The future of a Wyoming-focused science team that helped understand and popularize the phenomenon of wildlife migration is uncertain after a series of moves by the Trump administration’s U.S. Geological Survey to hollow out or even end its 43 cooperative research units.

Multiple sources reached by WyoFile this week said that plans are being developed to vastly reduce or even eliminate the entire national program, started in Iowa 90 years ago by conservationist J.N. “Ding” Darling. The Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit has been around since 1977.

“They have been instructed to develop liquidation plans,” said Tony Wasley, president and CEO of the Wildlife Management Institute. “I don’t know if it’s in anticipation of partial elimination or if it’s bigger than that, but they have been working to that end.”

Wasley’s organization is the private partner in the 43 cooperative research units. The U.S. Geological Survey pays the professors’ salaries while other cooperators in the research units are the Wildlife Management Institute, state wildlife management agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and universities. In addition to USGS, Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wildlife Management Institute, the Wyoming unit’s unique partners are the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and the University of Wyoming.

The Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit has been best known publicly in recent years for its work on wildlife migration. Under its lead scientists and USGS employee Matt Kauffman, it administers the Wyoming Migration Initiative, which has refined the science, informed policy on the state and federal level and through its storytelling popularized the biological phenomenon of migration.

John Organ, a former chief of the USGS’ Cooperative Research Unit program, received the same information that Wasley did.

“Co-Op Unit leadership was told to come up with a plan to dispose of all vehicles and equipment and shut things down within two weeks,” Organ told WyoFile.

A story by Government Executive, an online magazine covering government affairs, increased alarm that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency saw no need to continue with the cooperatives, which housed nearly 1,200 scientists, staff and students nationally in 2024. The publication reported that the USGS was laying off around 1,000 employees — and focusing the cuts on the Ecosystems Mission Area, which has roughly the same number of employees. The cooperative research units fall under USGS’ Ecosystems Mission Area.

Subsequently, the cooperatives got a slight reprieve: the U.S. Court for the Northern District of California issued a temporary restraining order pausing most federal agencies’ reduction-in-force notices through May 23, Government Executive reported.

There was an additional glimmer of hope the research units might be spared when word spread this week that the 1,000 jobs cut would be distributed throughout the entire USGS, which has around 8,000 employees, according to the agency’s budget brief.

Organ, however, heard that the layoffs would “disproportionately” hit the USGS’ Ecosystems Mission Area and its cooperative research units. If any units survive the reduction-in-force layoffs, there are longer-term challenges. Trump’s 2026 budget request proposes $564 million in cuts to the agency, shaving roughly a third of its current appropriation, and an internal email publicized by Science suggests the administration has plans to fully eliminate the $307 million Ecosystems Mission Area.

Federal appropriations to the cooperative research units have ranged from $17.3 million to $28.2 million over the past decade, according to a USGS fact sheet.

Agencies mostly mum

The U.S. Geological Survey’s public affairs officers at the agency’s Washington, D.C. headquarters did not respond to an interview request for this story.

Ahead of the budget cuts, non-federal members of the Wyoming cooperative aren’t saying much about its potential demise.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department declined an interview for this story.

At the University of Wyoming, the unit falls under the College of Agriculture, Life Sciences and Natural Resources. Kelly Crane, the dean, was unavailable for an interview, but told WyoFile in an email that he has little information about the situation.

“The expectation that our [cooperative research unit] faculty will be terminated by USGS has not been confirmed or even conveyed to UW,” Crane wrote. “We are aware of a potential [reduction-in-force] at USGS aimed at the Ecosystem Services section, but that is the extent of my insight.”

It’s unclear, Wasley said, if Wyoming’s and the other 42 research units could continue as a private, public partnership in the absence of federal funding. Those are conversations, he said, taking place right now.

“We understand that time is our biggest enemy,” Wasley said. “We’re doing everything we can to figure out how to maintain what we view as critical capacity for conservation, particularly for the fish and wildlife community.”

Kauffman was not authorized by USGS to give an interview, but losing him “would throw us into disarray,” said Greg Nickerson, the Wyoming Migration Initiative’s only other full-time employee.

“There is a tremendous amount of work that would not be happening without Matt,” he told WyoFile.

With the USGS’ Corridors Mapping Team, Kauffman has spearheaded publishing five volumes of ungulate migration maps and has a sixth in the works, Nickerson said. The federally funded University of Wyoming professor has also been integral to the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration, which launched an interactive global atlas last year.

There’s a theme to Kauffman’s work, Nickerson said. He uses science not only to understand large mammal migration, but also to guide its conservation by providing actionable information.

“That model has really developed here in Wyoming,” Nickerson said.

Lot to lose

Bob Lanka, a former Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit graduate who went on to supervise statewide wildlife and habitat management for Game and Fish, described the potential hit to migration research as “only part of the story.” The unit’s other USGS-salaried staffers, Anna Chalfoun and Annika Walters, have conducted important research that informs management tools like the Wyoming State Wildlife Action Plan.

Wyoming Game and Fish, he said, has improved its capacity to do its own research, but still leans on the cooperative for the “more difficult” research questions.

“Like, how do songbirds react to oil and gas development? And not only how do they react, but why do they react that way?” Lanka said.

Between current and former students, the Kauffman, Chalfoun and Walters labs have mentored nearly five dozen graduate students, according to the cooperative’s website. Browsing the names, it’s clear many have remained within Wyoming, employed with the Game and Fish or through other nongovernmental organizations.

Nationally, there are “hundreds” of graduate students whose research is now in limbo, said Steve Williams, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director who earned his Ph.D. via the Pennsylvania Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in the early 1980s.

“I have friends in the Fish and Wildlife Service, and know folks in the co-op units, and they don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring,” Williams told WyoFile. “This is a hell of a way to run a government if you’re looking for efficiency. It makes no sense at all.”

Outside of the Trump administration’s target on the program, Williams has never heard of any displeasure with the 43 cooperative research units, either from the states or universities.

“It’s just the opposite,” he said. “We just added a couple co-op units recently.”

Wyoming’s unit, Williams said, is the “poster child of what the research cooperatives can do for fish and wildlife.” They took on a “real problem,” he said, and helped solve the puzzle of how migration works — and what it requires to survive — on the modern landscape.

“Matt Kaufman and all the students and researchers, they pushed that issue right to the Secretary of Interior,” the former Fish and Wildlife Service director said. “They’re making great strides protecting migration corridors. What’s going to happen if they go away?”

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