Presidential adviser Elon Musk conceded during an Oval Office news conference last week that an unsubstantiated claim made to justify the Trump administration’s freeze on federal foreign aid might not have been true.
Amplified by Musk and President Donald Trump, the story of the U.S. government planning to send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza appears to be false, but the president’s January order stopping aid and development programs has had a real and possibly lasting effect, both across the globe and in Illinois.
A federal judge ordered the administration late Thursday to temporarily lift its freeze and allow funding from U.S. aid and development programs to flow for the time being. But uncertainty remains for organizations whose missions rely on government dollars to carry out projects that benefit populations in developing nations while also supporting jobs and the broader economy at home.
Among the Illinois-based programs affected by Trump’s order to halt funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and other foreign aid programs are a lab at the University of Illinois’ flagship campus that works to establish soybean markets in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions, a Chicago nonprofit’s work with victims of armed conflict and Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, and a project led by NORC at the University of Chicago working “to promote the use of evidence and data for decision-making” in USAID-funded programs.
The Trump administration has argued, often with little evidence, that USAID and similar assistance programs are full of waste and fraud and contradict American values and interests.
But those involved with the projects and others who’ve worked with and studied USAID say efforts to shut down the agency are shortsighted and undermine the administration’s stated goals of making America “safer,” “stronger” and “more prosperous.”
Layoffs at U. of I. soybean lab
For more than a decade, Peter Goldsmith has run the USAID-funded Soybean Innovation Lab at U. of I.’s Urbana-Champaign campus. The lab, one of 19 similar institutions at land-grant universities across the country, was awarded a $30 million grant from the federal aid agency in 2022 to continue its work helping a burgeoning soybean industry in sub-Saharan Africa.
The lab has worked in more than 30 African countries, helping spread expertise and technology to continue growing the industry, from the plants in the ground to the manufacturing processes needed to unlock the soybean’s versatile protein and oil.
In Malawi, for example, the lab’s experts “essentially worked ourselves out of a job” in the northern part of the country by successfully spurring soybean production, Goldsmith said. The focus shifted two years ago to the hotter, drier southern region, where the agriculture sector is looking to diversify from crops like sugarcane and tropical fruits, he said.
But after Trump’s edict, that effort now is at a “dead stop,” he said last week. Without the lab’s work, “there’s no one there to provide the technical support: how to process it, how to produce seed, how to grow it. That’s just expertise that … doesn’t exist, and that’s our role.”
The freeze also had an immediate impact much closer to home.
Without the federal funding, there’s no way to pay the lab’s staff, so Goldsmith said he is being forced to lay off 30 people beginning April 15. As of late last week, the federal judge’s temporary lift on the freeze hadn’t changed those plans, he said.
For the time being, he said, his team is “mothballing” operations in hopes of being able to restart if funds start flowing again in the future. If that happens, he said, he might be able to rehire some employees, but there’s no guarantee they won’t have moved on to other employment.
“I want them to find jobs and focus on their families first,” Goldsmith said.
If the Trump administration ends up doing away with the funding altogether, it would have a long-term impact not just on the lab’s employees and its work in Africa and elsewhere across the globe, but also on the soybean economy in Illinois, the top U.S. producer of the crop and home to industry giant Archer Daniels Midland Co.
“The market for soy is only growing globally,” Goldsmith said. “So as markets grow, it becomes more profitable for U.S. farmers, Illinois farmers to produce soy. … When markets grow, they win the most, and holding back Africa, not allowing it to become a soy continent, would be devastating for global soybean markets.”
Stability in developing regions
Establishing a new commodity crop also helps create economic opportunity and stability in developing regions that can be volatile, helping support America’s national security interests, Goldsmith said.
“That means that you don’t have to send in troops, you don’t have to worry about the infiltration of … forces that are counter to democracy,” he said.
The lab is the kind of “win-win operation” that demonstrates the positive benefit foreign aid can have both globally and locally, said Matthew Winters, a political science professor at U. of I. who has studied the effectiveness of foreign assistance.
“It was helping students and postdoctoral scholars and professors pursue research, and then that research was being shared with people in developing countries that could make use of it,” Winters said last week on a conference call with reporters.
Summarizing research conducted over the past decade on foreign aid more broadly, Winters wrote in a recent article that the evidence “shows that places receiving aid and people exposed to information about aid feel more positively about the foreign donor providing the aid” and called it “a meaningful tool for generating soft-power resources.”
U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski, a Springfield Democrat who represents the University of Illinois’ main campus, said she hopes calling attention to programs like the Soybean Innovation Lab will change the conversation on foreign aid.
“I think that will help, hopefully, Republicans begin to understand that these cuts are very deep and they’re going to hurt the very people that they’re representing,” Budzinski said last week.
Much of Illinois’ soybean crop is grown in heavily Republican downstate counties. Nationally, some GOP lawmakers have started to push for renewed shipments of direct food assistance after USAID’s inspector general released a report last week revealing that $489 million worth of American-produced food sitting at ports, in warehouses and on ships and at risk of spoiling or otherwise not reaching its intended destination. The administration has said that type of aid was subject to a waiver issued shortly after the freeze.
Impact on migration
Trump’s move to pause the flow of aid also has the potential to undermine some of his administration’s policy priorities in other areas.
Through federal funding including a $4.5 million USAID grant, Chicago-based Heartland Alliance International has been working in Colombia with both victims of the country’s armed conflicts and migrants from neighboring Venezuela who have fled instability in that nation.
In Colombia, “we go out and do emergency response, with food assistance, shelter, providing protection for folks who are at imminent risk of violence, particularly women and girls,” said Liz Drew, a senior adviser with Heartland Alliance International, which receives funding for the project and others around the world through other State Department programs that also have been temporarily stopped.
The work in Colombia “is on pause right now or significantly reduced because … we don’t have the resources,” Drew said. “There are no funds coming at this point from the U.S. government.”
In working with Venezuelan migrants, the organization assists with “regularizing their status” and finding jobs or entrepreneurial opportunities to establish stable livelihoods in Colombia.
“The idea is, really, actually to give folks the opportunity to stay safely in Colombia and not make dangerous migration journeys,” Drew said.
It’s a mission that should work in concert with the Trump administration’s goal of reducing migration across the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We feel really confident that our programs are in line with U.S. national security interests and in line with the current foreign policy,” Drew said.
In addition to furloughing 90% of its staff in January, more than 200 people, the organization laid off eight people at its headquarters in Chicago, said Rebecca Obrock, Heartland Alliance International’s interim executive director.
If the administration succeeds in permanently closing USAID or drastically reducing foreign assistance, “it’s actually going to have a huge detrimental effect to the American economy, as tens of thousands of people have now been laid off,” said Obrock, who added that the organization already has had to reduce a contract with an information technology vendor.
“It’s not a tiny international development bubble,” Obrock said. “It is going to have wide adverse effects throughout the country.”
And while the organization greatly appreciates those who’ve responded to its increased private fundraising effort amid the freeze, Drew said, “the U.S. government, even though (foreign aid is) a small percentage of our (federal) budget, it is the biggest funder worldwide of all development and humanitarian assistance.
“So when we pull back, it impacts everybody, because there’s nobody who can step in and diversify funding that quickly to meet this scale of need.”
The halting of aid work and staff layoffs are among the most acute results of the freeze, but it also has cast doubt on the availability of funding for future projects of the kind USAID has historically funded.
The University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures recently completed work on a $6.8 million federally funded conservation project at Egypt’s Medinet Habu, home to the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses III.
Although not immediately affected by the freeze, the institute was in negotiations about continued funding for work at the site, said its director, Timothy Harrison, who has worked on USAID-funded projects to preserve culture heritage sites around the Middle East since the early 1990s.
Such programs can have enormous benefits by providing employment and training for workers in those regions, generating tourism, and improving the U.S.’ relationships with other countries, Harrison said.
“If this funding is going to be permanently cut, it will have … a huge impact that is not at all reflected by the really small amounts of funding that we’re ultimately talking about,” he said.
Also at the University of Chicago, NORC is part of a consortium that last year received a $53 million, 10-year grant to better integrate the use of evidence and data into USAID programs.
That work also has been affected by the freeze. A spokesman for NORC declined to comment.
‘A right way and a wrong way’
The court ruling last week that lifted the freeze, at least temporarily, came in a lawsuit brought by several groups against the Trump administration, including the Chicago-based American Bar Association.
The legal group currently has $109 million in federal awards for 19 programs through USAID, with its work focused on strengthening the rule of law and human rights in numerous countries around the world, including efforts to combat human trafficking in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The association joined the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., because it believed the Trump administration was subverting the rule of law at home by withholding funds approved by Congress and attempting to shut down the agency without legislative approval.
“If the government doesn’t want to do this kind of work anymore, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this,” said Bill Bay, president of the American Bar Association. “You can’t close up congressionally created agencies without going back to Congress.”
The court ruling issued Thursday gave the Trump administration until Tuesday to show it is complying with the order to the unfreeze funds.
While Bay considers that a victory, he underscored that the order is temporary and said the court battle will continue.
“There’s still a long road ahead, but what we have said in the ABA is we’re going to be faithful … to tell the story of this important work and ensure that the government is obeying the rule of law when it does things,” he said.
Illinois groups receiving aid dollars that help developing nations say freezing federal funds hurts jobs at home.
Presidential adviser Elon Musk conceded during an Oval Office news conference last week that an unsubstantiated claim made to justify the Trump administration’s freeze on federal foreign aid might not have been true.
Amplified by Musk and President Donald Trump, the story of the U.S. government planning to send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza appears to be false, but the president’s January order stopping aid and development programs has had a real and possibly lasting effect, both across the globe and in Illinois.
A federal judge ordered the administration late Thursday to temporarily lift its freeze and allow funding from U.S. aid and development programs to flow for the time being. But uncertainty remains for organizations whose missions rely on government dollars to carry out projects that benefit populations in developing nations while also supporting jobs and the broader economy at home.
Among the Illinois-based programs affected by Trump’s order to halt funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and other foreign aid programs are a lab at the University of Illinois’ flagship campus that works to establish soybean markets in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions, a Chicago nonprofit’s work with victims of armed conflict and Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, and a project led by NORC at the University of Chicago working “to promote the use of evidence and data for decision-making” in USAID-funded programs.
The Trump administration has argued, often with little evidence, that USAID and similar assistance programs are full of waste and fraud and contradict American values and interests.
But those involved with the projects and others who’ve worked with and studied USAID say efforts to shut down the agency are shortsighted and undermine the administration’s stated goals of making America “safer,” “stronger” and “more prosperous.”
Layoffs at U. of I. soybean lab
For more than a decade, Peter Goldsmith has run the USAID-funded Soybean Innovation Lab at U. of I.’s Urbana-Champaign campus. The lab, one of 19 similar institutions at land-grant universities across the country, was awarded a $30 million grant from the federal aid agency in 2022 to continue its work helping a burgeoning soybean industry in sub-Saharan Africa.
The lab has worked in more than 30 African countries, helping spread expertise and technology to continue growing the industry, from the plants in the ground to the manufacturing processes needed to unlock the soybean’s versatile protein and oil.
In Malawi, for example, the lab’s experts “essentially worked ourselves out of a job” in the northern part of the country by successfully spurring soybean production, Goldsmith said. The focus shifted two years ago to the hotter, drier southern region, where the agriculture sector is looking to diversify from crops like sugarcane and tropical fruits, he said.
But after Trump’s edict, that effort now is at a “dead stop,” he said last week. Without the lab’s work, “there’s no one there to provide the technical support: how to process it, how to produce seed, how to grow it. That’s just expertise that … doesn’t exist, and that’s our role.”
The freeze also had an immediate impact much closer to home.
Without the federal funding, there’s no way to pay the lab’s staff, so Goldsmith said he is being forced to lay off 30 people beginning April 15. As of late last week, the federal judge’s temporary lift on the freeze hadn’t changed those plans, he said.
For the time being, he said, his team is “mothballing” operations in hopes of being able to restart if funds start flowing again in the future. If that happens, he said, he might be able to rehire some employees, but there’s no guarantee they won’t have moved on to other employment.
“I want them to find jobs and focus on their families first,” Goldsmith said.
If the Trump administration ends up doing away with the funding altogether, it would have a long-term impact not just on the lab’s employees and its work in Africa and elsewhere across the globe, but also on the soybean economy in Illinois, the top U.S. producer of the crop and home to industry giant Archer Daniels Midland Co.
“The market for soy is only growing globally,” Goldsmith said. “So as markets grow, it becomes more profitable for U.S. farmers, Illinois farmers to produce soy. … When markets grow, they win the most, and holding back Africa, not allowing it to become a soy continent, would be devastating for global soybean markets.”
Stability in developing regions
Establishing a new commodity crop also helps create economic opportunity and stability in developing regions that can be volatile, helping support America’s national security interests, Goldsmith said.
“That means that you don’t have to send in troops, you don’t have to worry about the infiltration of … forces that are counter to democracy,” he said.
The lab is the kind of “win-win operation” that demonstrates the positive benefit foreign aid can have both globally and locally, said Matthew Winters, a political science professor at U. of I. who has studied the effectiveness of foreign assistance.
“It was helping students and postdoctoral scholars and professors pursue research, and then that research was being shared with people in developing countries that could make use of it,” Winters said last week on a conference call with reporters.
Summarizing research conducted over the past decade on foreign aid more broadly, Winters wrote in a recent article that the evidence “shows that places receiving aid and people exposed to information about aid feel more positively about the foreign donor providing the aid” and called it “a meaningful tool for generating soft-power resources.”
U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski, a Springfield Democrat who represents the University of Illinois’ main campus, said she hopes calling attention to programs like the Soybean Innovation Lab will change the conversation on foreign aid.
“I think that will help, hopefully, Republicans begin to understand that these cuts are very deep and they’re going to hurt the very people that they’re representing,” Budzinski said last week.
Much of Illinois’ soybean crop is grown in heavily Republican downstate counties. Nationally, some GOP lawmakers have started to push for renewed shipments of direct food assistance after USAID’s inspector general released a report last week revealing that $489 million worth of American-produced food sitting at ports, in warehouses and on ships and at risk of spoiling or otherwise not reaching its intended destination. The administration has said that type of aid was subject to a waiver issued shortly after the freeze.
Impact on migration
Trump’s move to pause the flow of aid also has the potential to undermine some of his administration’s policy priorities in other areas.
Through federal funding including a $4.5 million USAID grant, Chicago-based Heartland Alliance International has been working in Colombia with both victims of the country’s armed conflicts and migrants from neighboring Venezuela who have fled instability in that nation.
In Colombia, “we go out and do emergency response, with food assistance, shelter, providing protection for folks who are at imminent risk of violence, particularly women and girls,” said Liz Drew, a senior adviser with Heartland Alliance International, which receives funding for the project and others around the world through other State Department programs that also have been temporarily stopped.
The work in Colombia “is on pause right now or significantly reduced because … we don’t have the resources,” Drew said. “There are no funds coming at this point from the U.S. government.”
In working with Venezuelan migrants, the organization assists with “regularizing their status” and finding jobs or entrepreneurial opportunities to establish stable livelihoods in Colombia.
“The idea is, really, actually to give folks the opportunity to stay safely in Colombia and not make dangerous migration journeys,” Drew said.
It’s a mission that should work in concert with the Trump administration’s goal of reducing migration across the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We feel really confident that our programs are in line with U.S. national security interests and in line with the current foreign policy,” Drew said.
In addition to furloughing 90% of its staff in January, more than 200 people, the organization laid off eight people at its headquarters in Chicago, said Rebecca Obrock, Heartland Alliance International’s interim executive director.
If the administration succeeds in permanently closing USAID or drastically reducing foreign assistance, “it’s actually going to have a huge detrimental effect to the American economy, as tens of thousands of people have now been laid off,” said Obrock, who added that the organization already has had to reduce a contract with an information technology vendor.
“It’s not a tiny international development bubble,” Obrock said. “It is going to have wide adverse effects throughout the country.”
And while the organization greatly appreciates those who’ve responded to its increased private fundraising effort amid the freeze, Drew said, “the U.S. government, even though (foreign aid is) a small percentage of our (federal) budget, it is the biggest funder worldwide of all development and humanitarian assistance.
“So when we pull back, it impacts everybody, because there’s nobody who can step in and diversify funding that quickly to meet this scale of need.”
The halting of aid work and staff layoffs are among the most acute results of the freeze, but it also has cast doubt on the availability of funding for future projects of the kind USAID has historically funded.
The University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures recently completed work on a $6.8 million federally funded conservation project at Egypt’s Medinet Habu, home to the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses III.
Although not immediately affected by the freeze, the institute was in negotiations about continued funding for work at the site, said its director, Timothy Harrison, who has worked on USAID-funded projects to preserve culture heritage sites around the Middle East since the early 1990s.
Such programs can have enormous benefits by providing employment and training for workers in those regions, generating tourism, and improving the U.S.’ relationships with other countries, Harrison said.
“If this funding is going to be permanently cut, it will have … a huge impact that is not at all reflected by the really small amounts of funding that we’re ultimately talking about,” he said.
Also at the University of Chicago, NORC is part of a consortium that last year received a $53 million, 10-year grant to better integrate the use of evidence and data into USAID programs.
That work also has been affected by the freeze. A spokesman for NORC declined to comment.
‘A right way and a wrong way’
The court ruling last week that lifted the freeze, at least temporarily, came in a lawsuit brought by several groups against the Trump administration, including the Chicago-based American Bar Association.
The legal group currently has $109 million in federal awards for 19 programs through USAID, with its work focused on strengthening the rule of law and human rights in numerous countries around the world, including efforts to combat human trafficking in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The association joined the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., because it believed the Trump administration was subverting the rule of law at home by withholding funds approved by Congress and attempting to shut down the agency without legislative approval.
“If the government doesn’t want to do this kind of work anymore, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this,” said Bill Bay, president of the American Bar Association. “You can’t close up congressionally created agencies without going back to Congress.”
The court ruling issued Thursday gave the Trump administration until Tuesday to show it is complying with the order to the unfreeze funds.
While Bay considers that a victory, he underscored that the order is temporary and said the court battle will continue.
“There’s still a long road ahead, but what we have said in the ABA is we’re going to be faithful … to tell the story of this important work and ensure that the government is obeying the rule of law when it does things,” he said.
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