Political scientist Jeremy Springman got a doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and came back two years ago as a research assistant professor, intending to stay for the long term. Now he's looking for jobs again.
The funding for his position runs out at the end of the summer. He and others in his lab group worked on research contracts for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration effectively dismantled.
"Basically all the people that we've worked with over the past five years are also out of work. And that happened to them much more abruptly than it's happening to us," he said. "We at least have a little bit of runway. Those … people we've been working with really went from having a career one moment, to not the next."
He worked at the Penn Development Research Initiative, which brought political scientists, health policy researchers, economists and people from other fields together to work on questions including how climate change affects migration patterns, and how to protect national parks from fires and poaching. Aside from Springman, data scientists, research assistants and early career researchers have also lost funding and are looking for jobs. The group had sent out job offers that they had to cancel.
One of the projects Springman worked on was a data collection and processing tool that uses dozens of machine learning models and other techniques to track media coverage in more than 60 countries that the U.S. government was interested in. The tool can be used to figure out what was happening in those countries, and then generate reports for U.S. policymakers to inform foreign policy decisions. They published some findings showing how their model could predict which countries might require a travel warning from the State Department.
They started this work in 2019, during the first Trump administration. Every year, they met with USAID and other government agencies to learn about what the agencies wanted to understand, which would set their research agenda.
"We had really carved out a space for ourselves where we could really provide unique data and analysis that was of … practical importance to the U.S. government," Springman said.
They still have the tools, but can no longer update the data without resources to keep the project going. He said they still plan to do academic research using the data they've gathered over the past five years, but it will no longer be useful to the U.S. policymakers who want to make decisions based on the most up-to-date information.
This tool was still relatively new, and had yet to reach its full potential, said political scientist Daniel Sabet, who had managed research projects at USAID for the past five years, until he also lost his job when the Trump administration effectively gutted the agency. He said that to do this kind of analysis across so many countries and languages would have required a small army of people.
"These guys didn't speak a bazillion languages and yet … the technology has advanced to the point that they were able to do this in all kinds of different languages," Sabet said. "That was just absolutely amazing."
He said this project stood out even more because it produced real-time data, instead of surveys that could take months to draw conclusions.
A State Department spokesperson said the department is "continuing essential lifesaving programs and making strategic investments that strengthen our partners and our own country" and "continually evaluating all our foreign assistance programs to ensure they make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous."
The University of Pennsylvania did not respond to a request for comment.
The researchers said that losing this funding means their field and students will have fewer opportunities to learn and do research. Political scientist and executive director Heather Huntington said their group partly worked on contracts from USAID to study the effectiveness of projects the agency had funded, to see how it could be more efficient and how it could improve them.
For example, she was working on projects in Zambia around rural communities that live close to national parks. USAID had funded programs to have community health workers teach people maternal and child health practices, and local groups to guard against poaching.
She, students and researchers had been doing interviews and collecting data on these projects for four years. They had one more year to go before the Trump administration shut everything down.
"None of the elements of the interventions that were being rolled out had ever been kind of evaluated in such a rigorous way before. And so we were potentially going to be able to say: this is working or this is not working, and I think both of those things are valuable to let people know. Because that was cut off or essentially cut off at year 4.5 or year 4, we will never know," she said. "We're so close to … finishing it out and … producing what we were supposed to produce, which is knowledge for the world."
Huntington added that she and her colleagues designed courses, and student projects around these research opportunities, so students could work on a project and learn how to collect data, do civil service work and understand social science.
"All of that disappeared overnight," she said. "This is the biggest pivot I've ever made, and it's a nightmare."
These projects involve nongovernmental organizations working with local populations, with the promise that the U.S. government would support them, so cutting these projects midway hurts the reputation of the U.S. with development organizations around the world, said Guy Grossman, a political scientist who is part of the group.
"They now come to realize that the contract with the U.S. government is not worth anything," he said. "There's a class of professionals that as a whole sector has lost trust in the U.S. government and will, whenever possible, try not to work with it going forward because you cannot trust the U.S. government to respect its own commitments."
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