By Austin Howard, Raul Negrao and Jose Escobedo
We are three El Pasoans who came home to build a defense technology company. The National Science Foundation award UTEP won in January 2024, worth up to $160 million, was supposed to build the aerospace and defense economy that companies like ours need to stay here. Congresswoman Veronica Escobar called it El Paso’s “moon shot.”
It is gone, and in our reading, the public record of how it was lost points to the UTEP president’s office.
In April 2024, NSF suspended the award. Less than two weeks later, President Heather Wilson demoted the grant’s principal investigator, Ahsan Choudhuri, writing that “the University has lost confidence in your suitability to lead.” Escobar, then-Mayor Oscar Leeser and County Judge Ricardo Samaniego wrote to her jointly: “We cannot even fathom what would lead you to take such a negative action toward our community.”
In August 2025, NSF canceled the grant, saying most of the money had been reallocated. In 2026, NSF’s Office of Inspector General reported that “no evidence existed to substantiate any of the allegations” against Choudhuri. But the money and opportunities for El Paso were gone.
The damage did not stop there. Grant spending at UTEP’s Aerospace Center topped $52 million from 2020 through 2023; it fell to $11.8 million in 2024 and $668,000 in 2025, according to El Paso Matters.
A separate $40 million federal economic development grant UTEP had led was, according to Escobar, at risk, and in October 2025 the city of El Paso became co-applicant. Escobar said the city “stepped up to save” it; UTEP calls it a planned partnership.
A White House celebration of the NSF award was canceled after, by Escobar’s account, Wilson’s team suggested it “might be too political in an election year.” As El Paso Matters has reported, the two grants could have brought up to $200 million to this region.
How has President Wilson answered? After the inspector general’s office closed its case this February, she said, “I stand by our May 2024 finding.”
She then raised a 20-year-old plagiarism case against Choudhuri that her 2024 decision had not cited. In a February guest column published by El Paso Inc. and the El Paso Times, she defended disclosing the proposal’s alleged problems, writing that the alternative would have been worse: “There’s a word for pretending we didn’t know. It’s called fraud.”
By then, federal investigators had already said they could not substantiate the allegations. According to El Paso Matters, as of February she had not responded to multiple interview requests over two years about the two grants. Escobar put it plainly: “For me, it was very clear (Wilson) really couldn’t care less.”
Questions about her stewardship of public money are not new.
In 2013, the Department of Energy’s Inspector General found that four Energy Department contractors had paid her consulting firm about $450,000 without evidence that the work had been completed.
At her 2017 Senate confirmation to be secretary of the Air Force, Sen. Jack Reed said “the inability to produce any significant work product, even examples of it, is troubling.” Asked by Reed whether she had deliberately negotiated contract terms exempting her from federal acquisition rules, she answered, “I don’t recall.”
In 2007, a watchdog group named her one of the most corrupt members of Congress over a call she made to the U.S. attorney about a pending public corruption case, which the group said violated House rules. And in 2019, the UT Regents named her president despite a petition with more than 10,000 signatures and what state Sen. José Rodríguez called “a flawed, closed search process.”
She has defended herself each time. She says disclosing the problems to NSF was the honest course, and that she did the work she was paid for. Readers can weigh that against the record.
This is not about UTEP’s faculty and students, who do excellent work. It is about the people who lead them.
In May 2024, UT Regents Chairman Kevin Eltife and then-Chancellor James Milliken said, “We are unwavering in our support of her decisions on the matter.”
We have written to the regents asking them to revisit that judgment, commission an independent review of the decisions surrounding the loss of the NSF Engine, require a public accounting of the new $2 million federal drone appropriation for UTEP’s Fabens and Tornillo sites, and decide, based on what they find, whether UTEP needs new leadership.
President Wilson told a professor the university had lost confidence in his suitability to lead. Two years and a potential $160 million later, El Paso is entitled to ask the same question of her.
Austin Howard is president and chief engineer of Peregrine Applied Sciences and an Air Force veteran. Raul Negrao is co-founder and chief of RF Engineering and an Army veteran. Jose Escobedo is co-founder and mechanical design lead at Peregrine Applied Sciences. All three live in El Paso.
The post Opinion: El Paso lost its moon shot. UTEP’s president still owes the city answers. appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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