Grant termination terminates data maintenance

When grants end, maintenance ends with them. Data infrastructure paid for by a project budget has the lifespan of that project budget — three to five years, after which the server contract lapses, the storage migrates ad hoc or not at all, and the dataset enters the failure modes catalogued in C-0017 (personnel) and C-0011 (Tier 1 platform).

The 2025 NIH and NSF terminations are the cleanest available demonstration: 2,291 NIH grants ($2.45B) and 1,752 NSF grants ($1.4B) terminated between February and August 2025 (S-0031); the NSF STEM Education Directorate alone lost 839 grants worth $888M; FY2026 proposed cuts of ~56% to NSF, ~24% to NOAA, and ~57% to ARPA-E. Every long-term dataset funded under those grants entered the failure mode this Claim describes within months of the termination.

Specific data infrastructure disappeared alongside the grants: the NOAA Billion-Dollar Disasters database (S-0032), Mauna Loa's 68-year CO₂ record proposed for complete defunding, ~3,400 datasets removed from Data.gov by late February 2025 (S-0033), and 191 of 411 long-term mammal studies terminated, including a 63-year yellow-bellied marmot time series rejected on the grounds it had "too much data" (S-0034).

Every long-term dataset is a cumulative capital asset. When the funding stops, the asset is abandoned, and re-collection is rarely possible because the ecological, cohort, or instrumental conditions under which the original data was collected cannot be reassembled.