Last Friday’s late-night termination of a democracy education program at the University of Montana’s Mansfield Center has its leaders wondering if it mistakenly got caught in an administrative purge.
The center’s Strengthening Democracy program, funded by the U.S. Defense Department, was expecting to receive the second half of a $6 million grant to develop civics and public service lessons for rural schools and communities across Montana. Instead, it got specifically called out as an example of “wasteful spending” and lumped in with other projects considered in violation of President Donald Trump’s executive orders eliminating activities relating to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell released a video on March 3 claiming that DOGE — the so-called Department of Government Efficiency headed by Elon Musk — had found about “$80 million in spending within the DOD that is not aligned with the DOD’s core mission.”
While other programs listed by Parnell had DEI in their titles or descriptions, the Mansfield Center’s Strengthening Democracy webpage has no such wording. Instead, it was targeted for “bridging divides.”
Center Director Deena Mansour said she wondered if there had been an artificial intelligence-driven error in the recent DOGE initiative to eliminate federal funding for all DEI-related programs. While she acknowledged the Department of Defense can legally cancel such grants if it wants to change direction, she and her staff are trying to make the case that they’ve been in alignment all along. They’re holding out hope that if the grant can’t be reinstated, they can re-apply for new funding and resume activity.
Ironically, a Trump executive order issued Jan. 29 titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” specifically calls for “additional patriotic education measures” where “all relevant agencies shall prioritize federal resources … to promote patriotic education” using the DOD’s National Defense Education Program. That’s the source of the Mansfield Center’s Strengthening Democracy program funding.
“The center was founded by Congress more than 40 years ago to promote the values of patriotism, freedom, democracy and global engagement embodied by Mike Mansfield,” Mansour said when reached in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. “In Mansfield you have a man who was a consummate patriot — he always put his country first and cared deeply about the people of Montana.”
In a press release issued by the DOD in the fall of 2023, the grants awarded to UM and other institutions were collectively described as “investments in our national talent base, geared towards ensuring our nation is able to maintain its military, economic, and technological edge.” The program was expected to run through 2026, and had already spent the first $3 million installment.
“The reason the Department of Defense gave us the grant was they found it was important to inspire and recruit the next generation of military leaders,” UM spokesman Dave Kuntz said on Tuesday of defunding the Mike Mansfield Center’s Strengthening Democracy program. “It followed Mansfield’s principles of duty to serve, patriotism and American freedom.”
Other grants that Parnell listed as examples of “stuff [that] is not a core function of our military” didn’t seem to qualify as an offending use.
For example, the University of Florida lost a $1.6 million DOD grant to study the effects of climate change in West Africa, a region also known as the Sahel. It looked at how six of the least-developed countries in Africa were responding to climate-forced change that have undermined local economies and energized violent extremist groups. It had a symposium set for April 5 on “Taking stock of the Sahelian jihads,” which have been destabilizing the region for two decades.
The U.S. military has been focused on climate change as a strategic threat since the 1990s, over concerns that abrupt agricultural shifts can trigger famines that turn millions of people into refugees. That theory played out in the early 2000s when President George W. Bush’s military analysts pointed out the connection between massive drought in Central America and the flood of immigrants trying to cross the U.S. southern border. The UF program was overseen by its Minerva Research Initiative, which was launched by the U.S. Secretary of Defense in 2008.
However, a recent court filing by Trump’s deputy administrator of U.S. Agency for International Development, Peter Marocco, stated he was terminating grants using the words “regime change, civic society or democracy promotion.” “Sustainability and climate change” were also considered contract terms subject for termination, according to the filing.
The Mansfield grant funded about 15 jobs as well as the travel and event expenses for workshops and training, according to Kuntz. The program sent speakers to middle and high schools. It also brought students to the University of Montana campus for workshops on democracy and civic discourse.
