June 18, 2026 at 12:00 PM ET
National Security, Natural Resources, and the New Landscape of Federal Funding
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The federal funding landscape is shifting faster than most research offices can re-plan for. In our latest webinar, the leadership of Montana Technological University shared what they are hearing directly from the U.S. military, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior, and what it means for where research dollars will flow next.
Chancellor Johnny MacLean is still learning about AI himself, and yet AI now sits at the center of nearly every funding conversation his institution is having. The takeaway for research development and pre-award teams is not that everyone needs to become an AI expert, but that the language of federal funding is changing, and the offices that learn to translate their faculty's existing strengths into that language will be the ones that keep the money coming in.
On September 11 of last year, the same calendar day the university was founded 125 years earlier, members of the U.S. military walked into the Chancellor's office. As the long-standing relationship between the Army and Montana Tech needed to scale up, there was a specific project that had to be finished in 17 months.
But that was only the first of many. Over the past year the campus has hosted the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, the Ambassador of Sri Lanka, and the General of the Montana National Guard. Every visit carried the same urgency, and it traced back to two barriers the country is racing to solve: critical minerals and energy.
We tend to picture AI as something purely digital. Dr. Katie Hailer reframed it. The race to build out AI is a race for physical inputs: rare earth elements and critical minerals for the chips, and an enormous amount of power and cooling for the data centers that run them.
Both inputs expose a vulnerability. The supply chain for critical minerals is not secure, and the vast majority of it is sourced from countries the U.S. does not always have strong relationships with. Decades of outsourcing also cost the country a generation of workforce and infrastructure. That is why so many of Montana Tech's proposals now pair a technical solution with a serious workforce plan: not just how to produce more critical minerals in the short term, but how to train the students who will do the work for years afterward.
As traditional streams from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are reduced, money is shifting toward the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. Two things come with that shift.
First, the bar for technical readiness is higher. Where the Army research labs once funded almost anything interesting at the bench, they now want work above bench scale, in close partnership with an industry collaborator, designed to scientifically de-risk something that can move straight into production.
Second, the government wants to see partnerships: universities working with industry, with national labs, and with each other. As Chancellor MacLean put it, if you can show the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense that you have strong partnerships and good ideas to meet immediate needs, they are telling you the funding will follow.
"If we can show that we have strong partnerships and good ideas to meet these immediate needs, they are telling us the funding will flow." — Johnny MacLean, Chancellor, Montana Tech
Dr. Hailer walked through several live examples, each one applied, partnered, and aimed squarely at the new priorities:
Because hospitals are now exposed to satellite imaging and drones, there is an active conversation about building protected medical facilities underground. Montana Tech happens to operate the only active mine on a college campus in the country, so it is now in discussions about what an underground hospital might look like. As the Chancellor noted, that is not an idea they would have reached on their own. It came out of putting two sets of expertise together.
Not every school is a school of mines (there are only 14 in the country, and Montana Tech is one). The good news from the Q&A is that the playbook for positioning is portable. Here is what MacLean and Hailer advised for teams that do not obviously fit today's federal priorities.
What stood out most was the balance. MacLean and Hailer are environmental scientists at heart, and they were clear that meeting these national needs has to be done responsibly. Montana Tech created one of the country's first environmental engineering programs back in 1972, and that value still anchors the work. The federal urgency is real, the funding is shifting, and the institutions that respond with creativity, partnerships, and a willingness to learn a new language are the ones that will be in the conversation.
If there is one line to carry into your next planning meeting, it is theirs: be proactive, because there is not a lot of time to be reactive right now.
Johnny MacLean — Chancellor, Montana Tech. A geologist by training, Johnny leads Montana Technological University in Butte, Montana, where the institution's 125-year history in natural resources places it at the center of today's critical-minerals and energy conversations.
Dr. Katie Hailer — Vice Chancellor for Research, Montana Tech. A chemist who spent 16 years on the Montana Tech faculty before moving into research leadership, Katie oversees the applied, industry-partnered proposals the university is putting in front of the DOE and DOD.
Raphaël Bernier — Head of Growth, Atom Grants. Raphaël leads partnerships at Atom Grants and hosts the webinar series, connecting research development teams with the people navigating the fastest-moving corners of the funding landscape.