The Documentation Project on Tuesday delivered another informational meeting on the effects of Trump administration cuts to federal grants and services in McLean County.
The event at Heartland Community College was hosted by the nonpartisan McLean County League of Women Voters. Gabriel Spalding, a physics professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, Julie Emig, executive director of the McLean County Museum of History and David Sharar, senior advisor of public policy and strategic initiatives at Chestnut Health Systems, were panelists.
Higher education
Spalding spoke about the loss of various science grants and the impact on universities.
Illinois Wesleyan participation in National Science Foundation [NSF] grants previously included Step Up, for professional development to high school physics teachers; OPTYCs, which addressed disciplinary isolation among two-year college faculty; Physics and Astronomy SEA Change that improved environments for retention of undergraduate students; and a NASA HEAT grant for developing research-based instructional materials.
For each cancelled grant, there was no opportunity provided for IWU or other similarly-affected universities to appeal, he said.
“This is not economics. This is nonsense,” said Spalding. “So, what we will do is we'll lose a generation. We'll lose people that would have gone to be our high school teachers. We'll lose people that would have stayed on in our community colleges. We'll lose people that we need for our local economy.”
Spalding also discussed how Trump administration policies have affected international students. One immigration rule limited the amount of time foreign students, as well as journalists, can stay in the U.S. before needing to apply for a four-year extension. Multiple parties are suing over that rule.
In 2025, international student enrollment in the U.S. fell by one-fifth compared to the year before. Neither Illinois State nor IWU announced international enrollment for the year, but the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign saw a 7.3% decrease in international students among the freshman class between 2025 and 2026.
Spalding said the loss of international students will affect private universities in particular.
“Those international students are subsidizing the costs for the domestic students. So what happens? Well, the cost of the domestic students has to go up,” said Spalding.
Museums and libraries
Emig said more than $100,000 in grant funding for the McLean County Museum of History has been cancelled during the second Trump administration, and the museum's plan is to find other ways to support programming other than federal grants.
Emig said guidelines for the federal government to cut grants were to use artificial intelligence to determine which grants were, in any way, described with any words associated with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion [DEI]. For the museum, that meant grants for a program on queer history and culture in Central Illinois and another with the Institute for Museum and Library Services [IMLS] were canceled.
“It would have been great to have the money. We didn't need it to sustain ourselves. We're doing the work anyway. It'll just take longer,” said Emig.
She said the museum will not be going for grants “this cycle,” but will instead work to improve programming with other options.
“We are not even going to waste our time to try to reinstate these funds because we don't believe in the end it will be worth it,” she said. “We don't want to get on the radar.”
Healthcare and Medicaid
Sharar discussed changes to Medicaid and how they affect people in McLean County.
A study by KFF, a nonpartisan think tank, showed incoming changes to Medicaid rules could cost Illinois hospitals up to $4 billion in revenue. Sharar said about 18% of McLean County's population is on some form of Medicaid. About 9,000 McLean County residents are uninsured.
New federal work requirements for those who are eligible for Medicaid because of financial reasons, rather than age, could have an impact in McLean County, with Sharar saying a rule of that nature was implemented in 2018 in Arkansas, where 18,000 lost Medicaid coverage.
But Sharar said that did not come with an increase in employment. Many people were technically eligible under the work requirement, but they could not follow new rules in reporting compliance with the rule.
“If we apply this to McLean County, we will probably have about 1,700, 1,800 more individuals uninsured after this whole policy,” said Sharar.
And if people lose their insurance coverage, Sharar said they will put off going for treatment when health issues surface, until they have no choice but to go to the emergency room.
“So this is a nonsensical policy because it's going to increase our expenses anyway,” said Sharar, who was formerly the CEO of Chestnut Health Systems, but stepped aside to conduct more research.