Purdue sticks to script as Trump calls out program as federal target
University’s tracking page of federal cuts, directives and temporary blocks in courts continues to grow.
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PURDUE STICKS TO SCRIPT AS TRUMP CALLS OUT PROGRAM AS FEDERAL TARGET
Purdue stuck tight to the script last week after President Donald Trump called out a $70 million program based at the West Lafayette campus in a recitation of what he considered wasted federal resources.
In other words, the Purdue administration kept quiet – just as Purdue President Mung Chiang and Provost Patrick Wolfe told faculty members it would as White House and Statehouse directives and threatened cuts continued to cascade.
On Tuesday, Feb. 18, after signing a set of executive orders, Trump was asked to clarify the role Elon Musk held, after White House officials had said the billionaire was not a Department of Government Efficiency employee and had no formal authority to make decisions. That was the day Trump said Musk’s consultant role was as “patriot” as cuts came swiftly for federal agencies.
“Where’s the money being spent?” Trump said of targets of Musk and DOGE. “Let’s go into that for just a second.”
Trump skimmed through a dozen multi-million projects, mainly funded on university campuses, that he took issue with. Among them:
“Seventy million dollars for a center at Purdue to research university-sourced, evidence-based solutions to developmental challenges,” Trump said. “I mean, these are massive numbers on things that nobody ever heard about.”
Trump didn’t name specific program, but the $70 million center lines up with LASER PULSE, an acronym for an array of USAID-funded work called Long-term Assistance and Services for Research-Partners for University-Led Solutions Engine.
Directly from the project’s site, it’s described as “a $70M program funded through USAID’s Innovation, Technology, and Research Hub, that delivers research-driven solutions to field-sourced development challenges in USAID Partner countries. A consortium led by Purdue University, with core partners Catholic Relief Services, Indiana University, Makerere University, and the University of Notre Dame, implements the LASER PULSE program through a growing network of 3,000+ researchers and development practitioners in 74 countries. LASER PULSE collaborates with USAID missions, bureaus and independent offices and other local stakeholders to identify research needs for critical development challenges, and funds and strengthens capacity of researcher-practitioner teams to co-design solutions that translate into policy and practice.”
According to the university, Purdue was selected in 2018 the U.S. Agency for International Development to “co-create research-driven solutions for developing countries,” supporting USAID as it “navigates developmental challenges, ultimately leading to societal, environmental, educational and agricultural improvements in partner countries around the world.”
Purdue’s Global Engineering Programs and Partnerships said in an online description that LASER PULSE had “built a vast network of 2,600 researchers and practitioners from more than 61 countries.” Among the research projects LASER PULSE lists deal with maize production in Zambia, post-production milk handling practices in Rwanda and the resilience of Ethiopian communities experiencing recurring violence.
Staff with LASER PULSE did not immediately respond to questions last week about Trump’s comments or the stakes for the program based at the West Lafayette campus.
Purdue spokeswoman Erin Murphy said all updates regarding federal funding were on the university’s page tracking assorted directives, budget issues and court cases. Murphy said Purdue had no comment beyond that.
On Feb. 17, Chiang told members of the faculty-led University Senate that Purdue the “situation consists of multiple parallel tracks and each changes continuously.” Chiang told faculty members and researchers the university would continue to forward federal agency-specific information to relevant principal investigators tied to the funding decisions or court developments whenever the university receives them.
“At any given moment, there are many questions that we don’t know the answers to, just like you,” Chiang said last week. “And we cannot execute on hypothetical directives that have not been given to us. … And we cannot execute on hypothetical directives that have not been given to us.”
Wolfe told faculty members that the university’s public silence shouldn’t imply Purdue was doing nothing behind the scenes. “We're on top of it,” Wolfe said during last week’s University Senate meeting. “We all realize that it's going to take quite a lot of work to stay on top of it, and that's what we're focused on right now.”
According to Purdue’s federal funding agencies update page, Purdue received 27 stop work orders in late-January related to USAID-funded programs. As of a Feb. 21 update, Purdue wrote that “stop work orders and terminations affecting Purdue USAID and Department of State awards remain in effect until we hear from the agencies.” A preliminary injunction hearing that temporarily halted cuts to USAID funding is set for March 4, according to the site.
The site tracks similar situations for new caps on indirect funding in National Institutes of Health funding, as well as funding containing diversity, equity and inclusion provisions from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others.
How much money is tied to all of those decisions for Purdue’s campuses isn’t clear.
THIS AND THAT/OTHER READS …
It was a rough day for the Boilers as things fell apart Sunday in Assembly Hall, when a big halftime lead crumbled in the second half into a 73-58 loss. J&C reporter Sam King had this, as coach Matt Painter and players took stock in what’s become a four-game losing streak: “Composure, a Purdue basketball staple, missing for Boilermakers as losses pile up.”
Speaking of reason to let a few choice words fly, I’m still think about this New York Times interview, two weeks old now, with Timothy Jay, a professor emeritus of psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts: “Curses! A Swearing Expert Mulls the State of Profanity. Timothy Jay, a scholar in the science of swearing, has a few choice words about why we curse and how to cut back (if you want to).”
Anne Helen Petersen, who writes and assembles Culture Study on Substack, had a terrific essay over the weekend set against the recent federal cuts, calling this “The Twilight of the American Passion Job.” Dialing in the fallout in the national parks system where freshly-former rangers and other employees have been telling their stories on social media about what the jobs and the service meant to them, Petersen makes this case: “These cuts don’t just signal the end of public works as public good. They also signal the twilight of the passion job, better known as the jobs performed by millions of Americans, often at great personal expense and sacrifice, simply because they loved the work that they did.” Whatever side you land on how the White House and DOGE are doing the pruning – or whatever Elon Musk was doing with that chainsaw at CPAC – Petersen’s worth reading on why the “work won’t love you back — and passion can only sustain you for so long.” Here’s the full thing:
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Support for this edition of Based in Lafayette comes from Purdue Convocations, presenting Hamlet Feb. 28-March 1. Actors From The London Stage return to Purdue for an encore week-long residency, deftly combining minimal staging with essential props and simple costumes. Buy Tickets Here.
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As a retired PR and marketing exec, I have to call out the gobblety-gook of that acronym and the university-speak of the barely explanatory copy. It’s being used as an example because the average Trump supporter can’t understand any of it. Explain it like you’re telling a fifth grader.
That essay gets the privatization of everything and attack on public goods right, but misses the tell MAGA is giving us: the focus on authority, fear ("crime is up!" no, it's not), and thoughtless obedience ("Gulf of America") means they want a security state. Why? To ensure that their minoritarian goals (Project 2025) outlive Trump. Capturing the Supreme Court is not sufficient.