The Trump istration has canceled a $3.7 million STEM education grant for San Diego’s Fleet Science Center, causing fresh strain at an institution that had already been reporting higher expenses than revenue on its federal tax filings.
The National Science Foundation grant was meant to promote neighborhood STEM education programs in southeastern San Diego. A separate $100,000 NSF grant also was canceled, Fleet said in a news release.
Similar cuts are being made at science centers nationwide, including the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, which this week lost $625,000 in federal grants. And the grant cancellation at the Fleet is among the first of scores the NSF is expected to make nationwide.
On Thursday, the journal Nature reported that NSF staff had been instructed to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice.” The NSF is among the world’s largest grant agencies, underwriting research into everything from engineering and computer science to psychology, mathematics, astronomy and marine biology.
Such cuts could seriously hurt large research schools like UC San Diego and San Diego State University. The cancelations “will impact science professors in all fields across the nation,” UCSD computational biologist Terry Gaasterland said Friday.
The Fleet Science Center, which opened in Balboa Park 52 years ago amid public fascination with the Apollo moon landings, says it still plans to hold a public “Celebration of Science” event on May 10 but will charge a modest ission fee.
The cuts at the Fleet, as many call it, is “not the news we hoped to share,” the center’s community service vice president, Mwenda KudumuBiggs, said in a statement.
“For the last 12 years Fleet has worked with communities from Escondido to San Ysidro, and they all have stories to tell about science and scientists in their neighborhoods. With funding being cut and scientific research being publicly devalued, these communities’ stories are more important than ever to inspire the next generation of scientists,” she added.
The Fleet has been a San Diego icon for generations. While still hugely popular, the museum has been managing a challenging revenue and spending environment, recent federal tax filings show.
The center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, reported $10.5 million in expenses and $9.5 million in revenue, according to its latest IRS Form 990. The museum reported a similar gap the prior year, reporting $9.7 million in expenses and $8.5 million in revenue.
Over the past two tax years, the museum’s total assets declined from $12.4 million as of June 30, 2022, to just over $10.7 million last year, tax records show.
Fleet president and CEO Steven Snyder said the Fleet is not spending more than it collects. Rather, the budget gaps are due to depreciation reported for improvements made to its building in recent years, he said. The ing practice allows businesses to write down, or depreciate, the cost of major assets over multiple years.
The Fleet Science Center’s two largest sources of revenue are contributions and programs services, tax filings show.
Program service income — the money people pay for entrance, gifts, classes and the like — has risen significantly from just under $4 million in fiscal year 2022 to more than $5 million last year, records show.
Over the same two years, public contributions dropped from $7.3 million in the year ending June 30, 2022, to less than $2.8 million last year.
Snyder said that decrease was due to anomalies in prior years that temporarily boosted the museum’s income — millions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief funds and a short-term capital campaign that raised money for building improvements.
At the same time, the tax filings show the museum workforce grew from 146 people in 2021 to the 182 employees reported in 2023. Over the same period, the number of volunteers exploded, from just 25 in the 2022 tax year to 300 in its latest report.
