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A Flagstaff-based hub for regional science -- and for the protection of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River -- could be under threat from President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to the federal budget.

In a to the Senate Appropriations Committee last month, Trump’s budget director, Russell T. Vought, laid out the president’s fiscal priorities -- mostly, a long list of cuts to virtually all federal agencies. Among those was a recommendation to slash $564 million from the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

And in a more detailed , the Office of Management and Budget proposed reducing the budget of the agency’s Ecosystems Mission Area by approximately 90%: from $293 million to just $29 million. (Previously, the magazine Science reported that the division might simply be .)

Among the programs funded by the are the Southwest Biological Science Center and its subsidiary, the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center (GCMRC) -- both housed here in Flagstaff.

“This potential closure is not just a bureaucratic decision,� Margot Steffensen, who oversees research trip contracts for the Flagstaff-based river outfitter Ceiba, wrote in a letter raising the alarm about the looming threat. “It would dismantle an institution that employs over 45 highly experienced, dedicated scientists, researchers and technicians locally.�

Though Ceiba contracts with GCMRC, Steffensen and company co-owner Scott Davis said they’re less worried about the loss of revenue than the threat to the scientific research that, by congressional mandate, is supposed to guide the management of the Colorado River and the surrounding Grand Canyon ecosystem.

“We have government contracts, but we are so small in comparison to what the important stuff is,� Davis told the Arizona Daily Sun in an interview at Ceiba’s headquarters. “If we didn’t have another government contract ever, but GCMRC was still intact � and the associated community can still operate, and have awesome science available to the public, then that’s what it’s all about.�

In 1992, Congress passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act, which ordered that must protect “the values for which Grand Canyon National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area were established, including but not limited to natural and cultural resources and visitor use.� As part of that law, the secretary of the interior was required to create “long-term monitoring programs� evaluating everything from the stability of the river’s sandy beaches to the protection of archaeological and cultural sites sacred to local tribes.

“GCMRC is a critical part of implementing the Grand Canyon Protection Act,� said Jen Pelz, water advocacy director for the Grand Canyon Trust.

The center provides the scientific basis for the dam’s Adaptive Management Program, and it simultaneously assesses the effectiveness of that program. Closing it down, Pelz believes, would undermine the original intent of the law.

The Grand Canyon Trust is leading an open letter to Arizona’s congressional representatives, urging them to support continued funding for the center. “Without robust, ongoing research and monitoring,� the letter states, “we risk undermining decades of progress in recovering threatened and endangered species like the humpback chub, preserving cultural resources, and maintaining water quality and sediment flows that are essential to the Grand Canyon’s unique ecology."

“The science that GCMRC provides � it’s really second to none,� Pelz said.

She relies on the center’s research, she noted, to guide the Trust’s advocacy and input on policy decisions.

And many others rely on that research, too: outfitters and recreation companies, the Bureau of Reclamation, Colorado River water users across multiple states and numerous Indigenous nations.

“They all utilize that information that GCMRC collects,� Davis said.

GCMRC, he added, provides the independent and unbiased information needed to make careful decisions and compromises.

“This coalition of people that rely on [the river] have many mutual interests, but they also can have conflicting interests. And that’s OK,� Davis said. “The only thing that you can really rely on is the science. Each interest is going to get the same information.�

But the work done by the Southwest Biological Science Center (SBSC), the larger Flagstaff-based group, also has relevance far beyond the Grand Canyon.

Bradley Butterfield, an assistant research professor at Northern Arizona University who has contributed to SBSC studies in the past, emphasized that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) -- which oversees more acres of federal public lands than any other agency, including vast swathes of both recreational areas and grazing lands -- is highly dependent on the work produced by the center’s Terrestrial Dryland Ecology group.

“They provide so much of the science for management of BLM lands across the west,� Butterfield said.

The research put out by SBSC is used by the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service, too, helping guide the management of iconic Western parklands and of game species prized by the hunting community.

“There’s a lot of people who have a stake in what they do,� Butterfield said. “Anyone who recreates on public lands, they’re benefitting from the science that’s done at USGS.�

Officials stay quiet as rumors swirl

Many details about the potential closure of the Ecosystems Mission Area and its operations in Flagstaff remain frustratingly unclear, local partners noted.

“There’s been nothing. No releases. It’s all hearsay,� Steffensen said. Davis added that at Ceiba, they’d been “stewing in anxiety� while waiting for some clarity on the situation.

Staff of the program haven’t been allowed to speak publicly about the closure threat. Pelz, who used to consult regularly with GCMRC on numerous topics, said threats of mass layoffs or a complete shutdown have put an emotional burden on employees.

When the Arizona Daily Sun reached out to the USGS for official comment, a Department of Interior spokesperson provided only the following statement: “Interior proudly supports President Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill� � a historic, America First budget that delivers middle-class tax cuts, unleashes American energy, secures our borders, and invests in the infrastructure and security of our public lands.�

The spokesperson did not provide any clarification on the future of the Flagstaff operations. But if the center were to close, the impacts on science and on the local community could be significant.

“When you take people that have been in their jobs for a long period of time, they have so much institutional knowledge on how things work and history that really does matter,� Pelz said. “If you gut those agencies, gut the science � they’re going to take other jobs outside of GCMRC or this very specific brain trust. And [their knowledge] will get dissipated, and you’ll lose that history of expertise.�

“If you lose that expertise,� she added, “you’re likely to return to something that didn’t work. You lose the benefit of the learning � that’s occurred over the past several decades.�

Even a temporary interruption could be detrimental to the ongoing data collection and monitoring missions.

Researchers are “already pretty efficient,� Butterfield said, and accustomed to making the most of limited funding. “We’re very efficient and intelligent about what we measure and at what frequency.�

But that doesn’t mean they can afford to stop gathering data.

“If we have a break in it, we could miss critical and informative years,� he said.

“If we miss out on those observations, that reduces our ability to predict into the future,� Butterfield continued. “The more breaks in the data, the more likely it is we’re going to miss some critical events.�

Beyond the threats to the science, closure would be a blow to the USGS employees who live, work and raise families in Flagstaff.

“They’ve tried to make a home here,� Steffensen said.

It saddened her, she said, to think of those people possibly having to uproot their lives.

Butterfield echoed that point.

“These are all folks that are really active in the community. Many of them have lived here for decades,� he said. “They’re all good people who work their asses off. Nobody’s sitting back, relaxing and pulling in a huge paycheck.�

A closure would have economic trickle-down effects, Davis said, both for the contractors who assist with scientific expeditions and for the local businesses patronized by employees and their families: “It’s the grocery stores, it’s the hardware stores, it’s the mechanics.�

Northern Arizona University also receives research funds from USGS, helping to employ professors, graduate students and even undergraduates.

As Congress debates and amends its appropriations bills, residents of Flagstaff are watching and waiting.

“Personally, downsizing kinda sounds good to me. But it has to be for a good reason,� Davis said. “Just laying people off for the reason of laying people off, it doesn’t make any sense in the science world.�

Butterfield said he continued to hear conflicting rumors about USGS’s future funding, expressing hopes that the proposed budget reductions would not ultimately come to pass.

“If it gets much worse, we’re going to see a significant decline in our scientific abilities,� he said.

“If we want to be the best,� he asked, alluding to the new presidential administration’s emphasis on American achievement, “don’t we want to also be the best at researching and managing our public lands?�