N.S.F. Cuts Raise Fears of a Reduced U.S. Presence in Polar Regions

Kelly Brunt wasn’t the only federal employee to be laid off this month while traveling for work. But she was almost certainly the only one whose work trip was in Antarctica.

Dr. Brunt was a program director at the National Science Foundation, the $9 billion agency that supports scientific advancement in practically every field apart from medicine. As part of the Trump administration’s campaign to shrink the federal government, roughly 10 percent of the foundation’s 1,450 career employees lost their jobs last week. Officials told staff members that layoffs were just getting started.

Yet the office where Dr. Brunt worked has an importance that goes beyond science.

The Office of Polar Programs coordinates research in the Arctic and Antarctic, where the fragile, fast-changing environments are of growing strategic interest to the world’s superpowers.

By treaty, Antarctica is a scientific preserve. And for decades, U.S. research — plus the three year-round stations, the aircraft and the ships that support it — has been the bedrock of the country’s presence there.

Of late, though, “countries such as Korea and China have been rapidly expanding their presence, while the U.S. has been sort of maintaining the status quo,” said Julia Wellner, a marine scientist at the University of Houston who studies Antarctic glaciers.

The Office of Polar Programs has long been understaffed, said Michael Jackson, who worked as an Antarctic program director for the agency until retiring late last year. Aging planes and facilities, plus flat budgets for science, have snarled the pace of research. “Right now we are capable of doing maybe 60 percent of the science that we were capable of doing” 15 years ago, Dr. Jackson said.