TLDR: a grant about building autonomous vehicles faster and making them safer was cancelled as part of a larger cancellation of a grant working on congestion reduction. The description of the grant the DOT posted was extremely incorrect and calls into question their other descriptions of what is being cancelled. Note that this blog does not reflect the opinions of my employers.
On May 2nd, the Trump admin announced that they were cancelling a $6 million dollar grant, part of which went to NYU. You can read about it here and you really should as insight into how they're approaching defunding research. Here's a quick highlight.
This grant funded a large center intended to study new techniques and evaluations for congestion reduction. With a bit of funding from the grant, my lab was working on new ways to design autonomous vehicles and to evaluate their safety. This small amount of funding we recieved had funded several papers and research that is starting to be widely used in industry. Now, as part of the grant, there was a requirement that the work somehow contribute to making transit more equitable. Whatever you think of this (I think this is good, transit access should be widespread), the research we were doing was important and useful with real impact on both the academic and industry communities. This is now research that may not happen and its absence will, I think, be a loss.
What is particularly frustrating, cancellation aside, is that they then proceeded to describe the cancellation in a way that looks deceptive. The cancellation is stated as "$6M for “e-bikes to low-income travelers in transit deserts” research."
Some portion of the grant may have gone to this research (which, by the way, might be a low-cost way to help with transit access!) but this was only one portion of a much larger grant that was funding over 20 different projects, including my own work. Whether intentional or unintentional, what comes across is a misrepresentation of our work.
I care about American scientific success and these politically motivated cancellations are the opposite of that. Fundamental research that brought value to the public is being cancelled and I want people to be aware. We are all invested in the success of science, and many of us in science continuing to be done seriously in America, and the public should be aware that research in their interests is being cancelled.