Over the weekend, the Trump administration told the University of Maine that it is discontinuing a $4.5 million award to the Maine Sea Grant Program.
There are 33 other similar Sea Grant programs in coastal and Great Lakes states around the country. Yet only Maine appears to have had its funding revoked. And the announcement came one week after Gov. Janet Mills sparred publicly with President Donald Trump at the White House about his executive order on transgender athletes.
The four-year federal award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration went into effect last February and would have awarded Maine Sea Grant roughly $4.5 million through January 2028, including about $1.5 million this year.
"It has been determined that the program activities proposed to be carried out in year 2 of the Maine Sea Grant Omnibus Award are no longer relevant to the focus of the administration’s priorities and program objectives," NOAA wrote in a letter to the University of Maine.
The program now appears to be in jeopardy, though both the UMaine system and its partners were still determining the specific impacts on Monday.
Federal and matching funds support the salaries of 20 people at the university and around the state. A spokesperson said Monday that the University of Maine system is still assessing how the funding cuts will directly impact staff and research projects underway.
Maine Sea Grant sponsors marine science and fisheries research initiatives around the state. Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, said losing access to Maine Sea Grant shellfish, finfish and seaweed experts would be a "tremendous blow" to aquaculture businesses around the state.
"The costs to particularly the young farmers, the new start-up farmers, their costs would go up, because they would have to actually bear the costs of actually doing some of that research and learning that Sea Grant has been doing for them," he said.
Sea Grant experts have been instrumental in helping aquaculture farmers solve technical problems, Belle added. He called the Maine Sea Grant cuts "short-sighted" and said losing access to the program's expertise could stymy the long-term growth of the state's aquaculture sector.
In addition, Maine Sea Grant played a major role in launching the state's emerging scallop farming industry, helping new farmers learn techniques being used in other countries and apply them to their operations here, Belle said.
"Without Sea Grant's engagement in that particular part of our sector, we wouldn't have, number one, as many farms as we have, and we wouldn't have farms as advanced as they are," he said.
Ten years ago, Maine Sea Grant provided funds to help launch a collaborative research project with fishermen, students and others to study and sample lobster at different life stages.
Lobsterman Curt Brown leads that project and said it's still providing invaluable data about the fishery.
"This is not a cost; this is not something you cut," said Brown, who's also a marine biologist for Ready Seafood. "This is an investment that has paid dividends for decades and will continue to pay dividends to Maine's coastal communities. And that's just so vitally important right now, especially right now. There's so much hinging on what happens right now, and we just can't afford to lose this vital resource."
Two former NOAA employees, including one fired last week by the Trump administration, told Maine Public and NPR member station WBUR that Maine is the only state to have sea grant funding revoked, at least for now. Both said the program was slashed in retaliation after Governor Janet Mills' public confrontation with the president.
And Matt Charette, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant in Massachusetts, said his organization is continuing to monitor the situation.
"As of now, there is no indication that any of the other 33 Sea Grant programs, including ours, are facing cuts similar to Maine Sea Grant," Charette said in a written statement to WCAI.
A spokesperson for NOAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
New England News Collaborative members WBUR and WCAI contributed reporting.
