A program meant to make the foreign service look more like America is on the chopping block
Without a Payne fellowship, graduate school was not an option for Saran Camara. Continuing her studies, said Camara, whose parents are from Guinea, in West Africa, “was beyond my reach.”
Only about three percent of applicants are selected for the prestigious award, formally called the Donald M. Payne International Development Graduate Fellowship Program, which pays the full cost of graduate school in exchange for working five years as a foreign-service officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The Trump administration’s plans to shutter USAID means that Camara — who speaks four languages and is studying three more — no longer knows how she’ll afford the second year of a master’s degree in international relations at the Johns Hopkins University. The program provides more than $100,000 per fellow in tuition, living stipends, and internship support.
Camara might need to take out student loans just to pay her living expenses. “I don’t know what next year holds, to be honest,” she said.
Like Camara, the roughly 60 Payne fellows are in limbo, unsure how they’ll pay tuition, uncertain if they’ll have a job after graduation.
While the program is small, it reflects the fallout of the tumultuous first weeks of the Trump administration on international education and global development — and on higher education and the federal government writ large.
Recipients got the news at the end of February, in an email from Howard University, the program administrator, that the fellowship had been terminated. Although an earlier stop-work order had frozen much of USAID’s foreign-aid operations, the announcement was a gut punch to Kyla Denwood, who will graduate in May with a master’s degree in international development from Georgetown University.
Denwood got her first passport, for free, as an undergraduate at Tulane University, where she studied and interned abroad in Europe, South America, and Africa. International work wasn’t an obvious choice for Denwood, who grew up in a single-parent household in the Chicago area. But she drew connections between her experience overseas, at a camp for HIV-positive children in Kenya, with the impact of neighborhood revitalization and development in her own community. When she learned about Payne and the opportunity to work at USAID, her path was set.
“I saw the good development work could do,” she said, “and I thought I could make an even-bigger impact in low-income countries.”
Part of the goal of the program is to expand the pipeline into foreign service and international development to a more-diverse set of applicants. Many of the fellows are, like Lindsey O’Neal, who is studying environmental policy at American University, first-generation college students and Pell Grant recipients. “This fellowship looks like America,” she said.
It’s also highly competitive. Those selected have stellar academic records, leadership experience, and a commitment to public service. Maggie Mello, a recipient and 10-year Marine Corps veteran, compares it to the competition for military-officer-training scholarships. “I just didn’t have to do as many situps for this one,” she said.
Mello became interested in international-development work after receiving training in emergency humanitarian operations from USAID as a military-logistics officer. She is supposed to begin a master’s program in applied economics at the Catholic University of America later this year. Now Mello, who is pregnant with her third child and whose husband is still in the Marine Corps, isn’t sure what’s next.
Part of the confusion, Mello and others said, is that while Howard was sent a program-termination notice, the participants, who signed individual contracts with USAID, haven’t received any official notification about their scholarships. They also don’t know whether — or how — they’ll meet the five-year work obligation. “I signed a commitment with the U.S. government,” Mello said, “and I want to fulfill that commitment.”
Lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced resolutions recognizing the contributions and opposing the shuttering of Payne and other merit-based diplomatic fellowships, like the Rangel and Pickering programs. (While the other programs have not been ended, legislators are concerned about their future because of Payne’s fate.)
“It is critical to our national security that Congress preserves these time-tested pipelines for young professionals to enter public service,” said Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “They ensure our national-security work force not only recruits the best talent our nation has to offer but also reflects the America these agencies represent abroad.”
Jioni Tuck is set to graduate in May from Harvard University with a degree in public health. Now she is in the midst of an unexpected job hunt, competing with both recent graduates and seasoned development veterans. “LinkedIn,” she said, “it’s the new version of doomscrolling.”
Tuck has attended some job talks, looking for ideas of how to apply her skills to work in related areas. The Payne fellowship is regimented — the program approves students’ course of study, sets a bar for academic performance, and requires them to complete internships in Congress and abroad. Tuck said she might have made some different choices, taking other courses or applying directly to a Ph.D. program, if she hadn’t been on a trajectory to foreign-service work.
“What I’m trying to understand,” she said, “is how we can be cut off from the opportunity to serve our government.”
