills for graduate students after graduation.
 
International Student Support. US students have the option to attend graduate school part-time while they work outside the university; however international students cannot hold outside employment, so these assistantships are their only form of income while in school. Acceptance into PhD programs is highly competitive. Faculty are committing research funds and counting on the students to help advance the research projects, so we must be very selective. The international students who we support are the best and brightest from their countries, and we hope to keep them in the US after graduation so that they can continue to contribute to America - through advancing research, developing innovative technologies, starting new businesses, or teaching the next generation.
 
Federal Research Funding. When a federal agency awards a research grant, those funds are then available to the principal investigator (PI) for the duration of the award period, subject to the approved budget and federal agency guidelines. It is not normal for federal agencies to terminate awarded research grant funding when there is a change in presidential administrations.
 
Basic Research. Many federal research agencies, and especially the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), support basic research, which is work that may not have an immediate marketable outcome. This type of research is not likely to be performed by private companies as it will not immediately impact their bottom line. However, this basic research is foundational to scientific and medical breakthroughs, even if the long-term impact of basic research comes years after the funding. In my own research, a tool we build for archiving web pages directly from the web browser inspired the development of Webrecorder, which became the standard for high-fidelity web archiving. And my research on vehicular networks, funded 15 years ago, is continually being cited in current work on autonomous vehicles. The research that we perform and tools we build are not meant to compete with commercial software, but are built to experiment, to figure what might (and might not) be possible.
 
Indirect Costs. As you may have heard with the proposed cuts to indirect rates for NIH, indirect costs, aka overhead, are provided to the university performing the research and are used to pay for major facilities, administrative personnel, utilities, and many other supporting costs. Researchers are typically not allowed to request basic equipment, like computers, as part of the proposed research budget. However, we have to have these things to carry out the research. We also have to have the university infrastructure and administrative staff to hire graduate research assistants, process payments, and make sure that we're complying with the terms of our grants. All of these things are paid for through indirect costs.
 
Travel Support. Most research grants are allowed to fund travel to technical conferences, both inside the US and international. This type of travel support is essential for PhD students, because it is a required part of academic publishing. In our group, we require our traveling students to publish conference trip reports after they return, so that others who were not able to attend can at least benefit from some of the knowledge that was exchanged. In computer science, if you don't pay the conference registration fees and travel to present your work, your paper will not be published in the proceedings and you can't count it as a publication on your CV. These publications are what demonstrate to potential employers that you have been performing quality research that has been deemed acceptable by your academic peers (i.e., peer-reviewed). In the "publish or perish" model, it takes not only good research, but also money, to publish.
 
Context on Award Amounts. In my 20 years in academia, my collaborators and I have been awarded over $6.8M in research funding. Of that, $5.3M came from federal agencies (NSF, NEH, IMLS, Dept of Defense). A little over $1.4M came from private foundations, and the remaining $70k came from state or university funds. Without funding at about this level, I would not have obtained tenure or been promoted to Associate and then Full Professor. This is just what's expected of faculty at a research university.

Agencies and Programs

I am heartbroken that these federal agencies and programs have been shut down and that program managers who I've worked with over the years have essentially been fired (or, "put on administrative leave"). So, before I talk about my specific projects that were terminated, I want to tell you a little bit about these agencies and programs.
NEH. I didn't have current funding from them, but the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), specifically their Office of Digital Humanities, was instrumental in helping me build my research program in web archiving and train PhD students, some of whom have become university faculty themselves. The program managers at NEH were dedicated public servants who cared about the research and scholarship they were funding, and they funded some amazing projects. You can read about a bit of my work that was funded by NEH as well as summaries of those project directors' meetings at https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/search/label/NEH. I am deeply indebted to Brett Bobley, Jen Serventi, and Perry Collins from the Office of Digital Humanities for supporting my work. NEH has a website that highlights the impacts that its funding has made throughout the nation. See https://www.neh.gov/impact for an overview and https://www.neh.gov/impact/states for an interactive map to explore the work being funded in each state. NPR's article on the cuts, "Cultural groups across U.S. told that federal humanities grants are terminated", highlights the effects on libraries and museums around the country.
IMLS. The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), along with the NEH, provided grants to libraries and museums throughout the country. In 2024, IMLS awarded over $250 million to fund research, education, and preservation activities, some of those described in this article on the impact of IMLS. While that sounds like a lot of money, it’s a tiny fraction of the US federal budget. Along with staff terminations, grants that had been awarded were terminated with little notice. IMLS funded some of my research in web archiving (most recently, our terminated National Leadership Grant, which I'll describe later), mainly used to provide stipends for my graduate student researchers. Through this, I have met amazing IMLS program officers, including Dr. Ashley Sands and Erin Barsan, who ensure that funding goes to worthwhile projects. Many IMLS staff members have degrees in library and information science and have dedicated their careers to supporting state and local library and museum services that help to educate people throughout the nation. Like with NEH, you can explore the outstanding projects that IMLS funds through their interactive map at https://www.imls.gov/map. 
This NPR article describes some of the library and museum grants that were cut, "Entire staff at federal agency that funds libraries and museums put on leave". To highlight the great work of IMLS, Thomas Padilla put together IMLS Matters, a website where librarians and others have provided testimonies to the importance of the agency. He also wrote the article "“No Longer Serves the Interest of the United States”: The Terminated Work of the Institute of Museum and Library Services", with excerpts from those submissions. 
DoD Minerva. The goal of the Department of Defense's Minerva Research Initiative (link is to the archived version of the page since the live page has been removed) was to "improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S."  Dr. Nicholas Evans from UMass-Lowell wrote a great article about the importance and impact of the Minerva Initiative. Quoting from his article: "In launching the program, then-Secretary Robert Gates claimed that 'Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand — or even seek to understand — the countries or cultures we were dealing with.' Minerva was designed to address the gap between operations and social science." Science reported on the cancellation of this initiative, "Pentagon abruptly ends all funding for social science research".
NSF. While I was working on this came the news that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has stopped awarding new grants until further notice and that a 15% indirect cap has been implemented for new awards ("NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones", "Implementation of Standard 15% Indirect Cost Rate"). I hadn't originally planned to talk about NSF, but I can easily say that without funding from this agency, I would not be professor. During my senior year of undergrad, I was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship that paid for three years of study at the school of my choice. Because of this, I was able to attend UNC, one of the top graduate schools for computer science. Once I had been hired at ODU, I was awarded three NSF grants during my first five years. This not only allowed me to develop simulation tools to study web traffic, perform foundational research in vehicular networks, and explore how to re-purpose existing sensor networks during emergencies, but this track record of funding paved the way for my promotion to Associate Professor with tenure in 2012.

Terminated Projects and Impact

IMLS National Leadership Grants

Technically, I had two IMLS grants that were terminated, but one was a planning grant for which we had already spent all the funds (so $0 was "saved" by terminating this award). The two grants were related, in that the planning grant allowed us to carry out a preliminary investigation that helped to frame our larger grant proposal. 
 
Grant 1: "Saving Ads: Assessing and Improving Web Archives' Holdings of Online Advertisements", Mat Kelly (Drexel), Alex Poole (Drexel), Michele C. Weigle (ODU), Michael L. Nelson (ODU), Aug 2022 - Jul 2025 Apr 2025, IMLS National Leadership Grant/Planning LG-252362-OLS-22 (proposal PDF via IMLS), $149,479
 
Grant 2: "Preserving Personalized Advertisements for More Accurate Web Archives", Mat Kelly (Drexel, PI), Alex Poole (Drexel), Michele C. Weigle (ODU), Michael L. Nelson (ODU), Aug 2024 - Jul 2026 Apr 2025, IMLS National Leadership Grant LG-256695-OLS-24, $398,927.
 
The basis for this project was our observation that today's ads on the web are indicators of cultural significance, much like those from print media of the past (see below). However, major public web archives are failing to capture many embedded ads in their archived pages.
Our first step was to assess how well online advertisements are being archived in places like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The planning grant enabled us to develop a dataset of current online advertisements and assess how well they had been or could be archived by various tools. We discovered that there were several challenges to archiving advertisements, some related to the dynamic nature of ads and some related to how online advertisements are delivered and embedded in webpages. The work that we did was relevant not only for ads, but also for similar types of dynamic elements in webpages. Our goal in the larger project was to investigate ways of saving personalized online ads, which are tailored to users based on their location, browsing history, or demographics. During the first year of the larger grant, we had continued our investigation of how well ads are currently archived and had started developing "personas" to represent different types of web users. Our plan was to use these personas to trigger the display of a diverse set of advertisements, which we could then attempt to archive with existing tools and, as needed, develop additional methods for archiving these personalized ads. Through this work, we hoped to improve archiving practices and to open up more historical digital content for researchers and the public.
 
For more information:
Direct Impact of Termination: As noted above, the funds from the planning grant had already been spent when the termination notice was received, but we were only one year into the larger grant period. The larger grant was intended to support one PhD student at ODU for two years and one PhD student at Drexel for two years. It was also intended to support travel to research conferences to present the results of the work and a few weeks of faculty summer funding for the project PIs. Because the grant was terminated during its first year, we were only able to support one PhD student at ODU for one semester and one PhD student at Drexel for two quarters. The project faculty will not be funded this summer or next summer, and travel for PhD students to present our findings and allow our work to be published will not be supported. 

DoD Minerva Research Initiative

"What's Missing? Innovating Interdisciplinary Methods for Hard-to-Reach Environments," Erika Frydenlund (ODU VMASC), Jose Padilla (ODU VMASC), Michele C. Weigle (ODU), Jennifer Fish (ODU), Michael L. Nelson (ODU), Michaela Hynie (York University, Canada), Hanne Haaland (Univ of Agder, Norway), Hege Wallevik (Univ of Agder, Norway), Katherine Palacio-Salgar (Universidad del Norte, Colombia), Jul 2022 - Jul 2025 Feb 2025, DoD Minerva Research Initiative, $1,618,699.
 
We were excited to be invited to join this interdisciplinary and international collaboration to study residents' perceptions of safety and security in hard-to-reach areas. This grant was particularly competitive with 400 white paper proposals submitted, 42 of which were invited to submit full proposals, and only 15 were ultimately funded. Our study sites were two informal settlements, Khayelitsha Site-C near Cape Town, South Africa, and Villa Caracas, Barranquilla in Colombia. The overall goal of the project was to explore the limitations and potential knowledge gaps when only certain methodological or epistemological approaches are feasible in such settings. Each research team used a different methodology to carry out their study: visual sociology, institutional ethnography, citizen science, surveys, and web/social media analysis. In addition, another team performed meta-analysis to study how the interdisciplinary teams collaborated. Our part of the project was to use public data sources, such as worldwide news databases and social media, to learn about the sites. We hope to still be able to produce a tech report to describe our findings.
Direct Impact of Termination: This was a large interdisciplinary, multiple institution grant, so I can only speak to the impact of the termination on my research team. For us, since this grant was cancelled only a few months away from its original end date, we were able to support one graduate student for the three year period of the grant and support faculty summer stipends for each of the summers. The main impact of the termination was the loss of our student's funding for this summer and the loss of travel support to enable all of the project partners to meet at our project wrap-up workshop.
 
For more information:

-Michele

PS - If you're so inclined, you can find contact info for your US Congress members using your zip code at https://www.congress.gov/index.php/members/find-your-member

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