A federal stop work order for programs funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development is uprooting some programs at Michigan State University.
Michigan is one of 13 states with universities where research has been halted by the Trump administration.
David Tschirley is the director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy, Research, Capacity and Influence.
His lab researches topics like growing disease-resistant crops—and local commodity groups like the Michigan Bean Commission are among their biggest supporters.
For every $1 invested in this research, Tschirley said the United States sees up to $40 in returns thanks to increased exports and reductions in pest pressure.
“It just delivers benefits to American people enormously larger than that budgetary expenditure,” Tschirley said.
While Tschirley said that MSU has committed to cover the salaries of researchers, a prolonged freeze on federal funding could jeopardize research that has already seen millions of dollars invested.
“There’s been millions of dollars of expenditure that’s gone into very promising research that will simply be lost,” Tschirley said.
Halting the work, he adds, would leave an opening for another country to become the world’s leader on agricultural research.
Tschirley said the research benefits the U.S. in many ways. That includes increased exports, developing innovations that local farmers can use to reduce losses caused by diseases and other pests, and earning goodwill for the country on the international stage.
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.