CU Boulder has had 56 of its research awards and grants terminated or affected by stop-work orders from the Trump administration, as of Friday. It’s worth specifying this because in the week that we’ve been working on this story, the number of canceled awards increased twice.

The financial hit has been in the tens of millions of dollars, according to the university, and at least eight CU Boulder employees have had their employment impacted.

For an institution the size of CU Boulder, 56 research awards might not seem like much.

After all, the campus received 1,243 federal awards totaling $495.5 million in fiscal year 2024. Fifty-six canceled awards are less than 5% of the school’s total.

But the reality is that we should all be deeply troubled by the cancellation of these grants and awards — at CU Boulder and around the country. These awards are a vital part of our universities, funding critical, innovative research.

This research provides a significant contribution to our economy. Most disturbingly, though, the cynical and chaotic nature of these cancellations speaks to an unsettling disregard for the value of science and the continuing need for our society to invest in the future.

“The financial impact of grant terminations at the University of Colorado Boulder is in the tens of millions of dollars,” CU Boulder spokesperson Nicole Mueksch told the Camera.

“More importantly, these grants fund critical research that ultimately contributes to the nation’s economy, job market, national security and competitiveness with other countries.”

Economically speaking, Colorado gets a heck of a lot from CU Boulder’s research. CU Boulder research expenditures in fiscal year 2023-2024, including equipment, construction, operations and labor, were estimated at $737 million, according to the University of Colorado Economic Contribution Analysis. The economic impact of these research activities on the Colorado economy totaled $1.4 billion.

Nationally, research is a huge financial boon. Take, for example, research funding from just one federal agency, the National Institutes of Health.

Across the country, for every $1 the NIH spent on research funding, $2.56 of economic activity was generated, according to a report by United for Medical Research.

In fiscal year 2024, the NIH “awarded $36.94 billion in extramural research funding to researchers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. … This funding directly and indirectly supported 407,782 jobs and produced $94.58 billion in new economic activity nationwide,” the report states.

In a little more than 100 days, the Trump administration has canceled $1.8 billion in NIH funding.

(CU Boulder has had five of its NIH grants impacted.)

If the Trump administration continues canceling awards and grants — which seems more than likely — it is probable that more researchers at CU Boulder will lose their jobs — and those job losses will ripple out into the community. So too will reductions in spending on research expenditures, like equipment and construction.

It is also important to remember that behind job figures are people. One person who has already lost her job to federal research cuts is Boulder City Councilmember Nicole Speer.

Speer ran a brain imaging research facility at CU that relied on NIH funding. When the Trump administration paused NIH grant reviews, the facility’s funding dried up, forcing Speer to eliminate her own position earlier this month.

“It’s a very intentional attack on science,” Speer told the Boulder Reporting Lab.

This is where things get more troubling.

Haphazardly slashing research funding is economically harmful in the present, but the future losses in innovation are going to harm us in profound ways we simply can’t anticipate.

Not only is the U.S. likely to quickly fall behind in the race for future technologies, pharmaceuticals and medical advancements, but we will never know what advancements we scorn by ending projects and firing scientists.

Projects terminated at CU Boulder include research seeking to find ways to improve learning outcomes for young students using AI, a study seeking to reduce health risks from wildfire smoke near schools, a program to provide Armenia with the knowledge and tools it needs to adopt more sustainable water management practices, and a partnership designed to broaden educational and career pathways for aspiring engineers.

Extrapolated to the hundreds of research universities across the country and the damage caused to scientific inquiry by this administration in a matter of months is simply astounding.

To be clear, the scale and scope of government bureaucracy are not sacrosanct. In any institution the size of our government, there is bound to be bloat and waste. As such, trimming back the federal workforce and reducing spending on things like research awards and grants are not inherently bad things — done right, they could serve to help get us on the path to a balanced budget while simultaneously making government more efficient.

The key words here, though, are “done right.”

Careful, considered cuts to eliminate waste and increase efficiency would be done with a scalpel. As we’ve all seen, this administration prefers the chainsaw.

And spending money on scientific research is far from waste; it is an investment — in both immediate economic activity and the future wellbeing of our country.

The counter to these ruinous cuts is a Congress with a spine. Congress is in charge of our nation’s purse and, sooner or later, it is going to have to take the reins back from an overreaching executive branch. Our responsibility, then, is to pressure our representatives to uphold their Constitutional duty to guide our nation’s spending and continue funding the vital research occurring at our universities.

And, of course, to do our part when midterm elections come around.

We are a little more than 100 days into Donald Trump’s destructive presidency. He’s got more than 1,340 left. If we continue letting him and his cronies belligerently destroy the foundational pillars of American excellence — of which our research universities are undoubtedly among — we are going to learn one of life’s lessons the hard way: It’s a lot easier to tear something down than it is to build something up.

Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board