Can ‘America First’ Succeed if We Abandon Agricultural Innovation?

The early days of Donald Trump’s second presidential term saw a record number of executive orders, an almost immediate freeze on federal funding, and a swift, yet indiscriminate, hollowing out of the federal research workforce. While the White House frames these moves as “much-needed reforms,” they undermine American innovation and appear to contradict the administration's stated priorities.

Protecting U.S. innovators and unlocking the power of technology are consistent themes across recent White House’s statements on everything from artificial intelligence to fintech to energy. This flurry of America First announcements, however, were punctuated with abrupt and seemingly uncoordinated efforts to shrink the scientific workforce. Dismissals and agency directives for future layoffs have come from the White House, the Office of Personnel Management, and Elon Musk via various X accounts leaving no corner of government untouched.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been significantly impacted by workforce reductions. USDA terminated federal employees serving in its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Food Safety and Inspection Service, and Natural Resource Conservation Service, leaving local NRCS offices across the country understaffed. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) staff experienced layoffs to the tune of some 800 employees, with probationary staff hit particularly hard. ARS is USDA’s chief in-house research agency with more than 90 research units and laboratories spanning 42 states.

After slashing the ARS workforce by more than 10%, USDA scrambled to rehire scientists there and in other offices working on avian influenza. A sporadic round of reporting in the days that followed indicated that ARS scientists, but not technical support staff, were being widely reinstated across sites, including those working on plant breeding in California and at the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Kansas. Still, sites like the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center in Wisconsin say they are not fully operational.

Other impacted federal research networks overseen by USDA include the National Animal Health Laboratory Network and the nation’s gene banks, which house collections of seed varieties and living crops that researchers use when breeding new crop varieties. With additional guidance from the White House foreshadowing large-scale workforce reductions still to come in March and April, these labs are bracing for a continued layoff whiplash.

The fluctuation of ARS staffing, as well as the broader funding freeze on grants, is also impacting agricultural research programs at land grant universities across the country. ARS sites are often co-located with public land grant institutions, with both benefiting from shared resources and often partnering on research efforts.

Agricultural research initiatives led by public land grant universities have also been affected by the rollback of USAID-sponsored research funding. Over a matter of weeks, USAID was systematically dismantled but in a final blow, the Trump administration shuttered 21 USAID-funded Feed the Future Innovation Labs. These labs were co-located at land grant institutions, like Kansas State University, University of Illinois, and Michigan State University, and were tasked with conducting specialized research on agricultural challenges that disrupt the global food supply, including food safety, post-harvest losses, and pest and disease management.

While the scale and pace of President Trump’s actions are unparalleled, the impact of cutting support for public agricultural research is all too predictable. Past government shutdowns have hindered ARS sites’ ability to continue data collection and reporting. Shutdowns can disrupt ongoing experiments and long-term research projects that benefit farmers. Delays in research timelines can be detrimental and costly to time-sensitive experiments, especially those tied to planting seasons. Furthermore, pausing or altogether halting in-process research studies is a significant waste of government resources. This can lead to the sacrifice of any concrete results after sinking multiple months or years of grant funding, staff time, and other resources into a project.

Further workforce reductions and ongoing funding freezes for research grants risk doing the same with far-reaching consequences for the agriculture sector. Agricultural economists have found that the long-term decline in public agricultural research funding has slowed improvements in U.S. agricultural productivity. The Trump administration should bear these lessons in mind as they consider whether to further reduce or otherwise hamstring the nation’s public agricultural research capacity.

Ironically, the Trump Administration’s first major announcements related to food and agriculture—establishing the Make America Healthy Again Commission and revealing a strategy to combat avian influenza—put research front and center. The administration needs a strong USDA research workforce and functioning laboratories to accomplish their outlined goals. Farmers concerned with how Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA agenda will restrict their ability to use key agricultural inputs like pesticides and consumers worried that the unchecked spread of avian influenza could keep egg prices volatile or metastasize into another pandemic should be wary of how this administration plans to deliver comprehensive research strategies with frozen resources and insufficient staffing.

The long-term consequences of funding and staffing cuts are clear. When agricultural research funding dries up, farmers lose access to innovations that improve yields, resilience, and profitability. Universities may be able to mitigate some of the impact by finding new private or philanthropic funding sources if federal grants stay frozen. But, the White House and USDA’s actions in the coming weeks will be consequential for the U.S. research enterprise: Will they take an inconsistent approach to U.S.-led innovation that leaves agriculture behind, allowing vital research institutions to wither? Or will they strengthen these institutions, and U.S. agricultural competitiveness in the process?