Funding for scientific research in the United States is at a record low after the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in research grants last year, derailing work focused on diversity, climate change, and other hot-button topics.

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It shouldn’t have come to this, the scientists say. But here’s how it did. When Blumstein took over the marmot project from its founder in 2001, funding was relatively easy to come by. For more than a decade, the project received most of its support from the National Science Foundation, one of the country’s largest funding agencies. But when he tried to renew the grant for another 10 years, he was denied three times before the agency told him to stop applying.

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Long-term projects such as this one ask “some of the most important questions in our time,” Blumstein said, but have been among the first programs cut. It’s a hard sell, Blumstein continued, to justify the need for continuous, robust datasets, but such resources are invaluable when it comes to studying evolutionary processes that play out over generations and for generating sound science for policymakers and land managers. He’s watched their budget shrink with trepidation.