The Trump administration has terminated the Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, nearly two months after its funding was paused pending a review. The lab’s funding is set to officially end on April 15.
SIL is one of more than a dozen Innovation Labs part of a program called Feed the Future that were started during the Obama administration. They were created under the U.S. Agency for International Development to address global hunger.
Director Peter Goldsmith said the university was informed in a letter that the project would not continue.
“And the letter said that SIL had been terminated,” said Goldsmith, “and it had been reviewed, and it had been found not to be consistent with U.S. interests.”
After their funding was frozen in late January, Goldsmith said he had hoped to present an argument for continuing the project.
The Soybean Innovation Lab is tasked with helping African countries develop soybeans as a major commercial crop. Goldsmith said that countries that get U.S. help in developing their soybean sectors would want to buy even more, giving American soybean farmers a new market for their crops.
But Goldsmith says there was never an opportunity to argue on SIL’s behalf.
“Though we were reviewed, we were never asked to submit any materials for that review,” said Goldsmith. “So we never got to make that case.”
30 employees, mostly at the U of I, were laid off from the Soybean Innovation Lab when funding was first paused in January. SIL’s research and development projects conducted in the U-S and several African countries are also being shut down.
The same is happening at other Feed the Future projects across the country. All were funded through USAID, and Goldsmith says the Trump administration is continuing with only one of them: an Innovation Lab developing climate-resilient wheat at Kansas State University.
The rest are among thousands of USAID projects that are being canceled. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X that 83% of the programs are being closed down.
“The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio wrote.
Goldsmith said that since it was launched in 2013, the Soybean Innovation Lab made progress in developing soybean varieties that adapted to the growing conditions of several African countries — and ready to be marketed commercially. SIL also helped develop a multi-crop thresher device that has now been commercialized for use in African countries.
But Goldsmith said that with the cancellation of the Innovation Lab projects, SILL will not be able to continue helping farmers and food processors adapt to using soybeans, which are not grown and used in African countries to the extent they are in the Americas.
“It sounds simple, but the private sector needs technical support, and that’s from processors all along the value chain, all the way up to seed companies,” said Goldsmith. “And that’s something SIL was especially qualified to do, and we were being very effective.”