Federal, state and local agencies across Colorado on Thursday braced for deep spending cuts proposed in President Donald Trump’s budget. Potential impacts ranged from reductions in research grants to universities and laboratories to reduced public broadcast programming to a multimillion-dollar hit to housing and community development programs.

Gov. John Hickenlooper on Thursday asked key staffers to reach out to U.S. Sens. Cory Gardner and Michael Bennet to assess how Colorado would fare under Trump’s proposed budget. Hickenlooper also directed all state agencies to assess how they would be affected by the budget plan, which is likely to undergo significant change when Congress takes it up, said his spokeswoman, Jacque Montgomery.

“The Trump administration’s budget blueprint poses some serious challenges for communities across Colorado,” Hickenlooper said in a prepared statement. “We have directed our state agencies to immediately begin reviewing how these proposed cuts might impact Coloradans. We have also begun discussions with members of Colorado’s Congressional delegation to ensure that Colorado’s values and priorities are protected. Moving forward, it will be imperative that the Trump administration provides more detail and information about the nature and scope of the proposed plan.”

Trump is proposing deep cuts in discretionary spending for agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, while other areas, such as the military, would see large increases.

Labor statistics show that Colorado has a higher percentage of federal employment than some of its neighbors, such as Kansas and Nebraska, but lower than Wyoming and New Mexico. According to 2013 statistics, nearly 56,000 people in Colorado work for the federal government, or 2.3 percent of the state’s total employment. Much of that employment is clustered in Colorado Springs, with a heavy military presence, a sector that will see growth under Trump’s proposed budget.

Colorado has about 37,000 active members of the military. The agency with the largest share of the federal workforce in the state is the Interior Department, which potentially faces a 12 percent reduction and has nearly 7,000 employees here. The next highest is the Air Force, with about 6,200 civilian employees.

Here’s a look at where cuts could hit hardest:

Housing and community funds

Trump has proposed eliminating Community Development Block Grant funds that communities across the state rely on to finance community development activities.

The state annually receives about $34 million in such grants, most of which go to local communities. Of that amount, $8.5 million goes directly to the Colorado Department of Local Affairs for dispersal. The department said Trump’s budget also proposed getting rid of $13.2 million in housing aid the agency receives annually.

Irv Halter, director of local affairs, held a meeting this week to warn his staff to gird for a brutal budget year, given Trump’s priorities.

“We don’t have any control,” said DOLA spokeswoman Denise Stepto. “We are focusing on what we can continue to do. We’re looking at what’s going to be impacted, and we’re doing an analysis to decide how to be nimble.”

Public universities

The University of Colorado would be stung by the proposed budget cuts through reduced research funding, school officials said. Those losses would ripple throughout the state’s economy.

Nearly two-thirds of CU’s research funding for the fiscal year that ended last June — $602 million of a record $924 million total — came from federal agencies, with about half coming from the Department of Health and Human Services, said Ken McConnellogue, spokesman for the CU system.

That agency would be looking at an 18 percent cut under the proposed budget.

CU receives about $85 million from the National Science Foundation, which isn’t specifically mentioned in the proposed budget but could be included among unnamed agencies in line to see funding slashed. The university also gets more NASA research funding, about $80 million, than any public university in the country. The space agency would see a relatively small 1 percent reduction in its budget.

Research funding also flows to the university from the departments of Energy, Commerce and Education, which are slated to see budget reductions of 6, 16 and 14 percent, respectively. Money also comes from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which would see a 6 percent rise in funding.

“That $924 million we get obviously has a substantial economic impact on Colorado,” McConnellogue said. “That’s a lot of money that goes for not only the research, but for the infrastructure and ancillary jobs it creates. So it really would have a ripple effect not only on our university, but on our state’s economy.”

At Colorado State University, about 70 percent of the school’s research expenditures came from federal sources — $232 million of a total $332 million in the last fiscal year.

Science and research

Proposed cuts to agencies that fund several research organizations have caused outcry in Colorado’s scientific community, one going as far as to call the cuts “indefensible.”

Climate scientists said the cuts would eliminate vital research the public relies on to prepare for and respond to weather emergencies.

“Staffing cuts that would have to happen born of the budget cuts would put incredibly smart people out of work and their projects would stagnate,” said Dan Powers, executive director of CO-LABS, a consortium of Colorado’s federal research labs and institutions. “In some ways, it’s hard to know what would be lost if there are wholesale closures of departments and projects within labs.”

More than 30 research labs and institutions that receive 51 percent or more of their funding from federal sources employ over 7,800 employees in Colorado, Powers said. The work at those labs and institutions spans multiple industries, including agriculture, renewable energy, climate science, disease research and forestry, and has impacts that ripple across the nation, he said.

The potentially impacted also include the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, which has 1,700 regular employees. Its funding for fiscal year 2016 was $386.6 million, 80 percent of which came from the Department of Energy while the remaining 20 percent came from grants from other federal agencies.

Other federal institutions that could be affected include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which including contractors has more 1,000 workers in its Boulder lab, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which has more than 650 workers in Boulder, some of whom are contractors. Both are funded by the Commerce Department.

Public broadcasting and arts

The proposed budget would eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s $445 million budget entirely, which could have varying impacts on Colorado’s stations. Although national programs PBS and NPR get most of the attention, 90 percent of CPB’s budget goes toward local stations.

Federal funding from CPB typically accounts for 15 to 20 percent of Colorado Public Broadcasting’s annual budget, spokeswoman Pam Parker said. The cuts likely would affect programming in fiscal 2018, although she speculated it would hurt the national programs more. Colorado’s rural and inner city communities would be particularly affected, she said, as people rely on them for pre-school programming, such as Sesame Street.

Federal funding accounts for 5 percent of Colorado Public Radio’s budget, which comes out to $893,000, CPR spokeswoman Lauren Cameron said. To prepare for these types of situations, CPR started to include annual budget surpluses to offset any loss of CPB funding six years ago.

The National Endowment for the Arts would also be eliminated as Trump’s proposal drops its $148 million budget, cutting off a pipeline that funneled $51.5 million into Colorado arts between 1995-2015. The agency gave 18 grants to Colorado organizations for 2017, totaling $355,000. Its recipients range from large cultural institutions, such as $45,000 to both the Denver Art Museum and Denver Botanical Gardens, and small cultural institutions, such as $10,000 to Su Teatro.

“We are disappointed because we see our funding actively making a difference with individuals of all ages in thousands of communities, large, small, urban and rural, and in every Congressional District in the nation,” NEA chairwoman Jane Chu said in a statement Thursday.

Transportation

One program that could be impacted at Denver International Airport and throughout Colorado is the essential air markets service, an initiative that subsidizes air routes to small airports in places such as Pueblo, Alamosa and Cortez through carriers including Boutique Air and Great Lakes Airlines.

DIA has the most essential air markets service destinations of any airport in the continental United States, with routes also outside of the state to small towns in Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska. The proposed budget would apparently eliminate the program entirely.

Also at risk are Amtrak’s long-distance train routes, two of which run through Colorado from Chicago to California. The rail carrier’s California Zephyr to San Francisco has stops at Denver Union Station, Granby and Grand Junction. Amtrak’s Southwest Chief to Los Angeles serves as an economic boon and link to the nation for its stations in Lamar, La Junta and Trinidad.

Amtrak says 115,000 people boarded its trains in Colorado in 2015, nearly 15 percent of whom reported they wouldn’t have traveled if Amtrak wasn’t available. The routes are linked to 480 Colorado jobs and have a $48 million impact.

K-12 Education

Trump’s plan would slice more than $9 billion from the federal education budget for fiscal 2018.

Denver Public Schools could lose between $5 million to $10 million in federal funding if Congress approves Trump’s proposed budget, said Superintendent Tom Boasberg.

DPS could lose $3.75 million it gets annually to hire and train teachers in schools throughout the district, Boasberg said. After-school, before-school and extended-day programs, known in DPS as Discovery Link, would take a $1 million hit. Those programs provide educational learning opportunities for working families that they might not otherwise be able to afford, Boasberg said.

“We are deeply troubled by the proposed cuts to federal education funding, which target key efforts to improve classroom instruction and provide extended learning opportunities for kids,” he said.

The proposed amount, Boasberg said, “is a significant sum, but we are equally concerned about the message this seems to send about the value of research-proven, data-supported efforts that work for all of all our students, but particularly our most vulnerable kids.”

Charter school advocates are encouraged by Trump’s call for $1.4 billion in new federal investments in school choice, including vouchers for private schools, charter schools and Title 1 funding that would follow students to the public schools of their choice.

Charter schools are public schools but generally operate independently from the local school district.

Corrections funding

One Department of Justice program that’s on the chopping block has helped Colorado’s Department of Corrections, Denver and 33 other counties. Agencies in the state were awarded a combined $3.5 million last year from a long-targeted program that helps offset the cost of incarcerating immigrants who commit crimes while in the country illegally.

The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program helps offset the salaries of correctional and jail officers for the time they spend overseeing such inmates while they serve sentences for at least a felony conviction or two misdemeanor convictions. Eliminating the SCAAP program would save $210 million.

The Obama administration tried to end that program, too, in recent years — only to rebuffed by Congress, which restored the funding. But the money for local awards has been cut by more than half since 2002.

A spokesman for the Colorado DOC, which received nearly $1.2 million in 2015 and $2.1 million last year, could not be reached for comment. In Denver, which received about $490,000 each of the last two years, the sheriff’s department was bracing for the loss. A spokesman said the federal program reimbursed about 25 percent of salary costs related to officers’ time overseeing eligible inmates. The department’s budget was about $137 million.

“Close to a half-million dollar hit this year would be significant to us,” said Simon Crittle of the Denver Sheriff Department. “Obviously it’s disappointing, especially since the federal government is so reliant on local folks to identify these sorts of inmates.”

Denver Post staff writers Kevin Simpson, Monte Whaley, Jesse Paul and Jon Murray contributed to this report.

Updated March 17, 2017, at 12:56 p.m.: This article has been updated to clarify that some Boulder National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Institute of Standards and Technology workers are contract employees.