The Department of Education canceled this year’s competition for three Fulbright-Hays fellowship programs, adding to the growing list of higher education grants that have been eliminated since President Donald Trump took office in January.
The decision, announced Thursday on the Federal Register, will affect doctoral students and faculty who applied for the Group Projects Abroad, Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad and Faculty Research Abroad programs—all of which focus on expanding American expertise in critical languages and are congressionally mandated.
About 110 individuals and 22 groups from over 55 institutions benefited from these three programs, according to department data, in fiscal year 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. This year, prior to the cancellation, more than 400 applications had been submitted.
Department officials wrote in Thursday’s announcement that the cancellation is just for fiscal year 2025 and was part of a “comprehensive review” to ensure that all competition criteria and priorities “align with the objectives established by the Trump Administration.”
But outside critics say these cuts signify larger problems that stem from cutting nearly half of the department’s staff in March.
The massive reduction in force was sweeping and impacted nearly every sector of the agency, including the International and Foreign Language Education Office, which oversees Fulbright-Hayes. After the cuts, not one IFLE employee remained.
“When [the department] conducted the reductions in force, it claimed it would continue to deliver on all of its statutory requirements,” said Antoinette Flores, director of higher education accountability and quality at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “But this is evidence that it’s not, and it can’t.”
The Department of Education did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for further comment on why the cuts were made and whether the program will resume in fiscal year 2026.
‘A Loss to Education’
All three of the canceled programs were signed into law by President John F. Kennedy during the Cold War in response to national security concerns. The goal was to ensure Americans had the international exposure and comprehensive language training necessary to maintain the nation’s diplomatic, economic, military and technological prowess.
In total, the 12 Fulbright-Hays programs have allocated more than $2 trillion to nearly 58,000 participants since 2000. But now higher education advocates worry that impact will be squandered.
“This is just a cancellation for these grants for this year, but the entire office that ran these programs was let go. It’s a team that had very specific expertise and knowledge that is not easily transferable or replaceable,” said Flores, who worked as a political appointee in the department during the Biden administration. “This is just one year, but long term, it’s a loss to education over all.”
IFLE’s former director of institutional services confirmed Flores’s concerns in a court declaration filed in an ongoing lawsuit from Democratic state attorneys general challenging Trump’s efforts to dismantle the department.
In addition to selecting grant recipients, the anonymous declarant said, IFLE assisted the awardees with securing visas and housing, ensured their work aligned with the goals articulated in their applications, helped establish research affiliations, and responded to safety and security concerns if they arose. Furthermore, each of the 18 staff members had expertise in curriculum development, and most were multilingual—skills the declarant said were “critical.”
Without the staff’s expertise, maintaining the program and meeting the department’s statutory obligations would likely be impossible, the former director explained.
“The complete removal of our team, leaving underqualified and overwhelmed staff left to manage these programs, seems to suggest to me that the decision was not made for budgetary efficiency but rather as part of a broader effort to dismantle international education initiatives within the Department and the America[n] education system,” the declarant explained.
And the consequences will not only fall on this year’s applicants whose proposals will be dismissed, but also on last year’s awardees, who are currently abroad and left with no experienced contact point in the States.
“We put in lifesaving mechanisms to ensure that scholars overseas are safe,” the declarant said. “The absence of this expertise puts scholars at extreme risk.”
