University of Alaska says 29 federal grants restored, 32 terminated since 2025

The University of Alaska says 29 of its federal grants, worth a combined $86.2 million, have been restored and that it no longer has any frozen or delayed federal grants, according to a slide in the materials for the Board of Regents' Nov. 5 meeting.

The same slide says 32 UA grants with $16.7 million in remaining balances have been terminated since 2025.

"Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) has been our lead champion in restoring federal grants, and is responsible for the vast majority of our success," the slide says.

It doesn't name the grants, the agencies or the campuses. It doesn't say whether any of the restored grants had been among the terminated ones. And its two figures use different measures: the restored grants by total value, the terminated ones by the money left on them.

Public records and a national grant tracker fill in part of the picture.

In September 2025, the U.S. Department of Education ended discretionary funding for its Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions program, one of seven minority-serving institution programs it called racially discriminatory. UAF would lose about $2.9 million a year, interim Chancellor Mike Sfraga wrote to staff and faculty. Most of the affected grants were in the College of Indigenous Studies and the Community and Technical College, he wrote.

The university's federal updates page said three UAF grants with $8.8 million in remaining balances could be lost. UAF was preparing extension requests for all three, the page said, and UA leaders were working with Alaska's congressional delegation to try to reverse the termination.

Grant Witness, a project that tracks federal grant disruptions, lists six other UA grants as terminated in spring 2025, with about $3.1 million left by its estimate:

• A $2.5 million National Science Foundation award to UAA for the LSAMP Alaska Alliance, a STEM pathways and research alliance.

• Three NSF grants to UAF: planning grants for a Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Stewardship and for "Transforming Arctic Geosciences for Alaska Native Sovereignty and Science," plus a collaborative project on Indigenous northern landscapes and visual repatriation.

• A National Institutes of Health grant for U-RISE, an undergraduate biomedical research training program, at UAA.

• An Environmental Protection Agency grant to UAA to develop a community-centered tool for assessing the health impacts of climate hazards and wildfire smoke in rural tribal and aging communities in Alaska.

One UA grant in the tracker came back: UAF's own U-RISE grant from NIH. The tracker lists it as disrupted in April 2025 and reinstated in July 2026.

The tracker covers only a handful of agencies, including NSF, NIH and EPA. It doesn't include the Education Department.

New NSF awards were down, too. As of July, the agency, UA's largest federal research sponsor, had awarded 55% fewer grants that year than at the same point in 2024, according to data House Science Committee Democrats presented that month.