Wind, water, and whales: The science the South Coast lost in 2025

David Bidwell found out his project was going to be shut down on Oct. 2 — his wife’s birthday. The day before he received his official termination notice, his colleague found his project on an unofficial list of Department of Energy programs set to be cut.

“It was during the government shutdown, so I naively thought, ‘Oh, how long is it going to take them to actually issue a termination notice?’”  Bidwell said. “The answer was the very next morning.”

The University of Rhode Island professor’s project — a five-year study on the impacts of offshore wind development in Baltimore, New London, and New Bedford — suddenly could not continue, but the work had already started. Bidwell and his colleagues then had to notify their community partners in each city and explain why they could not deliver the research they promised.

“The line was essentially that the project no longer reflected the priorities of the department,” Bidwell said.

The “rug pull” Bidwell experienced is one of a number of research grants the federal government abruptly terminated this year, snuffing projects from severe storm monitoring systems to wildlife research to studies measuring the ocean’s carbon levels.

Here is some of the science the South Coast lost in 2025.

Examining the impacts of offshore wind

An assistant professor in URI’s Department of Marine Affairs, Bidwell is a leading researcher on the socioeconomic effects of offshore wind development.

While much of his work has focused on the impacts of the Block Island Wind Farm off the southern coast of Rhode Island, his latest project would have examined the growing industry’s impact on three coastal communities in collaboration with the University of Delaware and Boston University. 

To help measure these impacts, Bidwell and his team partnered with Turner Station, an African American community group in Baltimore County; the NAACP of New London; and New Bedford’s Old Bedford Village Development Corporation, led by Buddy Andrade. The idea was to let these community partners guide the goals of the five-year study, funded by a $2.5 million grant from the Department of Energy.

The DOE terminated Bidwell’s grant 18 months into the project, midway through the information gathering process. The sudden termination also meant that Bidwell could not follow through on the financial contracts he had with each organization.

“They count on the funding that they’re getting, so that was one aspect, just feeling like, ‘Oh, here we are again, people letting down these communities after they’ve made a promise to work with them for years,’” Bidwell said.

Since October, Bidwell has worked to provide something of value to his community partners — even if it wasn’t the full study he intended — whether it’s publishing papers or organizing community workshops to present the data his team has gathered so far.

“A lot of those communities historically had a really strong relationship with activities at the ports, and they’re really craving that relationship again,” Bidwell said. “So we were trying to think of ways that those kinds of relationships could be built.”

Bidwell’s project isn’t the only project examining offshore wind to end up on the chopping block. In September, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) terminated nearly $490,000 of an almost $1.5 million grant to the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life to study offshore wind’s impact on the North Atlantic right whale. The remainder of the grant would have funded aerial surveys of right whales in southern New England through mid-2026.

“Our research shows the importance of this habitat: North Atlantic right whales may be sighted off Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in every season, engaging in biologically important feeding and social behaviors,” said Jessica Redfern, associate vice president of Ocean Conservation Science at the Cabot Center. 

As of January, the New England Aquarium had located funding to continue surveys through mid-2026 but had yet to find a funding source for surveys beyond that point.

(Not) getting caught in the eye of the storm

For the past 11 years, URI professor Austin Becker has worked to protect Rhode Island from major storms — which have increased in frequency and severity due to climate change. 

His Coastal Hazards Analysis Modeling and Prediction System, called CHAMPS, helped Rhode Island and the Coast Guard prepare for the worst by providing emergency planners with high-fidelity wind and flood models, tailoring simulations to vulnerable local infrastructure.

For the past decade, Becker’s work was supported by roughly $4 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence in Coastal Resilience. On April 8, Becker learned that the DHS intended to shutter the Center of Excellence program, dissolving nine research hubs across the country and all of their projects. (Later, the DHS announced it would continue to fund centers in Alaska and Nebraska.)

Becker was only a few months away from finishing contracted work with the state of Connecticut, the Coast Guard of Southeastern New England, and the Port of Providence when he discovered he would be short $500,000 in funding. The loss also meant that Becker could no longer employ the 10 students and faculty on his team, causing the researchers to scramble to find other work in the university.

“It was more work to wind them down in the way that they needed to be wound down than it would have been to complete the projects,” Becker said.

Some of Becker’s work continued thanks to funding from the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Becker is still looking for funding to deliver a storm risk assessment to the Coast Guard.

Disappointingly, Becker said, his CHAMP system was just one casualty of a sweeping wave of lost research.

Measuring the ocean’s carbon levels

URI oceanographer Susanne Menden-Deuer was working for the research arm of General Electric when she learned her project fell through.

Menden-Deuer and her colleague Hongjie Wang had been helping the multinational conglomerate measure the carbon levels of ocean water using a fishline-thin fiber optic cable stretched miles over the water. Eventually, Menden-Deur said, the company hoped to use the technology to develop a product that would remove carbon dioxide from the ocean and help reverse the effects of climate change.

“If it sounds a little bit voodoo, I still can’t believe what they can develop,” Menden-Deuer said. “I know nothing about the engineering.”

Menden-Deuer thought working within a public-private partnership would make her safer from cuts, but sure enough, in August her principal investigator received a stop-work order.

“They said the development of the cable wasn’t progressing to their desired standards,” Menden-Deuer said. “I’m a scientist and a problem-solver, so, my thing was, ‘OK, tell me what was missing and we can make up for whatever those things are.’ But then I thought probably that was just an excuse.”

As the president of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, the largest international association of aquatic scientists in the world, Menden-Deuer said cuts like these have significant downstream effects — on the international research community that depends on the United States’ resources, and on the next generation of scientists, who might now shy away from public research.

Universities, too, now have less funding for everyday expenses, on top of federal cuts to scholarships and research fellowships.

“People are just simply not able to take on graduate students,” Menden-Deuer said. “You are reducing the mobility of people into college and new career tracks. I would think that you would want to educate the next generation to be in the knowledge industry, and instead we’re cutting ourselves off at the knees.”

Menden-Deuer also pushed back on the idea that good research could conflict with any given policy goals.

“Whatever your policy attitude is, it’s up to politicians to decide whether we should have wind farms, whether we should have carbon dioxide removal manipulations through the ocean,” Menden-Deuer said. “Those are not scientists deciding. But science takes time, and we need to have those answers when the urgency arises.”

Surveying Atlantic scallop fisheries

One federal research program hasn’t been cut yet, but some are worried it could be vulnerable.

For the past 25 years, the scallop research set-aside program has fostered collaboration between scallop fishermen and marine researchers and informed fisheries management at no cost to the federal government. That’s because instead of using federal dollars, set-aside programs have fishermen donate a portion of their scallop quota to scientists for research. In exchange, scientists’ findings directly enhance fisheries management, often helping maximize the number of scallops fishermen can harvest the following year.

Although the research set-aside program is self-funded, it’s overseen by NOAA Fisheries and the New England Fisheries Management Council. This year, NOAA Fisheries offered a new interpretation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act that suggested the programs be replaced with government-contracted surveys.

David Frulla, a lawyer based in Washington D.C., represents New England fishing interests with the Fisheries Survival Fund. While the reframing isn’t final, Frulla worries that it could eliminate valuable partnerships and muzzle a program previously celebrated for its self-sufficiency.

“It seems to be a way to, if nothing more, increase federal control over cooperative research in a way that would allow for the government and not the private researchers to run it,” Frulla said. 

Set-aside programs have funded resource surveys that measure the number of scallops in a given area. At the University of Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), researchers use drop-cameras to get a visual of the ocean floor. These surveys supplement the annual survey conducted by the Northeast Fisheries Science, which recently laid off over a quarter of its staff due to federal budget cuts.

David Rudders, an associate director of the Marine Advisory Program at the William & Mary Virginia Institute of Marine Science, leads scallop dredge surveys that allow researchers to estimate the number of scallops in a given area and sample specimens for health problems.

Rudders said he wasn’t familiar with any efforts to reimagine the research set-aside program, but he expressed concern that any changes could hurt the relationship between industry and the scientific community that the program has fostered.

“It has provided the industry an opportunity to be part of the process, and I think that’s relatively unique,” Rudders said. 

Eric Hansen is a board member of the New England Fisheries Management Council and a longtime participant in the scallop research set-aside program, most often collaborating with Kevin Stokesbury and graduate student researchers at SMAST.

Since the early 2000s, Hansen has hosted these student researchers on his scallop boat, offering technical expertise to the eager scientists while they share their scientific knowledge of Placopecten magellanicus (the Atlantic sea scallop).

Ending the research set-aside program would be “tragic,” Hansen said.

“The industry would be rudderless,” Hansen said. “We wouldn’t have any guidance.”

Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.

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