Fulbright grant recipient Aubrey Lay was supposed to get paid for three months of work by the U.S. government through his teaching assistantship at a school for Ukrainian refugees in Estonia. Instead, he only got about one week’s pay and no word on when he might see the rest of his grant.

Lay is among scholars around the world who depend on State Department funding to participate in long-established programs like Fulbright and say their payments were abruptly cut off after being notified that officials were reviewing their activities. The move appears to be in line with the White House’s initiative to sharply slash government spending, a shakeup that has affected scores of federal agencies.

The government faces even more dramatic changes in the coming weeks and months. President Donald Trump has directed agencies to prepare plans for widespread layoffs, known as reductions in force, that likely will require more limited operations at agencies providing critical services.

The funding freeze has sparked panic among grant recipients who are stranded outside their home countries without clarity on the future of their programs or the money needed to support themselves.

In February, the U.S. State Department temporarily paused spending in an effort to review its programs and activities, according to NAFSA, an association of international educators. That included programs such as Fulbright, Gilman and Critical Language international scholarships.

In the weeks since officials enacted the pause, some scholars and advocacy groups have said the flow of funds dried up for people’s grants, yet there is no communication from U.S. officials on whether that will change.

The State Department did not immediately respond to an inquiry by The Associated Press about the funding freeze.

Lay found the lack of communication from U.S. officials troublesome. He was also left wondering about the future of the program that his grandmother also participated in decades ago. After it was established in 1946, the program has become a flagship for the U.S. government’s mission toward cross-cultural engagement. Worst for him is what it will mean for his students, particularly if he is forced to leave early.

“I don’t want to be one more thing that is changing and uncertain in their lives,” Lay said. “I can’t bear that thought.”

Lay said he will be OK for another month, but he worries about participants with no extra money saved.

“The clarity that I’ve gotten is that nobody knows what’s going on?” he said. “The clarity that I’ve gotten is that every time I’ve asked anybody, they don’t know what’s happening, and they are just as confused as I am, as we all are.”

Thousands of scholars are in similar positions to Lay, according to the Fulbright Association, which is a nonprofit group comprising alumni. In a newsletter email, the association said the halt in funding impact “over 12,500 American students, youth, and professionals currently abroad or scheduled to participate in State Department programs in the next six months.”

Aside from U.S. citizens, the Fulbright Association also said the pause has cut funding for U.S. programs hosting more than 7,400 people.

Halyna Morozova, a Fulbright grant recipient from Kyiv teaching Ukrainian to students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, said she was at the airport Feb. 28 after what felt like a never-ending day. Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier that day in an extraordinary Oval Office meeting. The future of her country along with her family back home weighed heavily on her mind.

Then she got an email from the Institute of International Education, commonly referred to as IIE, which administers the Fulbright scholarship.

“IIE is currently authorized to send you a partial stipend equivalent to one week of your anticipated upcoming stipend payment,” the email said. “We will update you on future payments as soon as possible.”

Morozova panicked. She usually gets $750 each month. Now, she has to stretch $187.50 to make ends meet.

“It was very scary, I would say, not just because I am lost in another country,” she said. “We don’t know if we will ever get another stipend here, and if they have enough money to buy our tickets home. So there are a lot of things that are not clear and not certain.”

Olga Bezhanova, a professor who manages Morozova and two other grant recipients, said the exchange program has been in place for nearly two decades at her university, becoming a bedrock of their language education. Now, she is trying to see if her university will supplement the funds being withheld by the federal government. If that doesn’t work out, she said she was unsure of what else could be done.

“I have to look into the faces of these wonderful people, and they’re asking me: ‘Is this America? What is this?’” she said. “This is a mess.”

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This story was first published on Mar. 9, 2025. It was updated on Mar. 10, 2025. The story should have made clear that Aubrey Lay is a Fulbright grant recipient rather than a Fulbright scholar. Other minor editing to conform.

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Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal immigration authorities arrested a Palestinian activist Saturday who played a prominent role in Columbia University’s protests against Israel, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s pledge to detain and deport student activists.

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a statement Sunday, describing it as being “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

Khalil’s arrest is the first publicly known deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against the war in Gaza that swept college campuses last spring. The administration has claimed participants forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.

McLaughlin signaled the arrest was directly connected to Khalil’s role in the protests, alleging he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.”

As ICE agents arrived at Khalil’s Manhattan residence Saturday night, they also threatened to arrest Khalil’s wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, Greer said.

Khalil’s attorney said they were initially informed that he was being held at an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. But when his wife tried to visit Sunday, she learned he was not there. Greer said she still did not know Khalil’s whereabouts as of Sunday night.

“We have not been able to get any more details about why he is being detained,” Greer told the AP. “This is a clear escalation. The administration is following through on its threats.”

A Columbia University spokesperson said law enforcement agents must produce a warrant before entering university property, but declined to say if the school had received one ahead of Khalil’s arrest. The spokesperson declined to comment on Khalil’s detention.

In a message shared on X Sunday evening, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration “will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

The Department of Homeland Security can initiate deportation proceedings against green card holders for a broad range of alleged criminal activity, including supporting a terror group. But the detention of a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime marked an extraordinary move with an uncertain legal foundation, according to immigration experts.

“This has the appearance of a retaliatory action against someone who expressed an opinion the Trump administration didn’t like,” said Camille Mackler, founder of Immigrant ARC, a coalition of legal service providers in New York.

Khalil, who received his master’s degree from Columbia’s school of international affairs last semester, served as a negotiator for students as they bargained with university officials over an end to the tent encampment erected on campus last spring.

The role made him one of the most visible activists in support of the movement, prompting calls from pro-Israel activists in recent weeks for the Trump administration to begin deportation proceedings against him.

Khalil was also among those under investigation by a new Columbia University office that has brought disciplinary charges against dozens of students for their pro-Palestinian activism, according to records shared with the AP.

The investigations come as the Trump administration has followed through on its threat to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to Columbia because of what the government describes as the Ivy League school’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus.

The university’s allegations against Khalil focused on his involvement in the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group. He faced sanctions for potentially helping to organize an “unauthorized marching event” in which participants glorified Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and playing a “substantial role” in the circulation of social media posts criticizing Zionism, among other acts of alleged discrimination.

“I have around 13 allegations against me, most of them are social media posts that I had nothing to do with,” Khalil told the AP last week.

“They just want to show Congress and right-wing politicians that they’re doing something, regardless of the stakes for students,” he added. “It’s mainly an office to chill pro-Palestine speech.”

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) — Facing the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding, Duke University is preparing for the worst.

Like research universities around the United States, the private school in North Carolina’s Research Triangle would see a massive loss from Trump administration cuts to grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Duke would be among the hardest hit. In its previous fiscal year, Duke took in $580 million in NIH grants and contracts, 11th most among the country’s research institutions. The cuts are delayed temporarily by a court challenge, but universities nationwide have implemented hiring freezes, scaled back research and drawn up contingency plans in case the loss in funding takes effect.

Historically, the federal government has negotiated with colleges and universities on its contribution toward their operating costs. If a scientist wins a federal grant to fund their research, the government pays the school an additional amount as a percentage of the grant money.

At Duke, the current rate for these “indirect costs” — expenses such as utilities and laboratory maintenance — is about 61%. Last month, President Donald Trump’s administration set the rate cap at 15%, significantly less than most universities receive.

The cut in indirect costs is far from the only concern. Funding for new grants also slowed to a trickle after the NIH halted grant application review meetings in January. At Duke, NIH grant and contract award notices plummeted, dropping from 166 in January and February of 2024 to 64 so far in 2025, according to the university.

Already, the uncertainty is causing reverberations at Duke’s School of Medicine, which receives over three-quarters of the university’s NIH funding. Expansion projects are being shelved. Fewer Ph.D. students are being admitted. And researchers are assessing whether their projects can continue.

Payments maintain freezers and machines to grow cancer cells

The Trump administration has described indirect costs as “administrative bloat” and said the cuts would save more than $4 billion annually. The change would also free up more money for scientific research, officials said.

“The Trump administration is committed to slashing the cottage industry built off of the waste, fraud, and abuse within our mammoth government while prioritizing the needs of everyday Americans,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said.

Through NIH funding, universities for decades have partnered with the federal government to support scientists’ academic pursuits.

Duke pharmacology and cancer biology professor Donald McDonnell estimates his laboratory has received up to $40 million in NIH funding over 30 years. His lab developed a drug approved in 2023 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat metastatic breast cancer.

Upkeep for lab equipment, including machines to grow cancer cells and massive freezers for enzymes and chemicals, would be difficult to afford if indirect cost rates dropped to 15%, McDonnell said. His laboratory also likely will be in the red due to the uncertainty around NIH grants, which would lead to staff layoffs.

“The bottom line is, I can’t live, I can’t think in this chaos,” McDonnell said.

Duke’s total research budget last fiscal year was $1.33 billion, with $863 million coming from the federal government. Without NIH funding, many scientists would have to turn to private organizations and philanthropies, which typically offer substantially less money, researchers said.

“We have long-standing relationships with private funders and industry partners, and value the contributions they make, but federal funds by far provide the largest single source of research dollars,” said Geeta Swamy, executive vice dean of the School of Medicine.

The cap on indirect costs also would hinder research for incoming neurosurgery and biomedical engineering professor Nanthia Suthana, who is relocating from the University of California, Los Angeles.

To study brain activity and treat conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and Parkinson’s disease, Suthana requires a lab large enough for patients to walk around while headsets and monitors capture heart rate, eye tracking, perspiration and brainwaves. Along the walls, 40 to 50 cameras — each costing about $5,000 — record their movements.

Her new lab is under construction, but Suthana said she is worried she will have to downsize within a year if funding uncertainties persist.

Ph.D. students are in limbo

Duke’s medical school has scaled back the number of Ph.D. students it will admit for the upcoming fall semester. Last year, the school brought in about 130 students, said Beth Sullivan, who oversees the school’s 17 biomedical Ph.D. programs. Now, the target is 100 students or less.

That means smaller class sizes over time and, in turn, a shrinking pipeline into medical research careers, she said.

“Our next generation of researchers are now poised on the edge of this cliff, not knowing if there’s going to be a bridge that’s going to get them to the other side, or if this is it,” Sullivan said.

Of the more than 630 Ph.D. students in the medical school, nearly all the students in their second year and beyond receive federal support from either NIH or the National Science Foundation.

Third-year doctoral student Caleb McIver was applying for an NIH diversity supplement — a funding opportunity to encourage professors to train minority students — when information about the initiative was removed from the agency’s website. McIver, who is Black, is now looking into other NIH grants without ties to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which the Trump administration has been wiping out of the federal government.

“I’m pretty stressed,” McIver said. “I mean, I need funding, so we need to find it.”

Duke reconsiders plans for new research building

The university had been planning to build a new research building on the site of an old, recently vacated building. Now those plans are on hold, School of Medicine Vice Dean Colin Duckett said.

Even smaller projects like renovating a building floor can’t start because of the budget uncertainty. Hundreds of people working in shuttered labs will consolidate in other buildings. If the indirect costs rate drops to 15%, there also would be widespread layoffs, Duckett said.

Duckett’s job previously focused on recruiting the brightest scientists and providing them with resources at Duke, he said. Now, he has taken on a much different role.

“It’s damage control,” he said. “It’s how to survive as an institution.”

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