When the National Science Foundation suspended nearly $21 million in research grants to UC Berkeley last month, it charged the projects’ principal investigators with failing to disclose funding they received from outside the United States.The countries named by the NSF were largely traditional U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Switzerland, rather than nations the federal government has identified as security threats. And several of those lead researchers said they had not received any funding from the countries the NSF specified. The allegations of undisclosed foreign funding, detailed in an April 13 letter to the university obtained by Berkeleyside, could signal a new front in the conflict over research dollars between the UC system and the Trump administration. The White House has been waging a yearlong campaign to exert ideological control over college campuses, proposing new rules this week giving political appointees more sway over federal grantmaking.
The 18 grants ranged from a study on the skin color of poison frogs to the development of new ways to edit genes in corn and barley plants, and AI-fueled research on autonomous driving.
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