Federal agencies started investigations across the state, including into the entire University of Maine system. The Department of Agriculture, which provides significant grant money to the university, announced that it would be reviewing the system’s compliance with Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination at federally funded schools and protects women’s access to sports. Soon afterward, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration informed the university that funding for its Maine Sea Grant program, which supports coastal communities, had been discontinued. Joan Ferrini-Mundy, the university’s president, was at a dogsled race near the Canadian border when she got the news. She rushed to a hot-cocoa stand and called Senator Susan Collins.
Maine can feel like a small town. It has about one and a half million people, with true “Mainer” status reserved for families who have lived there for generations. UMaine embodies this ethos. It’s the state’s only flagship public school and its only top-tier research university. Maine’s politics are purple: Democrats hold the governor’s mansion and the legislature, but Trump carried one of the state’s four electoral votes in 2024, and Collins, a Republican whose family has deep UMaine ties, has held her Senate seat for nearly three decades. When Collins heard about the Sea Grant cuts, she had just returned from the Maine Fishermen’s Forum, a gathering for the state’s fishing industry. The potential consequences of the cuts couldn’t have been clearer.
On a recent morning, Gayle Zydlewski, the director of the Maine Sea Grant program, took me out on the Damariscotta River, near the coast. The water was dotted with signs of a nearly invisible ecosystem: clamdiggers on the shore, kelp lines in the current, rows of what looked like small floating oil drums, which turned out to be an underwater oyster farm. Sea Grant helps keep this ecosystem functioning.
We stopped at a wooden platform in the middle of the river and hopped up. Beneath our feet were trapdoors, which opened to reveal trays of about two hundred oysters. Workers hauled them up, sorted them by size, hosed them off, and bagged them so that they’d be ready to sell. Brendan Parsons, who owned the oyster farm, explained how Sea Grant had supported his business: the Maine Oyster Trail, a statewide tourism program developed by Sea Grant staff, funnels visitors to his farm and restaurant. About half his workers had taken a Sea Grant training course. UMaine’s researchers are also developing cheaper methods of growing oysters. “This isn’t some willy-nilly program,” Parsons said. “It’s just astonishing that people would think that there’s waste there.”
UMaine is a land-grant university, with a mission to support agriculture and forestry. Researchers joke that Sea Grant is the university’s “salty extension.” “A lot of people in the country, when they think of research institutions, they tend to think of the Ivy League colleges,” Collins told me. But much more of higher education looks like UMaine. The school’s scientists are developing blight-resistant potatoes and testing ways to make jet fuel out of the wood in Maine’s forests. “This is not research that is likely to be picked up by a Harvard or a Yale,” Collins said.
The senator recalled having at least five conversations with Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce—which oversees NOAA—about Sea Grant. Within days of receiving the termination letter, UMaine was told that the funding would eventually be restored. But the narrative around the university had been set, and the crackdown was just beginning. As Andy Harris, a Republican congressman, wrote in a statement about UMaine a week later, “Women and Girls’ sports must be protected from woke identity politics.”
When the U.S.D.A. opened its Title IX review of UMaine, in February, the school’s leaders responded but never heard back. Two weeks later, Griffin Dill, who runs UMaine’s Tick Lab, forwarded them an e-mail he had received, stating that the U.S.D.A. had been directed to pause all funding to Columbia and the University of Maine system. Dill’s lab, which dissects ticks to check for Lyme and other diseases, seemed far removed from campus culture wars. “No one likes ticks,” he said.
As the spring went on, the confusion deepened. Grant administrators logged in to federal dashboards to draw down funds that had been awarded, only to find money missing. One vanished U.S.D.A. grant was for a STEM program for rural high-school girls, including “students from minority, immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking families.” When the university wrote to the U.S.D.A., program officers explained that the funds had been paused “during the transition of government” but wouldn’t elaborate; when UMaine officials tried to call, no one answered. A program officer for a different grant, related to soil health, wrote that his department had been told to pause any Biden-era funding. “I am very sorry and know this is causing much turmoil on your side,” he added.
Ferrini-Mundy told researchers that whenever they discovered that money was missing, received a notice letter, or even heard a rumor about a funding change, they were to report it. At town halls, professors worried aloud about their labs, staff, and graduate students, whom they employed with federal money. It wasn’t even clear which grants were being frozen as part of a Maine-specific Title IX crackdown, which ones were part of the broader DOGE dragnet, or what other mysterious government machinations might be to blame.
In April, UMaine learned that a Department of Energy grant for a floating offshore wind-turbine project was suspended—on the same day that a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-ton platform had been hauled to a dock in Searsport. The university couldn’t fund the project’s launch, but it couldn’t leave the platform in port, either, forcing school officials to find emergency funds to move forward. Trump, who has called wind turbines “ugly,” had issued an executive order pausing leasing and permitting for offshore wind projects. Yet when UMaine contacted the Department of Energy, a program officer explained that the suspensions were tied to another executive order: “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Different political priorities had gotten tangled together. Offshore wind had become part of a debate about transgender athletes, rather than a debate about offshore wind.
