The Paleontological Research Institution received a formal letter terminating nearly $100,000 of federal funding on Wednesday following several funding cuts under the Trump administration. The PRI was awarded the grant last fall by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which has recently been dismantled by the Trump administration.
The IMLS is an independent federal agency that supports U.S. museums and libraries through grants, policy development and research opportunities. As of March 31, IMLS staff were placed on administrative leave and the following day, several institutions across the country began receiving termination letters for different grant awards.
The PRI has received several grants from the IMLS in the past. The recently terminated grant appropriated two years of funding for a project called “Digitizing the Cenozoic Western Atlantic Coral Collections of the Paleontological Research Institution.” The project involved the identification cataloging and computerization of approximately 10,000 coral specimens from the Caribbean and Florida.
The Museum of the Earth is a natural history museum that is part of the larger Paleontological Research Institution, a nonprofit organization that owns and operates the museum. Cornell has been formally partnered with the PRI since 2004. According to the PRI website, The Museum of the Earth has served as a resource for “Cornell undergraduate courses in biology, geology, anthropology, and art.”
Prof. Warren Allmon, earth and atmospheric sciences, who is the director of the PRI, explained that their team had finished about one-third of their project and was supposed to have over a year and half of funding left to complete their work.
“It has been halted — Our collection is so vast, and we totally depend on grant money to do major cataloging,” Allmon said. “This grant was paying for us to do that with one little slice of our collection. Now, if there’s no more money, that project will simply stop.”
Allmon said that there was a lack of clarity about the timeline for which termination letters were sent. Local institutions, including the Sciencenter, an interactive science museum, reportedly received two award termination letters last week, pushing them to halting two major initiatives.
Ali Jackson, director of programs and partnerships at the Sciencenter, told The Sun that they were grappling with the loss of around $400,000 in grant money.
Although the termination letters for the Sciencenter and PRI were sent several days apart, both had the same effective termination date of April 8.
“We got our letter in the middle of the night, [which is] later than the Sciencenter, but interestingly our termination dates are the same. They got their letter three days ago, we got ours last night, [and] our appeal dates are the same,” Allmon said.
The loss of the IMLS grant money also hurts PRI employees. Prof. Robert Ross, earth and atmospheric sciences, who is the associate director for outreach at the PRI, explained that grant money is often also used to pay salaries.
“When grants are lost, it is often also a loss of jobs, because the money that pays the people that do that work is often the only [funding] … available for those employees,” Ross said.
According to Allmon, the PRI formally dismissed an employee working on their research project on Wednesday morning. “We’re different from the Sciencenter … they were not employing any particular person with their grants,” Allmon said. “That was not true for us, we had a person who was working sixteen hours a week just paid for by the grant.”
The PRI directors are hesitant to solicit external donations for their project, as they don’t want to “cannibalize donations” needed just to keep the PRI afloat, Allmon said.
Their ongoing financial crisis contributed to their hesitancy to solicit donations from the public. “People say, ‘well, you know, find the money elsewhere.’ We need the money from elsewhere just to stay open in our current crisis,” Allmon said.
Allmon said that the IMLS grant was a “rare piece of good news for us last fall because we were able to advance on this curation project in the middle of all these other problems we were having.”
An overwhelming amount of uncertainty remains surrounding the federal funding cuts. Leaders of the afflicted institutions have also expressed their frustrations with the lack of transparency about where the already appropriated funds would be reallocated. Connie Bodner, former IMLS director of grants policy and management, explained that the current situation is unprecedented.
“In the 13 years I’ve worked there, that [grant termination] was never, ever the case. Say you apply for a three year grant, the entirety of that grant is appropriated in the year that you’re notified that you won that award. So, the money’s already been appropriated by Congress,” Bodner said.
The future of the IMLS and the programs it funds remains to be seen, including programs under the PRI.
“IMLS is a tiny agency, but it has incredible reach across the country, and it's in so many congressional districts,” Allmon said. “One might hope that because it's in a lot of congressional districts, that all those librarians and museum-goers will be writing to their representatives.”
Reem Nasrallah is an assistant news editor for the 143rd Editorial Board and can be reached at rnasrallah@cornellsun.com.
