The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is gutting a landmark project designed to fund social science research with important implications for national security. Dozens of researchers with grants under the Minerva Research Initiative (MRI)—studying violent extremism, disinformation, and threats from climate change, for example—have had their grants terminated in recent days. Participants in the most recent round of applications received an email that the department was “no longer offering the Minerva University Research Competition.”
MRI, billed by the Pentagon as “Social science for a safer world,” was established in 2008. It has been awarding 3- to 5-year grants for unclassified research by university researchers “to help DOD better understand and prepare for future challenges.” In its latest funding round, in August 2024, the department awarded $46.8 million to 19 teams to work on topics from the use of artificial intelligence in national security to the movement of people displaced by climate change. At least nine of those projects have received termination notices, as have more than a dozen projects from previous rounds.
DOD did not immediately answer questions about the reason for the terminations and the criteria used to decide which projects to ax. “I wish I could tell you that I see a pattern in the ones that are being cut that I know about,” says Neil Johnson, a physicist at George Washington University who also lost a grant. “I’m not sure that I do.” Many researchers worry the terminations so far are the start of the dismantling of the entire program.
MRI was built on lessons learned after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, says Scott Atran, an anthropologist and psychologist at the University of Michigan. The Pentagon realized military capacity alone was not enough to anticipate and manage international security threats and that “the social and behavioral sciences could be instrumental in filling the gap,” he says. Atran was the principal investigator on two MRI grants funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, one focusing on factors that keep the Western military alliance from fragmenting and the other to examine what motivates people to keep fighting in a war. “Both have been stopped dead in their tracks,” he says.
Also terminated is a project led by economist and political scientist Christopher Blattman at the University of Chicago that aims to better understand how drug cartels in Colombia are organized and operate and how they recruit new members. The work is directly related to the root causes of major issues such as illegal immigration and the fentanyl crisis, Blattman says: “This is the number one security threat in the hemisphere and we have a unique opportunity here to bring rigorous social science to documenting how this whole system works and figuring out how to counter it.” Blattman was officially awarded the 3-year, $2.1 million grant on 1 February. For now, the project will continue at a slower pace, he says, while “we just kick into emergency fundraising mode.”
Johnson was the principal investigator of a project focused on mapping how threats online and offline interact and where foreign influence, misinformation, and anti-U.S. narratives build up online. “We’re the only group in the world that maps out the entire online space, upward of 50 platforms—all the social media platforms and the gaming platforms, he says. “As a taxpayer I can’t understand why [DOD] wouldn’t want it.”
Yet the program was also threatened in 2020, toward the end of President Donald Trump’s first term. Some DOD officials thought its funding could be better spent on other priorities, despite a review the year before by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lauding MRI-funded research.
Renard Sexton, a researcher at Emory University who’s studying whether Taiwan’s recent defense reforms help deter an attack from China, has also been told his project is terminated. Other canceled projects investigated whether climate change could lead to armed conflicts over access to fish stocks and how it affects societies in the Sahel.
The initiative has helped build up a generation of social science researchers engaged with national security, says Jacob Shapiro, a political scientist at Princeton University. “It’s been a great program for building the cognitive and analytical foundations for making smart defense policy,” he says. Shapiro leads an MRI project to evaluate whether China’s investment projects in Southeast Asia are earning it durable influence, a project that has not been terminated. Several other researchers told Science they haven’t received termination notices either.
“Many of us cut our teeth as assistant professors with support from the Minerva initiative which allowed us to support students and carry out field work,” says Joshua Busby, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior adviser for climate at DOD in 2021–22. “Losing one of the key sources of support for the social sciences is another big blow to academic inquiry and likely undermines our government’s capacity to understand and respond effectively to threats the country faces.”
“Jettisoning the entire … initiative, whose yearly cost is that of a single F-16, [would be] about the most cost-ineffective measure that DOD and the nation could implement,” Atran adds.
