The NSF has supported Arecibo for decades now, along with a bunch of other observatories (http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/nato...). NSF has re-evaluated its commitment to these observatories and decided to pull out of several of them so they can pursue new observing opportunities, such as LSST (sky survey for transients) and ATST (solar telescope).
Some scientists are unhappy. The complaints I have heard are that these less-centralized telescopes allowed small investigations to get off the ground, and the new ones are large consortia.
The LSST is an incredible project. I toured their lab at Brookhaven and one of the lead scientists offhand commented "Yeah, the only problem so far is we're going to have to make something flatter than anyone has ever really made something flat" (referring to the CCD array).
Some scientists are unhappy. The complaints I have heard are that these less-centralized telescopes allowed small investigations to get off the ground, and the new ones are large consortia.
For more: http://news.sciencemag.org/2012/08/major-u.s.-telescopes-fac...