The Trump administration just cut Defense Department grants that research terrorism and drug trafficking

Researchers in a highly regarded Department of Defense program called the Minerva Research Initiative recently received word that grants already awarded by the Defense Department are being terminated, potentially putting their work—and in some cases even paychecks for their students and lab staff—in peril. 

Since 2008, the Minerva program has funded university social science research projects related to U.S. national security. Created under the George W. Bush administration and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the program has backed research into subjects like Russian propaganda campaigns, overseas effects of U.S. military deployments, and modern maritime piracy.  As recently as August, the program announced a new round of $46.8 million in multiyear grants to teams studying topics like organized crime in Colombia, the impact of AI technology, and population movements amid climate change.

“In a rapidly changing world, social science is essential for making sense of human behavior, guiding informed decisions, and understanding societal progress,” David Montgomery, director of social science in the Defense Department’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said at the time. “We need to explore and better understand the complex social dynamics that shape our world and provide insights useful to policymakers and others concerned with the social context of security.”

But under the Trump administration, priorities appear to have changed.  A March 2 report in Science found that “dozens” of researchers are affected, and that applicants for the next round of Minerva funding received word that the Department of Defense was “no longer offering” the program. It’s a decision that left grant recipients and other scientists baffled, since the program previously received support under presidents from both major parties, appears to align with the Trump administration’s focus on national security, and cost relatively little. A 2020 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found the program typically received between $20 million and $22 million in annual federal funding. Total annual defense spending is typically more than $700 billion per year.

“There’s an aspect of this in which we’re removing an investment in the efficacy of future national security policy for short-term cost savings,” says Jacob Shapiro, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.

The Department of Defense didn’t respond to an inquiry from Fast Company. 

The Trump administration has gone after a wide array of scientific programs, probing grants related to disfavored topics like climate change and gender, pausing research funding through the National Institutes of Health, and cutting the jobs of hundreds of weather forecasters and other employees at agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has pursued cuts throughout the federal government and cancelled contracts and grants throughout the government. Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell cited a Minerva-funded study of “Vulnerability and Resilience to Climate Hazards in the African Sahel” in a video posted on Monday to X discussing allegedly “wasteful spending” highlighted by DOGE. “This stuff is not a core function of our military,” he said in the video.

But scholars familiar with the Minerva program say the cuts there still came as somewhat of a shock, since the program supports research in national security-related areas that otherwise seem to be White House priorities. “It just seems tremendously short-sighted to cut support from a program that has absolutely transformed research and practice on counterterrorism,” says John Horgan, a professor in Georgia State University’s psychology department and an expert on the psychology of terrorism. “It makes no sense.”

In addition to traditional peer-reviewed research papers, scientists receiving Minerva grants have generated write-ups in mainstream publications like The New York Times and Scientific American, interactive mapping tools for visualizing climate change and disaster issues, social network analysis software, and numerous relevant data sets, according to the National Academies study. “Over the past decade, Minerva grants have produced a substantial body of research in a variety of areas of importance to national security,” the report found.

Horgan received Minerva funding between 2014 and 2018 to study religious conversion and converts who commit acts of terrorism. He says the program was valuable not only for the grants it provided but for connecting researchers with DOD officials. Those connections helped officials understand researchers’ insights and put them into practice around the world. They also helped scientists learn to better communicate their results to public officials, he says.

Minerva funding has also supported new scholars in national security-related fields, particularly in today’s academic environment, where graduate students, undergraduate researchers, and early-career professors depend on external grants to finance their work. Horgan says Minerva funds made it possible to recruit up-and-coming researchers with newly minted doctorates in fields related to national security and “give them the time and space and resources to shine” as their careers take off.

“It really is about figuring out how to support and pave the way for success for the next generation of terrorism scholars,” he says. “That’s what Minerva allowed me to do.”

The sudden apparent shutdown of the program will likely leave some scholars scrambling for new sources of funding for existing projects and workers.

“Many of us cut our teeth as assistant professors with support from the Minerva Initiative, which allowed us to support students and carry out field work,” writes Josh Busby, a public affairs professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in an email to Fast Company. “We were able to develop innovative new datasets and methods including geospatial mapping and conflict event data. We explored important new areas of risks to U.S. national security from emergent problems like climate change.” The loss of a major funding source for the social sciences is a significant setback for academic research, he says, and may weaken the government’s ability to comprehend and address threats facing the nation, he says.

The Trump administration has already made several high profile about-faces around funding cuts and personnel decisions, so it’s still possible the Minerva program could be restored in some form. It’s unclear whether the administration has the authority to terminate existing Minerva grants, which means the cuts could face legal challenges. Also still up in the air is how budgets across the federal government will be affected by votes in Congress, which faces a March 14 deadline to pass a spending bill for the rest of the fiscal year or face a government shutdown. 

But, researchers say, if the funding isn’t restored, the lack of research into security-related topics and the failure to cultivate up-and-coming scholars and their relationships with the Defense establishment may cost more down the line. 

Recent decades have seen plenty of successful research into what sorts of programs actually work to promote international security and development, from cash transfers for poor people to various kinds of public health interventions, says Christopher Blattman, a professor of global conflict studies at the University of Chicago who has received Minerva funding for research involving organized crime in Colombia.

“The unfortunate thing is the toolbox for the next 20 years not only will be more poorly funded, but it won’t be as effective, because we won’t be continuing to build on what actually works,” he says.

Blattman’s work has included looking at ways to offer young people alternatives to gang membership. He says he and his colleagues had been “cautiously optimistic” that the Trump administration’s focus on countering drug smuggling could lead to more funding for that sort of work. “Why this was on the chopping block?” he says. “I don’t know.”

Blattman, who also saw other government funding from sources like the U.S. Agency for International Development dry up, says his team will likely be able to “sweep by on fumes” and continue existing projects, though they may not be able to do as detailed measurement as would have been possible if the grants continued. “Nothing shuts down, but we definitely are maybe less ambitious in our scope of what we can do,” he says. 

In general, says Princeton’s Shapiro, the Minerva program has funded research with practical applications into civil wars in Africa, Islamist extremism, drug-related conflict in Mexico, and why people join terrorist organizations and how best to demobilize them, among other topics relevant to U.S. defense efforts.

And while it’s a tiny fraction of overall U.S. defense spending, the research that has come out of Minerva has helped officials make decisions about how to effectively allocate funds and personnel to actually make a difference, Shapiro says.

“There’s tremendous value for money in this program,” he says.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91291503/defense-department-cuts-minerva-research-initiative-grants?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss