Funding for agricultural and infrastructure projects led by Virginia Tech researchers is hanging in the balance while the Trump administration tries to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Most staff at the agency have been placed on administrative leave after the White House in early February released a statement listing USAID projects it called evidence of “waste and abuse” of federal funds. The administration also froze funding for USAID projects; that action has been challenged in court.
The impact of cuts at USAID on university researchers who receive grant funding is not yet clear.
At Virginia Tech, there have been eight USAID-funded projects since July 2023, totaling about $4 million in expenditures to date, university spokesperson Mark Owczarski said Monday. The total value of those projects, which typically last several years, “was expected to be approximately $14.3 million,” Owczarski said.
It’s a small fraction of the federally sponsored research spending at Virginia Tech each year. In fiscal year 2024 alone, expenditures funded by federal programs totaled more than $308 million.
But Tech has a history dating back decades with USAID. In 2004, Virginia Tech received the largest single-day award any university had received from the agency. The grants, totaling $34 million, funded five years of agricultural research to improve crop yields in developing countries.
Related research is still taking place today. But the university hasn’t been willing to say much about the future of its USAID-funded projects.
How many people at Virginia Tech would be affected by funding cuts at USAID?
At Virginia Tech, about 30 positions have been fully or partially funded by USAID projects since July 2023. Most of those people are teaching and research faculty, while a few are students.
Owczarski said their projects focus on technical and vocational training, disaster resilient infrastructure, and farming sustainability in countries including Ghana, Uganda, Senegal, Malawi, Jordan, Nepal, Bangladesh and India.
“Currently, no one in Blacksburg has lost a job,” Owczarski said by email on Feb. 17.
Since late January, the university has maintained a webpage for federal agency updates that impact funding and projects at Tech. It advises people to continue work on their awarded programs until notified by the sponsor agency and to share all communications with the university’s Office of Sponsored Programs. “In some cases, work will not be stopped but may be re-scoped in response to recent executive orders,” an FAQ says.
Owczarski said on Feb. 25 that USAID grants represent “a fraction” of the full-time workload for most of the 30 people the funding cuts would affect, and there could be a variety of ways to make sure that work could be completed. For the approximately seven employees and graduate students who get most or all of their funding via a USAID grant, figuring out the path forward could be more complicated. “The university is working on each [grant situation] in support of the scholarship being done,” he said.
USAID’s budget represents less than 1% of the nation’s annual spending. The agency was created by Congress in 1961 to provide civilian foreign aid and development assistance.
Universities and businesses across Virginia stand to lose about $7 billion in funding if active USAID contracts and assistance are terminated, according to USAID Stop-Work, a project tracking the impact of cuts to USAID.
What kind of projects at Virginia Tech were recently funded by USAID?
Much of Tech’s recent work through USAID took place in Southeast Asia. Here are a few examples of the projects researchers have worked on recently.
India
The majority of Virginia Tech’s recent USAID funding has gone toward its work in India.
In July 2024, Virginia Tech announced that its Center for International Research, Education and Development had been awarded a $5 million grant from USAID to work with higher education institutions in India.
The grant would allow experts on adapting infrastructure to withstand extreme weather and other climate change-related hazards to work together to create certification courses on infrastructure management and conduct research on how to make systems like housing, transportation and power more resilient.
Virginia Tech operates a few research centers in the country, and most recently opened a satellite office in Chennai for the Virginia Tech India Research and Education Forum in 2023. VTREF facilitates research between the university and partners in the country. It also offers certificate programs in business analytics and artificial intelligence.
Bangladesh
In 2021, Tech won a $3 million grant from USAID for its Feed the Future Innovation Lab for an Integrated Pest Management project in Bangladesh. For that project, Tech and collaborators investigated solutions to threats to crops and coordinated with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to develop prevention efforts against new crop threats.
Though the project focused on crop sustainability in Bangladesh, Guru Ghosh, vice president for outreach and international affairs at Tech, noted in a Tech announcement about the grant that protecting crops in one country can benefit surrounding nations as well, with ripple effects felt globally.
Tech’s Integrated Pest Management lab was established in 1993. Feed the Future is the U.S. federal government’s global hunger and food security initiative led by USAID.
When checked on Feb. 26, the Feed the Future website could not be accessed. USAID’s website could be accessed but contained no content beyond instructions for employees to retrieve personal items from their offices in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
In addition to the above projects, a Virginia Tech professor was in the midst of a yearlong fellowship at USAID.
Venkat Sridhar, associate professor of biological systems engineering at Tech, was named a Jefferson Science Fellow by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in June 2024.
Awardees complete a one-year fellowship at either the U.S. Department of State or USAID.
Sridhar was spending a year at USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment and Food Security focusing on global water resource management and helping coordinate the nation’s 21 Feed the Future Innovation Labs.
Sridhar was not immediately available for an interview because he was out of the country.
Owczarski did not make anyone at Tech’s Center for International Research, Education and Development, which facilitates international projects, available for an interview.