Ashley Dayer’s dream of winning a National Science Foundation grant to pursue discoveries in bird conservation started when she was an early-career professor with an infant in her arms and a shoestring laboratory budget.

Competition is intense for NSF grants, a key source of funding for science research at U.S. universities. It took three failed applications and years of preliminary research before the agency awarded her one.

Then came a Monday email informing Dayer that President Donald Trump’s administration was cutting off funding, apparently because the project investigating the role of bird feeders touched on themes of diversity, equity and inclusion.

“I was shocked and saddened,” said Dayer, a professor at Virginia Tech’s department of fish and wildlife conservation. “We were just at the peak of being able to get our findings together and do all of our analysis. There’s a lot of feelings of grief.”

Hundreds of other university researchers had their National Science Foundation funding abruptly canceled Friday to comply with Trump’s directives to end support of research on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as the study of misinformation. It’s the latest front in Trump’s anti-DEI campaign that has also gone after university administrations, medical research and the private sector.

The NSF’s director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, defended the agency’s priorities but then quit on Thursday, saying he had “done all I can to advance the critical mission of the agency.”

More than 380 grant projects have been cut so far, including work to combat internet censorship in China and Iran and a project consulting with Indigenous communities to understand environmental changes in Alaska’s Arctic region. One computer scientist was studying how artificial intelligence tools could mitigate bias in medical information, and others were trying to help people detect AI-generated deepfakes. A number of terminated grants sought to broaden the diversity of people studying science, technology and engineering.

NSF, founded in 1950, has a $9 billion budget that can be a lifeline for resource-strapped professors and the younger researchers they recruit to their teams. It has shifted priorities over time but it is highly unusual to terminate so many midstream grants.

Some scientists saw the cuts coming, after Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz last year flagged thousands of NSF-funded projects he says reflected a “woke DEI” or Marxist agenda, including some but not all of the projects cut Friday.

Still, Dayer said she was “incredibly surprised” that her bird project was axed. A collaboration with other institutions, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, it tapped into Project Feederwatch, a website and app for sharing bird observations.

Dayer’s team had collected data from more 20,000 Americans on their birdwatching habits, fielding insights on how outdoor feeders were affecting wildlife, but also people’s mental well-being.

The only mention of the word “diversity” in the grant abstract is about bird populations, not people. But the project explicitly sought to engage more disabled people and people of color. That fit with NSF’s longtime requirement that funded projects must have a broad impact.

“We thought, if anything, maybe we’d be told not to do that broader impacts work and to remove that from our project,” Dayer said. “We had no expectation that the entire grant would be unfunded.”

On the day the grants were terminated, Panchanathan, the NSF’s director since 2020, said on the agency’s website that it still supported “research on broadening participation” but those efforts “should not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.” Less than a week later, Panchanathan had announced his resignation.