“These funds are so important to keeping these collections accessible—from maintaining specimens in conditions amenable to long-term preservation, to digitizing skeletons so the data is available to researchers worldwide, to recording collecting location in large databases so that researchers can look at global patterns of change,” adds Hoekstra. “Because of these recent advances, collections are getting more use than ever before, so why pull the plug now? It just doesn't make sense.”

Although the NSF invests a lot of other money into cataloguing and studying life on Earth, the CSBR is unique in funding the infrastructure behind natural history museums. It pays for unglamorous but essential things like basic specimen care and storage. Typical grants are worth around $3 to 5 million, and collectively, they amount to just 0.06 percent of the full NSF budget. And yet, they’re crucial.

“The CSBR is special because it gets to the root of the issue—the collections,” says Prosanta Chakrabarty, the curator of fishes at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Sciences. “Without the collections, there are no long-term natural history studies.”

After many failed attempts, Chakrabarty finally got one such grant just before the hiatus was announced. Rather unglamorously, it’s mostly for new shelving units that roll on tracks. “It’s hard to tell people how excited you are for shelves,” he says. “But these will triple or quadruple our space and shelving allowing us to grow for the next 20 years, rather than having to hold back our collecting or, worse yet, donate part of them to a larger museum. It is a big deal for us. A cancellation would be devastating.”

But nothing’s being cancelled yet. “We’re in a flat budget year, so we were directed to really examine our programs carefully,” says Muriel Poston, the director for the NSF’s Division of Biological Infrastructure. Her team administers the CSBR program, as well as two other relevant programs—one supporting postdocs who “are using collections in innovative and exciting ways,” and another focused on digitizing museum collections. “This was a moment to figure out how best to support CSBR in light of these two newer initiatives.”

This has happened before, she adds. The CSBR was put on hiatus in 2013 and “came back in 2014 as a much stronger, more focused, and more effective program”—one that included not just preserved specimens but also living stocks of laboratory organisms like fruit flies, worms, and yeasts.

But some curators argue that even a year-long hiatus could be a disaster, especially for smaller collections. “I know folks who had a year to get their collections in order or the fire marshal was going to shut them down for not being in code,” says Chakrabarty. Such crises would warrant special consideration, says Poston. “We have a responsibility to respond to any collection that would be at risk during this year of hiatus. If there was an emergency, we would look at that very carefully.”