The U.S. Department of Agriculture has restored funding to the University of Maine System, Sen. Susan Collins’ office said Wednesday night.
It amounted to an abrupt reversal of the unprecedented funding freeze that came down on Monday. That move escalated President Donald Trump’s war with Maine, which is facing federal civil rights investigations for policies allowing transgender athletes on women’s sports teams.
The stakes were high for Maine’s universities. The system has $63 million in active USDA awards that benefit legacy agriculture and fishing industries in Maine by supporting wide-ranging programs that include research into per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and potato breeding regimes. About $35 million has yet to be paid.
Collins’ office was notified shortly before 8 p.m. Wednesday that the freeze had been reversed, according to Blake Kernen, a spokesperson for the Republican senator. Her office did not explain the reasons for the freeze or the reversal, but Kernen said the Wednesday move followed talks between Collins’ office and officials at both the USDA and the White House.
“We’re deeply grateful to [Collins] for this encouraging news and eager to put the whiplash and worry of recent weeks behind us and keep up our good work to move Maine forward,” Chancellor Dannel Malloy of the university system and University of Maine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy said in a joint statement.
The USDA notified the universities of the funding freeze on Monday with an email saying that it was directed to “temporarily no longer issue any payments or any other releases of funding” to the University of Maine System and Columbia University in New York. The Trump administration has accused the latter school of failing to address antisemitism on its campus.
Maine’s transgender athlete policies caught Trump’s eye after a Republican lawmaker’s posts about high school students went viral. The president threatened the state’s federal funding and then got into a war of words with Gov. Janet Mills at a White House event.
Things escalated from there. The state has been targeted by six federal agencies that have investigated institutions here or pulled program funding. Last week, the Social Security Administration reversed a decision that cut off Maine’s access to a program allowing parents to register their newborns for Social Security numbers from maternity wards.
The Trump administration has investigated Maine and other states as part of an untested legal theory that its policies on transgender athletes violate Title IX, the 1972 law barring sex-based discrimination in schools. The notice to the university system said the funding pause was temporary as the USDA reviewed “prospective” violations of that law.
It remains unclear how the Trump administration came to that conclusion. A university system spokesperson said the agency’s questions focused on whether “biological males” could compete on women’s teams. Maine’s universities are members of the NCAA, which recently conformed to a Trump executive order barring transgender women from women’s sports.
Maine is one of 23 states to allow students to participate in athletics according to their identified gender, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Mills and the Democratic-led Legislature passed a law in 2021 that led the Maine Principals’ Association to allow for automatic participation. Before that, the group considered individual requests to participate.
Spokespeople from the USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the justification for the freeze and the reversal.
“This USDA funding is critically important not only to the University of Maine, but to our farmers and loggers, as well as to the many people who work in Maine’s agriculture, aquaculture, and forestry industries,” Collins said in a statement.
Correction: An earlier version of this report misstated the amount of USDA money going to Maine’s university system.