Thursday, April 17, 2025
Over the past month, Michigan State University professor Marcy Hessling O’Neil has had to inform 47 Malawian students that their university scholarships can no longer be paid for.
Their scholarships — funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — were terminated by the U.S. Department of State on Feb. 26, alongside the entire Transforming Higher Education Systems project that Hessling O’Neil co-directed.
The program is not alone in its cancellation, as all MSU USAID programs have been cut as the federal government seeks to reshape higher education and cut what it sees as wasteful spending.
At MSU, nine direct and five flow-through USAID projects were terminated, amounting to more than $20 million in funding lost, according to university spokesperson Amber McCann.
Those cuts didn’t come as a complete shock to MSU’s researchers, however, as they had already ceased working amid a 90-day freeze implemented by President Donald Trump’s January executive order titled Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid. During those 90 days, the Department of State would review each USAID project to determine whether they made America safer, stronger and more prosperous.
The freeze meant the Malawian students funded by Hessling O’Neil’s project had their scholarships paused for the time being, in addition the rest of the project being halted. Even so, many researchers remained hopeful that their projects would meet the standards set by the Trump administration and be able to resume.
That was until Feb. 26, when all USAID projects at MSU received the cancellation notice — only halfway through the 90-day freeze.
Later, on March 10, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on X that 5,200 USAID contracts had been cancelled of the 6,200 that were appropriated by Congress.
“The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio’s post read.
Rubio wrote that the remaining 18% of programs will be administered under the State Department.
For the 47 Malawian students Hessling O’Neil’s project funded and the other global communities impacted by USAID projects, the mass cuts may be detrimental, researchers say.
These students were part of a scholarship pilot program within Transforming Higher Education Systems that tested the impact of wraparound support for students who came from financially vulnerable households, Hessling O’Neil said.
“(The recipients) had to be poor or ultra poor. They also had to be students who didn’t have an offer of student loans from the student loans board. This was basically their only chance of going to school,” she said.
The cuts are detrimental for some MSU professors as well, who not only lost their projects but also their jobs. Still, they are trying to find alternative funding routes and get the word out about their projects’ value.
Uncertainties surrounding review period
Upon receiving the cancellation notice, David Tschirley, director of Michigan State’s Food Security Group, whose projects received the majority of their funding from USAID, said that although he wasn’t surprised, he was disappointed.
“You spend your whole career doing this and you know what you’re doing is not just fascinating and fun for you, but it’s helpful and affects many, many people,” Tschirley said. “People have invested a lot in this and to see things terminated without any meaningful review was very, very, very tough.”
It’s unclear what the Department of State’s review process looked like, especially because what was expected to be a 90-day review period lasted only six weeks.
A university spokesperson did not provide any details about the review process.
Jessica Garrels, educational specialist and co-principal investigator for Transforming Higher Education Systems, said her team was never contacted during any part of the six-week review period.
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“We have no information about the review other than we were terminated,” Garrels said. “Normally, in a review, you might have a chance to have some sort of dialogue or make a plea.”
Terminations and looking forward
Now that the contracts have been terminated, many researchers and their teams must go through the process of closing out. This process was made harder by the fact that USAID was being dismantled at the same time, Garrels said.
Transforming Higher Education Systems researchers still do not have disposition instructions, despite asking for them, Garrels said. They are also concerned about having to keep staff on longer, which will make the closure process more expensive.
“I think because of some of the things that (the State Department) did in the way they rolled this all out, nobody was ready,” she said. “The staff wasn’t in place. They weren’t allowed to talk to us in the normal ways.”
Not only is the process logistically difficult, but researchers also have to send termination notices to their teams in the U.S. and abroad — all while dealing with their own terminations.
Hessling O’Neil received a 60-day notice from MSU with her termination date set for May 3. Garrels will continue her work at MSU as an education specialist in the Office of International Studies in Education.
Tschirley said that within the Food Security Group (FSG), all fixed-term faculty received 60-day notices on April 3, making their last day at MSU June 2. Two staff in the group were on a probationary period, so they had to be let go immediately. Any other fixed-term faculty that FSG has to let go will receive adjunct faculty status, Tschirley said, so they will be able to maintain their institutional affiliation with MSU to pursue funding, bring it back to the university and come back on to the payroll.
Despite the terminations, Tschirley said FSG and other USAID funded groups on campus are remaining optimistic that they will be able to continue their work and find funding elsewhere.
There are two significant FSG projects that are currently funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, alongside a few other smaller projects. Now, Tschirley said, the program must be strategic about reaching out to private sector organizations as well as asking MSU for help.
“We’re reaching out very systematically to other foundations, and we’re trying to be very forward looking,” Tschirley said. “We’re actually asking the university for support to help us do what we’ve been talking about doing for about a year and that is turn FSG into a more explicitly multi-disciplinary cross-college center for doing this kind of work.”
Tschirley said this kind of investment into FSG and its work would help it maintain its capacity and would make MSU even stronger within the security space.
The group is also encouraged by President Kevin Guskiewicz’s announcement that the university will pull $5 million per year over the next three years from a restricted endowment to fund research amid the Trump administration’s cuts to higher education.
The details of this additional research support have not been finalized, said McCann, the university spokesperson.
Spreading awareness on campus
In the meantime, impacted faculty say they are trying to raise awareness about the importance of these programs and the benefits they bring to the university, the country and the world.
On April 17, a group of faculty members, including Garrels and Tschirley, set up an information booth next to the MSU Rock and painted the Rock with the phrase “USAID Cuts — Who will feed and educate the world? Spartans Will.”
Michigan State faculty gather outside of the Rock in protest of USAID pulling federal funding from MSU researchers in East Lansing, Michigan on April 17, 2025.
The decision to set up the informational booth was inspired in part by researchers’ interactions with community members. Feed the Future Biotech Potato Partnership Communications Manager Janet Fierro said she and other faculty realized many people didn’t know what USAID was or that many USAID programs provided support for different people.
“We live in a global society, we have to be good community partners. And by isolating the U.S., we’re not going to do the U.S. any favors,” Fierro said. “So we just felt like we really needed to come out, share our story and let people know that we’re real people that are being touched and impacted by this.”
The faculty passed out handouts that point recipients to a QR code for Michigan State’s Action Center, which provides a quick way for students to fill out their information and send a pre-written email to local legislators to express support for federal research funding.
One of the faculty members at the booth was David Douches, the director of MSU Potato Breeding and Genetics. Douches was passing out potato chips made from his genetically engineered, late blight resistant potatoes.
Douches’ Feed the Future Global Biotech Potato Partnership was one of the cancelled USAID programs. Douches’ team was working with farmers in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya and Nigeria to bring late blight resistant potatoes into their fields with the larger goal of creating greater food security in these countries.
When their project was terminated, Douches was just about to send their data to the Kenyan government so that they could begin working with Kenyan farmers, he said.
“A lot of our lives are good here in America,” Douches said. “We can take our skills and knowledge and help people in other countries … You try to help people, so it really hurts to be shut down on something that we think was so important.”
Similar to FSG’s efforts, Douches’ team is trying to find alternative sources of funding. But as its work is halted at the moment, Douches said the team is just trying to hold things together until it is able to get more support.
Michigan State faculty gather outside of the Rock in protest of USAID pulling federal funding from MSU researchers in East Lansing, Michigan on April 17, 2025.
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All MSU USAID projects terminated by Trump administration – The State News
