University of Alaska president reports $50M in grants frozen under Trump administration, warns of cuts to staff

The administration of President Donald Trump has suspended and canceled more than $50 million in funding at the University of Alaska, university President Pat Pitney told the Board of Regents this month.

Pitney also warned regents at the board’s two-day meeting last week in Fairbanks that the statewide system faces the possibility of future staff cuts in programs that receive high levels of federal grants.

The statements came as the regents approved the coming fiscal year’s operating and capital budgets.

The operating budget’s $352 million in unrestricted general funds represents an increase from last year. But it does not keep pace with rising costs, Pitney told regents.

Constrained state funding is also adding to pressure on the university, Pitney told the regents.

On the bright side, enrollment is growing with help from the Alaska Performance Scholarship and the university’s affordability, she said. (Alaska legislative leaders have recently approved a plan that could lead to a draw from the account that pays for those scholarships to help close a $200 million budget shortfall. The decision, and the budget bill, currently sits on the desk of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who could potentially veto the item.)

“The Board has intentionally adopted a budgetary approach that balances fiscal restraint with specific investments in our university system, and that approach continues to yield positive results, including institutional stabilization and enrollment growth,” Board Chair Ralph Seekins said in a statement from the university.

“As the state budget environment contracts and uncertainty at the federal level remains, the board will continue working” with university leaders to maintain progress on student enrollment and success, he said.

Canceled and frozen grants

About $5.6 million worth of federal grants have been canceled, said Jonathon Taylor, a spokesperson for the university, in an interview last week.

The cancellations include a $2.5 million grant over five years for the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program, Matt Calhoun, the program‘s executive director, said in a notice.

The National Science Foundation grant is one of the program‘s largest grants, the notice said.

The cancellation was “unexpected and untimely” and required canceling the program‘s summer Acceleration Academy, he said. Five other summer programs remain in place, he said.

ANSEP will look for new funding sources to strengthen the academy in coming years, Calhoun said in the letter.

Another $50 million in federal grants is frozen, Pitney told regents.

They include a $46 million, 10-year grant from the Department of Homeland Security for the Arctic Domain Awareness Center-ARCTIC Center of Excellence housed at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Taylor said.

Initial projects for the program include detecting emergency calls from mariners and researching renewable and nuclear energy options, the university said in a statement last year. New and existing academic programs were also planned through an interdisciplinary Arctic Security graduate degree and student fellowship program, the statement said.

Pitney told regents the program is in wait-and-see mode.

The university is working with the Department of Homeland Security to find a way to allow the grant to continue, Taylor said.

About $21 million in previously frozen federal grants for a variety of other programs has been reinstated, he said.

The university receives $270 million in federal funds annually, Pitney said. About $220 million of that is associated with research and academic grants. The rest is associated with student aid, Pitney told regents.

“Everything in the rhetoric puts all that at risk,” she said, referring to language in presidential executive orders and agency notices. “That also has to go through a congressional process. It will go through court processes.”

“But we can kind of see the pressure coming,” she said. “I mean, we can clearly see the pressure coming. There’s no ‘kind of’ about it.”

‘Fewer employees’

The university works on 1,200 grant-funded programs supported largely by the federal government, often on multi-year timelines, Pitney said.

The university is fairly confident that the vast majority of those 1,200 grants will continue, she told regents.

“And so we have a runway as an institution up here,” she said.

“It’s the 250 new grants every year we think is where we’re going to see the difference,” she said.

The number of new grants could fall to perhaps 200 or 100 annually, she said.

Also possible is that average award amounts might drop substantially, she said.

That would change the university workload.

Pitney said, “it would be nice to be able to report that we see no staffing changes in our horizon, but that’s just not practical. And I’d rather let people know that the expectation is changes are going to be happening.”

The changes, if needed, will be more concentrated in “highly leveraged units” that receive large amount of federal research money, such as the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, or the College of Health in Anchorage.

“There will be fewer employees here next year than there are now” because of the federal cuts and pressure from state funding, Pitney said.

Staff with one program at the International Arctic Research Center, the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, recently have raised concerns that the program’s existence is endangered by potential Trump administration cuts to scientific research.

[Trump administration cuts endanger critical science programs in Alaska, researchers say]

Despite the “noise in the federal environment,” the university in the coming fiscal year is looking at a “relatively modest” reduction of around $2 million to $3 million in indirect cost recovery associated with federal awards this coming fiscal year, Pitney told regents.

Indirect cost recovery provides reimbursement for university costs that are not directly related to research, such as lab equipment or administrative support.

In a best-case scenario, funding levels in this area would be maintained, Pitney said.