It was 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, 2025, when the email from the National Institutes of Health arrived. The email notified Leticia Marquez-Magana and Charlotte Tate, biology and psychology professors at San Francisco State University, that their five-year, $2.8 million research grant had been terminated. The project, nicknamed “From Hoods 2 Woods,” had brought Black and Brown students between 18 and 25 on three trips out to redwood groves in the South Bay, where they’d marveled at banana slugs, waded in creeks, and examined edible fungi. Before and after the series of outings, researchers took hair and saliva samples to study how the walks in the woods changed stress hormone levels and cell repair. When the email arrived, the team was a week out from a culminating event where the participants would hear about the first results.

The email, which said the research supported “unlawful discrimination,” surprised no one. Environmental justice research had seen a burst of funding under the Biden administration, and now it was being dismantled by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. From April to July 2025 alone, more than 1,500 National Science Foundation grants were cancelled—about one in 20. More than 1,400 of those grants included words related to DEI. “We basically had all of the banned words,” says Tate. 

Across the Bay at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, a public science center with a focus on environmental education, researchers received similar termination emails from the National Science Foundation. They’d been bracing. “We had plan B, plan C, plan D,” says Melissa Collins, a researcher working on one of the grants. Over $6 million in funding were terminated—one-fifth of the institution’s $29 million annual budget. The grants reflected Lawrence Hall’s growing commitment to community engagement, and helped support research that included building an exhibit on Ohlone culture, and studying how people of color could be better supported in environmental organizations.

In both cases, the researchers joined lawsuits, fighting for their grants to be reinstated. “I feel like I’ve gotten a little baby law degree,” says Jedda Foreman, a researcher at the Lawrence Hall of Science who became a plaintiff in one lawsuit. Many of the lawsuits—including Foreman’s—were successful, and both groups had their funding back within the year. 

But the terminations disrupted projects, lives, and research that had been decades in the making. The whiplash has forced environmental justice researchers across the country into a reckoning about how they did their work. “The trust between academic researchers and the federal government has been broken,” says Scott Delaney, a former public health researcher at Harvard. Delaney started the project Grant Witness last year to track terminated federal grants. “A lot of people just want to bail out, but they don’t know where to bail to.”

The grant terminations pushed both Bay Area research teams to pivot. The Hoods 2 Woods group got scrappy to finish their work with much less funding and institutional support. Meanwhile, the Lawrence Hall team sprinted to build an entirely new way to fund the science center’s research. “The bottom falls out—you either crash down and go home, or you think differently,” says Rena Dorph, executive director of the Lawrence Hall of Science.

How a campus “nature prescription” program hung on

Genievive del Mundo, a San Francisco State staffer on the Hoods 2 Woods project, thought the termination called for a picnic. On a sunny campus lawn, she held a potluck for all the students who had worked on the project. She wanted them to offer some closure, after their months of work recruiting participants, visiting the woods, and completing the long hours of lab work. For many student researchers at SFSU, a commuter school where most people juggled classes with other jobs and responsibilities, the project had reshaped their own relationship with nature. Del Mundo printed certificates and handed them out, in a sort of graduation. “We made it a really celebratory event,” she says. 

But no one could escape an undercurrent of sadness and anger. Everyone had wanted to use the project to seed more work like it, getting more people outside. Del Mundo and another Hoods 2 Woods staff member, Yvette Mari Robles, had begun setting up a campus “nature prescription” program, Campus Nature Rx, to help SFSU students connect with nature and de-stress. But Robles was laid off with the grant’s cancellation. The $300,000 they needed to launch the program seemed unlikely to manifest. SFSU itself was going through upheaval after state budget cuts: firing lecturers, slashing programs, cutting sports teams, and buying out faculty. “It was more like, how am I going to pay my bills?” says del Mundo.

The project’s connective tissue eroded with the cancellation: lost staff, time, and momentum. Tate told team members she would volunteer to keep going with publishing the research, and invited staff to join her. “We really all agreed that the best act of resistance under these circumstances is to continue to work and to tell the story of the grant,” she says. 

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Students involved with the Hoods 2 Woods program, in redwoods. Courtesy of Genievive Del Mundo Mendieta

Still, with less support, the project’s ambitions shrank, even after the lawsuit reinstated some funding. Marquez-Magana says the team did fewer analyses. They didn’t bring any more groups to the woods. “There’s going to be some transformative results,” says Marquez-Magana, who retired last August. “But there would have been many more.” 

Del Mundo has continued to host nature-related workshops, like growing succulents in abandoned Halloween pumpkins. She brands them Campus Nature Rx, so people get familiar with the name. “That’s going to be sustainable,” says Marquez-Magana. “It doesn’t depend on federal funding.” Robles, whom Marquez-Magana rehired with the reinstated funding, cobbled together donations of space, partnerships with outside organizations, and time in professors’ classrooms to talk to hundreds of students about getting outside for “green breaks.” 

In small groups, Robles has led conversations among students about climate equity, what inclusion in nature meant to them, and what kept them from going outdoors. She believes, despite the odds, they have made a difference. “We know somebody’s going to have a cup of tea outside with their elder. We know somebody’s going to take their niece and nephew on a walk. We know somebody’s going to make love on the beach,” she says. “We were just throwing out all these beautiful wild seeds, and we don’t know where they’re going to bloom, but we know they’re going to bloom.” 

For Lawrence Hall, a pivot from nonprofit to for-profit

At the Lawrence Hall of Science, Rena Dorph knew it would be easy for staff to focus on what had been lost in the nine terminated grants. In-person events had to be cancelled, including the first workshop of a three year, NSF-funded series exploring how environmental organizations actually lived up to their DEI commitments. Meetings were cancelled with Ohlone tribal partners, who were working with researchers to build the first mixed media exhibit about Ohlone culture at the museum on another $1.6 million NSF grant. At least 15 people had salaries that drew from those grants. 

Visitors to The Lawrence Hall of Science explore yuutka: the Place of Acorns. Grant funding for the exhibit was terminated, then reinstated, then terminated again—but the show did go on. Brittany Hosea-Small / The Lawrence Hall of Science

But the problem posed by the terminations was existential. Lawrence Hall had already been struggling to balance its budget amid increased post-pandemic staff costs, and also build stable relationships with community groups that didn’t always trust the university. “There was way more at stake than these nine grants,” Dorph says. “I asked people to do their grieving, and be ready to move on to think about how we’re going to continue to be a beacon of light for science education during a stormy time.”

Dorph began looking at Lawrence Hall’s work over the last years as a business opportunity. The staff had spent years developing workshops for people in the environmental workforce, including the series that had just been cancelled. What if those workshops charged attendance, and were framed as professional development? Other grants had devoted countless hours to building beautiful, immersive exhibits that taught kids about science and sustainability. Maybe other science centers, also struggling with funding, would license them?  “We had a whole set of materials and experiences that could be potentially turned into something that other people could use,” Dorph says. 

A decade earlier, Jedda Foreman had gotten an MBA she’d never used. Dorph called Foreman, and told her to dust off her business books. In what Foreman calls a “three-month sprint,” the team built a business: an online learning platform offering a series of workshops on leadership and STEM education—and maybe a way for Lawrence Hall to earn enough money to keep going. “We were in the caterpillar phase. All our body parts melted,” Foreman says. “We had to come out as something else, but still retain our sense of self.” 

And pupation, Foreman says, has felt really good. The new, online-only model, to which organizations can subscribe, allows the workshops to reach more people than before. Foreman offered free memberships to all the organizations that were part of the terminated NSF grant. “Charging money allows us to have an impact in this bigger way,” she says. “It’s actually opened up opportunities for folks to participate in ways that didn’t exist before.” 

The workshops are not quite a multimillion-dollar revenue stream yet. An organization with 15 or fewer staff pays $1,000 a year for a membership, or an individual can pay about $500 for a single workshop. Four people attended the first workshop, titled “Leadership Essentials for Organizational Change.” The team is figuring out how to price their offerings and recruit attendees. “It’s an ongoing experiment,” says Dorph. 

Federal funding does remain a part of Lawrence Hall’s support—just a smaller, less-trusted one. The reinstated grant developing an exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science with Ohlone tribal members was re-terminated last month. The show, called yuutka: The Place of Acorns, went on anyway. The NSF has shortened its grant cycles, and research has to be limited in new ways. “We’re not waiting around,” says Dorph. “We’re going forward with the assumption that we’re going to have to create new paths forward.” 

Nationwide fear

Trump’s War on Woke continues, but now with a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer, says Emily Patrolia, a policy advisor in D.C. for environmental groups seeking federal funding. “The longer this administration goes on, the deeper and deeper [political appointees] are able to get into the underbelly of the government.” Proposed regulations from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget will give political appointees more power to decide what research gets funded. “It’s going to become a little bit more difficult to wait it out [until the administration changes], because the waiting it out is contingent on the agency being able to build itself back,” Tate says.

Lawrence Hall researchers pivoted to offer paid workshops that help fund the science center’s research. “The bottom falls out—you either crash down and go home, or you think differently,” says Rena Dorph, executive director. Screenshot

Most researchers want to find a new way forward, Delaney says. But not everyone can. He notes the Lawrence Hall of Science was only 20 percent federally funded. Many other researchers he knew depended totally on federal grants. He has seen grant applications to the NIH increase along with grant applications to private foundations, even as both sectors hand out less money. The outcome, Delaney says, is a less healthy world, and a harder fight for environmental justice. “But I don’t think anybody’s going to quit,” he says. People in this field are used to uphill battles. 

Tate agrees. She’s a Black trans lesbian who has become adept at finding non-federal funding sources for gender and sexuality studies. “The decision makers tend not to look like us,” she says. 

Delaney left academia last fall. Along with his work on Grant Witness, he has started a consultancy with former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency employees, offering air pollution models to local governments that used to rely on the EPA. “You don’t stop caring, even if you have fewer tools and fewer resources to get the work done,” he says.