(St. Louis Post Dispatch) Trump freeze is over. Local industries still worry.

CREVE COEUR — Becky Bart spends much of her work at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center studying staple crops, examining soil microbes and probing ways to combat drought — a top threat to global farmers and food security.

The work and its findings are important, she said — her lab has found some microbes that cause crops to grow longer roots, for instance — and it’s largely supported by federal research funding.

But the past week has made the future of such work feel more tenuous, she said, amid White House directives that aim to restrict government spending.

“People have been pretty nervous at the Danforth Center and our partner organizations,” said Bart, the center’s interim vice president for research. “There is enormous impact in plant science to actually improve people’s lives. But we have to do the science in order to make that happen. It’s not going to happen on its own.”

Last week, President Donald Trump’s budget office issued an order freezing trillions of dollars of federal government spending, threatening to disrupt funding for everything from subsidized housing payments to police partnerships to far-reaching science and research initiatives. The move fueled a wave of confusion and concern nationally and around St. Louis, a hub of crop and biosciences.

And it continues to linger, leaders here say, even after White House officials reversed course Wednesday afternoon and rescinded the budget office instructions. Executives and scientists of St. Louis-area organizations have worried about the status of federal funding for a few weeks now.

Danforth Center CEO Jim Carrington focused on such concerns in a recent weekly message, noting that federal agencies accounted for more than half — or 53% — of the organization’s $23.8 million in overall research grants and contracts in 2023.

The National Science Foundation is the Danforth Center’s biggest source of federal funding, he said, trailed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was “the only non-federal organization within the top four funders of grants to the Danforth Center,” Carrington said.

And last year, federal agencies accounted for even more of the Danforth Center’s research grants, contributing 58% of such funding.

The organization is working now, Carrington said, to build “awareness with elected officials about the critical role of federal grant funding for the Center, the growth of St. Louis, and our ability to achieve impact.”

At the Danforth Center, people like Bart worry about the precedent and “ripple effects” from signals that make science funding feel more uncertain — potentially setting in motion decisions that affect careers of scientists as well as the livelihoods of farmers, businesses and the people who ultimately benefit from their findings.

“The federal government has to fund that research to then lead to those projects that are going to help people,” she said. “If it’s not going to be supported, people are going to choose other career paths that are perceived as more stable. ... We need to support the next generation and encourage people to pursue careers in research.”

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