This story was originally published by Sierra Magazine.
In April, Louisiana Tech University ecologist Julia Earl received a distressing notice from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant supporting her research, the first the agency had awarded her, was being prematurely canceled. It was the same notice that thousands of scientists at universities around the country received for work relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
But Earl, whose NSF grant used the word diversity 152 times, wasn’t studying DEI; she was studying insect diversity, looking for connections between forests, aquatic bugs, and water quality in the subtropical forests of the American South. Her work had been slashed by mistake.
“The termination notice gave us no reason, except that the priorities for funding had changed,” recalled Earl.
The Trump administration’s trawling of research for politicized topics has brought in some bycatch. In the process, Earl and countless other researchers have been left feeling frustrated, disheartened, and without enough money to finish their work. They’re without recourse; though Earl’s cancellation was almost certainly made in error, her university’s appeal to restore the funding was denied.
“I was shocked,” said Earl, about receiving the initial notice. “I felt defeated.”
Outside origins
As a child, Earl didn’t love bugs. What she liked were frogs. Their big eyes, their colorful patterns, and especially the way her stuffed frog Paco sat on her shoulder when she pinned him to her backpack strap.
Earl spent hours of her childhood outside in the North Carolina mountains, stomping in creeks and looking at different plants and animals. “It was like my safe haven,” she recalled.
In high school, she started reading books about how amphibians were declining due to climate and land use changes and decided to follow a career in conservation. At Emory University in Atlanta, she pursued political science, thinking of working in conservation policy. But then Earl “realized that I liked being outside and interacting with animals, and going over policy documents did not seem nearly as much fun.” So she switched to a degree in environmental studies and spent her post-grad years working internships and temp jobs trapping swans, salamanders, snakes, and, of course, frogs.
When she went back to school, first for a master’s in water science at Kentucky’s Murray State University and then for a PhD in biological sciences at the University of Missouri, she noticed that her beloved amphibians already had a sizable research community. What were understudied were the aquatic beetles she scooped up in the field alongside the frogs and lizards.
“They were beautiful, and there were so many more species of aquatic insects than there were of amphibians,” Earl said—and yet both kinds of creature were declining rapidly. By the time she had finished two postdoctoral fellowships and gotten hired for a faculty position at Louisiana Tech University, she had decided to shift her research to insects. “I still love amphibians,” she said, “but I saw a need.”
Into the woods
Today, Earl studies how drought affects insects that spend some or all of their lives in water. She’s also about to start a research project to monitor insect populations using sound, a noninvasive technique that could transition the field away from removing members of already dwindling populations.
Her NSF grant, the largest she’d ever been awarded at $197,022, was for investigating how the diversity of leaves in a forest affects the diversity of aquatic insects it supports. Typically, she explained, diversity in one aspect correlates with diversity in another, and determining what factors contribute to insect populations can help form conservation recommendations. The amount and type of leaves in ponds also affect water quality, she noted, since water bodies can become connected during heavy rain and floods, both common weather events in Louisiana.
When the grant was canceled, there was $14,237.27, or approximately 7 percent, left to be paid out. As a result, Earl couldn’t afford to keep paying the lab’s two undergraduate research assistants. Hundreds of isotope samples from the project, used to characterize the diets of the insects, were left unanalyzed on lab shelves. And an experiment to turn kiddie wading pools into artificial ponds and catch the insects that flocked there was stymied.
“I could immediately see why this was valuable research,” said Dorothy Boorse, an aquatic ecologist at Gordon College, noting that this kind of work has broader implications for forest management, invasive species, and therefore potentially human health and livelihoods. “[I] was brokenhearted on her behalf.”
Aquatic ecologist and consultant Lauren Kuehne said she “can very much relate” to Earl’s situation, having had her own NSF grant canceled for studying the influence of virtual conferences on ecology and conservation science. There’s “a strong emotional component” of “being told that your work is no longer valuable or needed or important.”
For scientists, their empathy has been matched by frustration. Given “the speed at which thousands of grants were cut, there’s no way a human being reviewed them,” said Kuehne. “It was the keyword approach,” added Boorse, nodding to a general sentiment in the scientific community that the Trump administration has been canceling grants based on targeted words in their titles and abstracts, rather than the content or impact of the research. That approach follows Occam’s razor for how Earl’s work was killed by accident. However, Kuehne notes that the community “only has rumors and speculation.”
“I think it’s disappointing for the scientific world … that politics is coming before science,” said Megan O’Rourke, a former US Department of Agriculture ecologist and current congressional candidate in New Jersey’s 7th District. “I don’t think there’s enough people at the decision-making table right now who know or understand [the impacts].”
Growing trends
In May, Earl, with the backing of her university, submitted an appeal to the NSF on the grounds that her uses of “diversity” were not in reference to DEI. A spokesperson from Louisiana Tech University reported that the school even worked with the office of their congressional representative, Speaker Mike Johnson, who approached the NSF on Earl’s behalf, “but did not receive any substantive responses.”
Earl’s appeal was denied in August. The NSF declined to comment. Speaker Johnson’s office could not be reached for comment.
More than the disappointment felt for her own research, “It’s really disheartening for the students that work in my lab,” Earl said. “I mean, they were … paying their bills with money from the grant.”
For the scientific community, Earl’s situation represents larger trends of attacks on both past and future research, as well as unnecessary waste that comes from canceling nearly completed studies. The NSF is a top funder of basic science, and its rates of accepted proposals for fields, including ecology, are slated to drop from the teens or twenties to the single digits given the Trump administration’s proposed budgets. “I’m very unsure about whether it’s worth spending my time to write [another] NSF grant proposal right now,” said Earl. “Nobody wants to spend that much time on something and then have it pulled out from under them.”
O’Rourke sees Earl’s story—one that takes place at a Southern university in the district of the third-most-powerful politician in America—as a reminder that the attacks on science don’t discriminate. “It’s a testament to the fact that you are not safe just because of the state that you’re in or the particular university that you’re in,” she said.
Even with her research stymied, Earl is keeping her eyes forward, continuing to mentor undergraduate students, collect insects, and compete in half-marathon trail races.
Ecologists hope her situation, in time, will be seen as an outlier, not a norm. Until then, “My heart is grieved for this researcher,” said Boorse. “It’s devastating for … anybody who cares about America being a force for good in the scientific world.”
©2025 Sierra Club. All Rights Reserved.
