Back in May, when Jennifer Hettema first saw the Trump administration’s proposed budget, it took her a while to find the bad news. But buried in a Health and Human Services appendix, there it was: a $100 million line through the nation’s teen pregnancy prevention program. A psychologist and public health researcher at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Hettema is studying how doctors can best talk to Native American and Latino teens about avoiding unwanted pregnancies. Her work is funded by the Obama-era program, which gives out five-year grants for evidence-based intervention evaluations.

That left Hettema with three years left on her grant, but she figured it wasn’t too soon to worry about the future. She started to talking to her local representatives in Congress, who assured her there was bipartisan support for science and reproductive health—the budget was just a proposal, after all. She went back to work recruiting patients for her trial study.

But last week, when her annual grant award letter arrived from the Office of Adolescent Health, the HHS arm that administers the teen pregnancy prevention program, she found one gut-sinking sentence: “This award also shortens the project period to end June 30, 2018, and the end of this budget year.” The grants were supposed to last through 2020.

As recipients at 81 institutions around the country found out last week, the Trump administration decided to cancel them early—cutting off $213.6 million in promised funds and disrupting ambitious research projects aimed at unwanted pregnancies in teens. The unusual move, circumventing the traditional congressional budgetary process, has scientists and public health officials scrambling to figure out how to save work already in progress. But for most, the outlook is bleak.

“Our study can’t be salvaged,” says Lisa Masinter, who leads a Chicago Department of Public Health project to test the efficacy of a school-based education and STI screening program. Started as a pilot in 2009, the program had so much demand that CDPH wanted to make sure it actually worked. So they applied for a federal grant and began collecting baseline data last year. They were planning to start testing the intervention on ninth graders next year, and follow them through their entire high school career. Now, they can maybe collect six months of follow-up data. Which, if you know anything about human gestation, isn’t long enough to evaluate the most relevant metric: births. “Even if we find other funding, the framework of the evaluation has been totally altered,” says Masinter.

Many grantees WIRED spoke with indicated that their project officers at the Office of Adolescent Health were just as surprised by the grant disruptions as they were. According to a Reveal report that broke the news last week, the decision to eliminate funding likely came from the office of the assistant secretary of health. Last month, President Trump appointed Valerie Huber, an outspoken advocate of abstinence-only education, as the office’s new chief of staff. On Monday, a spokesperson from the office of the assistant secretary for health confirmed eliminating the final two years of funding, but when asked where the directive came from, responded in an email that “the President’s FY 2018 Budget eliminated funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, so our grants office informed the grantees of their June 30, 2018 end date, to give them an opportunity to adjust their programs and plan for an orderly closeout.”

It should be pointed out here that the President’s proposed 2018 budget is not a legally binding document meant to guide any immediate agency funding decisions. Until Congress approves the budget, it should only be a White House wish list.

Before coming to HHS, Huber was the president of Ascend, formerly known as the National Abstinence Education Association. In a March editorial in The Hill, Huber wrote that the time had arrived for evidence-based pregnancy prevention programs to yield to an abstinence-only sex-ed stance. And indeed, evidence of that thinking was on display in the Trump administration’s rationale for eliminating the program. In the HHS appendix, which outlines budget justifications, the stated reason was that while the teen pregnancy rate has declined significantly over recent years, “it does not appear this program has been a major driver in that reduction.”