Scientists sound alarm over how cuts to federally supported research could impact citizen science projects

BOSTON — Research projects that receive federal funding and also have a citizen science component could face an unknown future amid recent efforts by the federal government to drastically slash budgets and fire federal employees who would support these research projects, according to sources.

“There is concern that reductions in federal agency budgets will severely impact the Nation’s valuable set of citizen science projects,” Jay Benforado, board chair for the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences, said in an email to Civic Science Times. Benforado retired from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) three years ago, where he served as chief innovation officer in EPA’s Office of Research and Development.

At EPA, he was involved in overseeing the agency’s citizen science work and other innovation programs. Through his role, he also chaired the Federal Community of Practice on Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science (Fed CCS), where he helped coordinate activities across government agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Forest Service, among other agencies.

“Over the past 10-20 years, federal agencies have augmented their traditional program approaches with innovative citizen science efforts,” Benforado said. “Mainstreaming citizen science (and other participatory science) approaches across federal government programs is one important way to connect people and the government programs that serve them. Participatory science approaches engage the knowledge, needs, and lived experiences of individuals and communities (from local to large scale), and participatory science project results can inform government decision making, regulations and policies.

“A diverse set of high-impact participatory science activities exist across a broad array of federal agency programs – from biodiversity to disaster response and prevention, from monitoring environmental pollution to conducting human health studies, and from astronomy to agriculture. Experts fear that these projects will be eliminated as part of budget cutting,” he continued.

While many research projects receive funding from multiple sources beyond the U.S. federal government, such as state funding, philanthropic organizations and the private sector, the potential disappearance of federal funding is making project leaders nervous. Some projects that receive federal funding have told Civic Science Times that there have been delays in receiving funding or that they have had to depend on additional funding resources.

“It feels like for almost every project that I’m aware of, the federal funds are a key component of what they’re doing,”  said Keith Seitter, a professor in the environmental studies program at the Worcester-based College of Holy Cross. “And so again, you’re in a position where, for those research projects, if they’re funded from multiple sources, is there an avenue that they can continue without federal support? But for many of these programs, the federal support is a key element of it.”

Research projects with a citizen science component may also depend more heavily on federal staffers to vet or assimilate data from citizen scientists, and thus they may find themselves in a bind because those projects can typically have higher overhead, which means they are vulnerable to staffing cuts, according to Seitter. 

“I think any program that has a relatively large overhead component to it—and by that, I mean a program that requires a lot in terms of staff, time or resources—are ones they’re going to be looking at. Those areas where cuts can be made, that maybe allow less cuts to happen in other places,” Seitter said. “I would hate to be in the shoes of any of these people who are having to develop these plans because I think most of the agencies feel that they could use more resources, not less.”

He continued, “Without a way to keep those programs going, I think people are going to notice [their disappearance], and it’s really incredibly unfortunate that that’s what we’re looking at right now.”

Given the disappearance of scientific data online, there is also uncertainty among some within the citizen science community over what could happen to federally-supported databases that list dozens of citizen science projects, such as CitizenScience.gov, whose “mission is to nurture collaboration between the federal government and the public to advance inclusive participation in scientific discovery and research.”

Joanna Marsh

joannaf.marsh@gmail.com

Joanna Marsh is a freelance writer and journalist based in Washington, D.C. As a business journalist, she's covered transportation and logistics, the North American freight railroads, and sustainability and civic science initiatives.

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