Harmful and opaque.
Those were the words Governor Jared Polis used to describe $7 billion in sudden education funding freezes from the Trump Administration in a roundtable discussion between state education leaders Wednesday.
Denver7 was there as the governor said the state does not have the money to fill the $71-million gap in Colorado, saying school districts, colleges and universities would have to make cuts.
Education
Education cuts loom as federal government stays silent about $71M funding freeze
Few sectors will have as large of an impact on Colorado, and the nation, as how the funding cuts are affecting higher education, one university leader said.
“It's not so much the funding that we lose and the outlook of funding that we may not get is the importance of the work that will not get done,” University of Colorado Boulder’s Senior Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation Massimo Ruzzene said.
Ruzzene said the federal government has canceled 56 of the CU Boulder’s grants. That equates to $30 million or 5% of the CU’s research budget, according to Ruzzene.
He said the university has already had to let go of some people and reassign others to other projects because of the cuts. Ruzzene said his main concern is not just the research that will not get done, but how that lack of research will affect Colorado’s, and even the nation’s economy.
“Some of the missions that are slated to be canceled will support and are essential to support a human missions to Mars, for instance, right? And if they were canceled, they would need to be started from scratch, which cost perhaps a billion dollars in terms of restarting the work with a new mission, a new project,” Ruzzene said.
Colorado has more aerospace jobs per capita than any other state.
Ruzzene said these cuts and the ambiguity about future ones will trickle into that sector and many others that rely on the research the CU Boulder and other universities across the state does.