Creating a trusted database of federal research funding cuts
For the past five months, one website has maintained a near-complete list of federal research grants for science canceled by the Trump administration. Grant Witness (formerly Grant Watch) and its creator, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Scott Delaney, were the focus of a July 24 Boston Globe article.
The article details how Delaney, a research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health, shepherded Grant Witness from its early days as a Google spreadsheet to its current status as a trusted tool widely used by journalists, lawyers, congressional staff, and universities.
The site, currently maintained by a group of seven volunteers, is known for comprehensively and accurately cataloguing grants that have been cut at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, according to the article. Users can search Grant Witness’ database in various ways—by grant status, university affiliation, or details such as the title of a project or an award number. Those who work on the website find data by scouring government websites and reviewing submissions from scientists. They also issue weekly reports that list terminated grants by state and institution.
Delaney’s own funding—for a project aimed at shedding light on the link between environmental factors and neurodegenerative disease—was terminated in mid-May, along with hundreds of other federal grants at Harvard University.
Delaney told the Globe that he originally thought that the website would be needed only temporarily. Now he envisions it continuing for years as researchers across the U.S. struggle to continue their work amid deep losses in funding for science and the likelihood, going forward, that federal dollars for research will be much scarcer.
“There wasn’t an exit strategy at the beginning. There still isn’t,” said Delaney. “We’re in this until the end.”
Read the Boston Globe article: How a researcher from Medfield created the go-to database of federal research cuts
Learn more
Documenting grant cancellations that represent ‘a life’s worth of work’ (Harvard Chan School news)
