In the face of massive budget cuts across many federal agencies, scientists can no longer rely on traditional funding mechanisms to complete their research.
Jonathan Stine, a postdoctoral geology researcher at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, has turned to an untraditional method: he’s using crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to raise money to pay for his research.
For the past couple of years, he’s been studying a rock formation called the Cutler Group in Bears Ears National Monument in Southern Utah.
“The first reason I'm studying (the Cutler Group) has to do with their age,” he said. “They're around 300 million years old, which is very, very old. It's about 50 million years older than when the dinosaurs first showed up. Because of that, there has been a lot of research in the Cutler Group looking at this ancient pre-dinosaur life.”
Stine looks at rock cores, collected from very deep within the earth. The fossils of these pre-dinosaur animals are located in these cores, which are very sensitive to the climate conditions at the time. A wet climate versus a dry one would mean that different minerals are present in the core.
“These different minerals would have different, unique magnetic, radioactive, and chemical signatures,” he explained. “By measuring these signatures, using the equipment at the University of Minnesota, I can then determine what the climate was like, and thus answer big picture questions about how life evolved on land.”
But Stine says there’s contemporary uses for this research, too. He says other research has shown toxic levels of arsenic and uranium in aquifers in Bears Ears, in rock formations above the Cutler Group.
“But the wide geographic spread and their association with past uranium mining, really kind of stresses the need of, we should probably look at other aquifers to see if these toxins are present,” he said. “This, of course, has important implications for the communities in Bears Ears, specifically the Navajo Nation which borders Bears Ears directly to the south.”
Bears Ears has a history of uranium mining. When the first Trump administration took office, it shrunk the monument’s boundaries, allowing mining companies to stake vanadium and uranium claims in areas that were previously part of the monument. Joe Biden restored the monument to its original size in 2021.
Stine’s work was primarily funded by grants from the National Science Foundation. He described a very competitive process to getting NSF grants, which are then paid to the university a researcher works at. Stine said that this reliance on NSF funding puts postdocs in a precarious position. Postdocs are university employees, but they’re not faculty, and they’re not students, either.
“(Universities) don't have the funds to pay you,” he said. “At least, they don't have anything set aside to pay you for salary. So, the way they pay you is the grants that they receive.”
When Donald Trump took office in 2025, Elon Musk and the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, were tasked with reducing federal spending. As a result, hundreds of thousands of federal workers were laid off and entire grant programs were eliminated.
“People would get emails saying, ‘your funding just doesn't exist anymore,” Stine recounted. “And I did get an original email back in January 2025 saying, ‘oh, your research might not be funded anymore.’”
DOGE and the Trump administration targeted research topics it didn’t find politically acceptable.
“That included a lot of funding for science, such as environmental work,” Stine said.
Anything that said the word ‘diversity’ in it, even if it was something like ‘biodiversity.’ Or anything related to climate, like my research studies ancient climate.”
In Stine’s case, his funding wasn’t immediately canceled, but one of DOGE’s policies was to implement a moratorium on supplementary requests. This would allow researchers up to six months of extra support in order to finish up research that was taking longer than initially anticipated, or to begin pursuing new avenues that your research opened.
Other traditional bureaucratic avenues also closed. Stine thought that previously, the Environmental Protection Agency may have been interested in his work for the public health impacts.
“They ended their grant program entirely,” he said. “You can go on the EPA website, like I just checked it this morning. You can click ‘research funding opportunities.’ When you click it, it just says, ‘there are no research funding opportunities at this time.’ It’s been that way since January 2025.”
So, Stine made the decision to make a GoFundMe page, to raise money for things like lab costs to analyse the rock samples, as well as living expenses.
The main reason for crowdfunding?
“My desperation,” he said, adding that his funding was rapidly running out.
Stine has been moderately successful. The fundraiser has been going for a little over seven months and he’s raised $4,563 as of April 22. His ultimate goal is $10,000.
Some people have been able to raise even more for research. Stine pointed to a friend at an Ivy League school who had been able to crowd source over 20-thousand dollars in a few months… but they also had tens of thousands of followers on social media.
“A lot of scientists, including myself, we just don't have that kind of outreach, you know?”
There is support out there for scientists who are looking to get into crowdfunding. Stine got help from a platform called Researchr with creating content to post on his social media to promote the campaign. They also feature scientists on their website who are crowdfunding.
It wasn’t unheard of for scientists to crowdfund aspects of their research in the past, though Stine said that from what he saw when researching, these requests tend to be much more limited in scope.
“The most common GoFundMe for postdocs that you'll see will be something like, ‘I just got a postdoc in country X, and I'm from country Y, please help me raise a couple thousand dollars for the move and the visa,’” he said. “Or it might be somebody'd be like, ‘Hey, I just started a postdoc, and I need a couple hundred to maybe a thousand dollars to buy this equipment,’ like a laptop or something.”
It’s difficult and time-consuming to try and raise tens of thousands of dollars from the general public to fund research and supplement federal grants.
“For most people, you have to email friends and family, email your network, try to reach out to various people,” Stine said. “It's very difficult to raise that money. But unfortunately, it's kind of the only real solution I have right now if I want to complete this important research.”
Stine said these difficulties make him skeptical that many postdocs will see crowdfunding as a viable solution to pay for research.
“Unless they're in particularly desperate situations like I am, you might not see a lot of people rising from it,” he said. “I think most people will probably just try to wait to see if the tides shift and federal funding might return.”
He hopes that he can raise enough money to complete a final data set, which he wants to leverage into further research and grant opportunities in Bears Ears.
“Mostly because I do think, especially from the screening for toxins element of it to potentially see if there's uranium and arsenic in these water-bearing rocks, I think it has a lot of societal importance.”
He’d love for his success to eventually translate to a permanent faculty position at a university. But Stine warned that for many people in his position, the outlook is grim.
“If anyone’s ever seen any of those headlines that say like, ‘oh, we're gonna lose a whole generation of scientists.’ And it's true.”
Congress will decide in the coming months whether it will accept the Trump administration’s current proposal to cut millions of dollars from NSF and other federal research grant programs.
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
