Inside the ‘America First’ makeover of a global hunger program

This story is about global food aid policy, not home energy upgrades, so it does not affect your house or any rebate program directly.

The piece traces what happened to USAID's Feed the Future Innovation Labs, university-based programs that helped farmers overseas fight crop pests and diseases made worse by climate change. In January 2025, the Trump administration froze USAID funding, and last fall it formally cancelled $72 million for the program, calling the spending "woke, weaponized, and wasteful." Only one lab, at Kansas State University, kept its funding. This March, the State Department reopened applications for a redesigned version of the labs, worth an estimated $20 million to $40 million per award. Researchers who reviewed the new criteria say Africa, long the program's focus, is barely mentioned, while references to "climate change" were dropped in favor of terms like "drought." Universities rewrote their applications accordingly. So far, the labs advancing to the final round are almost all in Republican-led states, including Kansas, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia.

The larger point researchers raise is that pest and disease problems studied abroad, such as insects damaging African crops, often show up later in American fields, so cutting that research could eventually affect U.S. farmers too. For homeowners, there's nothing to act on here, but it's a look at how federal funding priorities are shifting under the current administration.