Agriculture labs funded by USAID on chopping block

Recent actions by the Trump administration have put at risk a network of university-based laboratories that conduct specialized research on agricultural challenges facing underdeveloped countries, including nutrition, food safety, irrigation and livestock management.

In addition, nonprofit groups and former USDA officials who have been watching events unfold at a rapid pace since President Donald Trump’s inauguration worry that his buyout offer to federal employees could result in the loss of key personnel at federal agencies, including USDA.

Feed the Future Innovation Labs have been funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has been targeted for massive downsizing from about 14,000 employees to fewer than 300. Funding for the program is difficult to ascertain because USAID's website went dark recently, but the agency has in recent years given five-year extensions to labs worth between $15 million and $20 million each. The Association of Public Land-Grant Universities says the economic benefit of the investment is at least $8.4 billion, or eight times the total program cost.

At least one is shutting down. Peter Goldsmith, director of the Soy Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois, says a sudden cutoff in funding requires accessing new funds which SIL and the university do not have. The limited funds available will be used to support employees over the next two months as they seek new employment and SIL will shutter April 15.

“The money's got to come from somewhere,” he told Agri-Pulse. “And so every university has to figure out where that’s going to come from.”

Peter GoldsmithUniversities where the labs are located "are all doing their independent priority list” to see whether they can keep the labs going by pulling from other programs, Goldsmith said. APLU says there are 17 labs at 13 universities.

Other labs contacted by Agri-Pulse had varied reactions. Operations at the University of California, Davis’ lab, which focuses on markets, risk and resilience, are “in limbo as we wait for the legal dust to settle,” lab director Michael Carter said in an email, referring to litigation over the Trump administration’s USAID shutdown.

“Under the terms of our suspension, we are to be notified in under three months whether or not we can resume implementation activities,” Carter said. “We have received no word on how that will happen, nor who will review our program nor what their criteria will be.”

No employees have lost jobs, he said. “Following the advice of the University of California, we have not yet terminated our university employees.” Under the terms of the funding suspension, “we are to ‘minimize’ nonimplementation expenses during the time period of the pause.”

That suggests to Carter that “we will be compensated for those expenses, although procedures and rules are not clear. The risks are clear and I do not yet know the appetite of the university to bear that risk.”

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At Kansas State, which has a lab focused on sorghum and millet, “federal funding supports research … with outcomes that advance biosecurity, agriculture, engineering and human and animal health in Kansas and beyond,” according to a statement sent to Agri-Pulse. “We are awaiting updates and guidance from our federal partners and will take action as needed.”

Eric Mitchell, president of the Alliance to End Hunger, says the Feed the Future initiative operated by USAID “helps lift millions of people out of poverty across the world.” The land-grants that house the labs partner with more than 70 universities around the country to conduct research on ways to address serve weather, aiding farmers both in the U.S. and globally.

“When that funding just automatically dries up in the middle of projects being done, those projects are no longer able to happen,” he says.

Historically, he says the program had had bipartisan support, from the Obama administration through the first Trump and the Biden administrations. The initiative grew out of the George W. Bush administration's response to food price spikes in 2007 and 2008.

“It has shown to be a major way to bring U.S. investment, U.S. priorities to the forefront, to help address food security around the world,” Mitchell says.

Goldsmith says efforts are under way to persuade congressional representatives to allow funding of the innovation labs to continue.

“We're seeking a review so they can see this is serving American interests, American farmers, American agribusiness, as well,” Goldsmith says. “And given that review, we think they would see the light and turn the spigot back on and the funding back on.”

Asked how his lab has helped American agribusiness, Goldsmith said points to its effort to promote soy in Africa, where there is a “pitched battle” over genetically modified seeds.

“Do the American farmers want a non-GM continent?” he asks. “Imagine 30 years from now, when Africa has an economy similar to South America — very large, growing, dynamic and they're non-GM, that would be a bad outcome,” he says.

When U.S. soy varieties are grown in Africa, “the U.S. benefits, because it becomes the industrial standard,” he says.

Meanwhile, the administration’s buyout offer has some worried about the loss of key scientific personnel at USDA. A federal judge on Tuesday kept in place a hold he placed last week on the offers, which reportedly had garnered about 40,000 positive responses.

Eric Deeble

Eric Deeble, who was deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs at USDA during the Biden administration, where he oversaw the department’s response to the avian flu outbreak, said he’s concerned about departures by scientists involved in that effort.

“You lose a couple of key people at the [National Veterinary Services Laboratories], and you can't do the confirmatory testing” for the virus, he told Agri-Pulse. He also expressed concern about the potential loss of senior experts in the Agricultural Research Service and at the Center for Veterinary Biologics. CVB is reviewing vaccine candidates for both poultry and cows.

“The highly technical folks over at CVB do the actual approval process in coordination with the data that they get from ARS,” he says. “If you start to lose any of those folks — and we lose them all the time because the drug companies always poach them away because they're really talented — and now you have a hard time actually getting anything through the internal approval process.”

Joe Reardon, senior director of food safety programs at the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, told Agri-Pulse that NASDA is watching the staffing situation closely.

“In many, many cases, those employees that have been there for a long time really represent a tremendous amount of brain trust and institutional knowledge, and we hope that we will not see a reduction or a loss of those employees through any of this, because of … the importance of what they know and what they do each day in the context of providing and ensuring a safe food supply.”

“Our federal partners bring a tremendous amount of knowledge, institutional knowledge and science knowledge,” he said. “They have the ability to conduct research to really better understand these pathogens and how they affect our food supply.” In many cases, he said, the states do not have the resources to do the same work.

Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa., chair of the House Agriculture Committee, told Agri-Pulse he does not like the idea of buyouts, pointing to the potential for a “brain drain” at USDA.

“It scares the hell out of me,” he said.

Rebekah Alvey contributed to this article.