Johns Hopkins Plans for Layoffs Amid $800M Cut to Federal Grants

Johns Hopkins University is planning for staff layoffs after the Trump administration canceled $800 million in U.S. Agency for International Development grants for the Baltimore-based institution, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The grants supported a variety of health-related initiatives overseen by Johns Hopkins, including a breastfeeding support project in Baltimore and mosquito-net programs in Mozambique.

The foreign aid agency was one of the first targets of the Trump administration’s crusade against alleged widespread “waste, fraud and abuse” of federal funding. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this week that he’s purged 83 percent of USAID’s programs and the remaining contracts will be administered by the U.S. Department of State.

The $800 million in cuts comes on top of another $200 million Johns Hopkins stands to lose if the National Institutes of Health succeeds in capping indirect research costs at 15 percent. Johns Hopkins is among numerous universities, states and other organizations that have sued the National Institutes of Health over the plan to limit research funding, which a federal judge has temporarily blocked.

“At this time, we have little choice but to reduce some of our work in response to the slowing and stopping of grants and to adjust to an evolving legal landscape,” JHU president Ronald Daniels wrote in a letter to campus, according to The Baltimore Banner. “There are difficult moments before us, with impacts to budgets, personnel, and programs. Some will take time to fully understand and address; others will happen more quickly.”

Such drastic cuts to Johns Hopkins—the nation’s largest spender on research and development and the biggest private employer in Baltimore—will reverberate far beyond the campus itself.

“Johns Hopkins has bet very heavily on a century and a quarter of partnership with the federal government,” Theodore Iwashyna, a JHU critical care physician who is currently overseeing an NIH grant studying at-home care for pneumonia patients, told the Journal. “If the federal government decides it doesn’t want to know things anymore, that would be bad for Johns Hopkins and devastating for Maryland.”