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An entrance sign at Kansas State University is shown.

Kansas State University is eliminating nine jobs due to federal cuts in international aid programs, and KSU is indefinitely suspending two programs that help improve crop yields in the U.S. and overseas.

K-State on Friday announced that it would suspend operations of its two Feed the Future Innovation Labs on April 12, and would eliminate nine employee positions as part of the change.

The announcement is one of the first by a state-operated university in Kansas to cut jobs due to new federal funding policies. But it comes at a time when massive cuts and hiring freezes are starting to emerge at other research universities across the country. On Thursday, John Hopkins University — the country’s largest research university — announced it was cutting more than 2,000 jobs due to federal grant funding changes pushed by the Trump administration.

Earlier this week, University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod told the Journal-World that he wasn’t aware of any layoffs at KU related to the federal funding issues, but acknowledged the situation was fluid.

KU leaders have acknowledged they’ve received stop work orders on a “handful” of federally-funded projects. But Girod, on Wednesday, said that many of the researchers and staff members tied to those programs had additional duties at the university, and the stop work orders hadn’t yet necessitated KU to eliminate those positions. However, it is unclear whether KU will be able to take that approach for an extended period of time.

“There are short term responses but the longterm responses are what we are trying to analyze now,” Girod said.

The university hasn’t yet announced what KU programs have been impacted by the federal stop work orders. The Journal-World on Friday asked for the identity of the specific projects that have been impacted by the federal changes, including whether some of the projects had received termination notices. A termination notice is a step beyond a stop work order and is a sign that federal funding for the project won’t be restored.

While specifics haven’t yet been provided, Girod earlier this week said that most of the programs impacted at KU are tied to funding through the U.S. Department of Education. KU may be at greater risk of funding losses than most other universities as the Department of Education goes through a massive reorganization.

As the Journal-World reported last month, KU ranks No. 4 among all public universities in the country for the amount of funding it receives for research about the education industry. In the last fiscal year, KU received $31.1 million in federal research dollars from the U.S. Department of Education.

That’s funding that KU leaders will be keeping an eye on as the Department of Education is undergoing a wide scale reorganization that likely will cut its workforce in half.

“We are very heavily research funded through the Department of Ed, and we don’t really know what that means for that body,” Girod said. “That is where we have seen a couple of stop work orders. We had a lot of really strong research funding and partnerships with the Department of Ed and I don’t think we really have any idea what it means for that.”

At Kansas State, the job cuts have come as funding agreements with the U.S. Agency for International Development — also known as USAID — and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service have been terminated, the university said in a press release.

The innovation labs that are being shut down worked on projects that included the development of new wheat and sorghum varieties to better withstand drought, new processes to protect crops from pests and diseases, and food safety programs that involved new ways to store food after harvest.

The labs had been in operation for more than a decade, K-State said in the release.