Johns Hopkins University said Thursday it had begun laying off more than 2,000 workers across the globe after the institution lost $800 million in federal grants cut by the Trump administration.
As the administration has slashed funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), perhaps no institution of higher education has been hit harder than Johns Hopkins. Among the programs targeted were a $50 million project to treat HIV while experimenting with machine learning in India and a $200 million grant to treat one of the world’s most deadly diseases in thousands of children.
In all, the university cut 1,975 positions in 44 countries and 247 in the United States from the public health nonprofit Jhpiego, the School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs and the School of Medicine, the university said in a statement. U.S.-based workers have at least 60 days before the job changes take effect.
“This is a difficult day for our entire community,” the university said in a statement. “Johns Hopkins is immensely proud of the work done by our colleagues … to care for mothers and infants, fight disease, provide clean drinking water, and advance countless other critical, lifesaving efforts around the world.”
The university said it also furloughed about 100 additional workers.
Hopkins President Ronald Daniels wrote in a recent note to the university’s community that nearly half of its total incoming money came from federal funds last year. “The breadth and depth of this historic relationship means that cuts to federal research will affect research faculty, students, and staff and will ripple through our university,” Daniels said.
The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have sought to dismantle USAID over the past two months, canceling the vast majority of the agency’s contracts, terminating more than 1,600 jobs and putting almost its entire workforce on administrative leave. The effort has sparked outrage among USAID supporters, who say the funding of nutrition, medical, democracy and other overseas assistance strengthens U.S. global influence and worldwide stability. But Musk and others in Trump’s orbit have alleged, without evidence, that USAID is a “criminal organization” that must be eliminated.
At Hopkins, the cuts could have wide-reaching effects not only globally, but also locally. The Maryland economy relies on the Baltimore-based university as one of the state’s largest employers.
The university produced $15 billion in economic impact in the state in the 2022 fiscal year and employed more than 55,000 workers in Maryland and more than 90,000 overall, according to its most recent economic impact report.
Carter Elliott, a spokesperson for Gov. Wes Moore (D), called the consequences of the cuts to the university “immediate and profound.”
“It is difficult to overstate the significance of Johns Hopkins University as a cornerstone of Maryland’s economy,” he said in a statement. “Students, faculty, and researchers at Johns Hopkins will bear the direct burden of these reductions, but the ripple effects will extend far beyond campus.”
The university, for example, committed $360 million to local construction businesses in recent years and spent more than $1 billion with local businesses, according to a university spokesperson. Baltimore, home to 11,000 federal workers, could be especially affected by the administration’s broader cuts.
Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 and has led the nation in federal research and development funding every year since 1979, according to the university website. The school’s research made water purification possible, invented CPR and helped lead to the creation of Dramamine, among other innovations, the website said.
With about 30,000 students, Hopkins is also the largest recipient of National Institutes of Health funding, money that is also at risk after the Trump administration has tried to lower caps of indirect costs for those grants. If NIH cuts, which have so far been blocked by the courts after a lawsuit from Johns Hopkins and other schools, go into effect, the school could lose more than $200 million per year, according to a court filing.
Overall, Hopkins had more than $3 billion in research spending in 2023, a large portion of which is focused on global health and international aid and research — making it particularly susceptible to the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid.
Earlier this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on social media that 83 percent of all USAID programs have been canceled and that the remainder will be folded into the State Department.
The Trump cuts have faced legal challenges.
Still, the fallout at Hopkins could be a sign of things to come at universities across the country if larger funding cuts survive legal scrutiny. Many have announced hiring freezes.
Andrew Flagel, president of the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area, said in a statement that he fears it could take decades to recover from the “slashing of these programs.”
Keith Martin, a physician and executive director of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, said they are trying to gauge the extent of the impact of the USAID cuts. The global health consortium recently held a conference with more than 150 colleagues from sub-Saharan Africa, he said, “and they are absolutely devastated.”
“We’re trying to mobilize our members to engage with GOP members to reverse these cuts, because we know that the longer they go on, the more people will die,” Martin said
One of the larger grants cut at Hopkins was called SMART4TB, a $200 million investment trying to combat the spread of deadly tuberculosis. The five-year grant had $175 million left to spend and had been setting up diagnostic trials and hiring staff around the world, Richard Chaisson, the program lead, said.
Twelve Hopkins staff on his team in Baltimore lost their jobs Thursday, he said, many of whom worked as administrators, technicians and pharmacists. Hundreds more in Africa and Asia would, too.
“We were providing state-of-the-art diagnostic testing plus experimental tests that could help save thousands of lives,” he said. “That’s now turned off.”
Chaisson said he had hoped their grant would get a waiver under what Rubio has called “lifesaving” activities. It didn’t.
The program had tested 2,500 people in Uganda for tuberculosis, allowing them to get lifesaving treatment, Chaisson said, but thousands more children and mothers will no longer be able to receive the experimental tests they were using, among other treatments. Tuberculosis, a preventable and curable disease, killed 1.25 million people in 2023, according to the World Health Organization.
Chaisson, the director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Tuberculosis Research, said the grants also had provided money to five U.S. companies that had developed rapid coronavirus tests to alter the technology to test for tuberculosis.
Those companies will no longer receive that support, he said.
Chaisson and other investigators said they are scrambling to find funding from other sources, whether those are donors, foundations or even other governments. But they worry it may be impossible to fill the gap left by USAID. Some have wondered whether Hopkins graduate and billionaire donor Mike Bloomberg could help. Others are inquiring about smaller donors.
The grant cuts will affect not only programs that were terminated, other Hopkins faculty said, but also administrators who manage non-USAID grants. Fired technicians may split their time between projects but be primarily funded from grants that are terminated, they said.
“Research runs on teams,” said Jill Marsteller, a professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her grants have not been cut, she said, “but I will almost certainly be affected. There’s concern for the well-being of every single corner of the university.”
Marsteller said the USAID and possible NIH cuts are a large focus of conversations among faculty and administrators on the university council, a governance body. She said she has looked into bringing on colleagues to her existing grants if their skills align with her study of how research is put into practice. But nothing has come to fruition, and foundations are not a replacement for government funding, she said.
“It’s kind of a wait-and-see with grim determination,” she said. “Our science is important, and we will keep pursuing it one way or another.”
Susan Svrluga contributed to this report.
