CLEVELAND — On Friday, Ohio’s Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network, known as MAGNET, learned that its public funding had been frozen, effective immediately.

“I was initially shocked. Immediately after it, it was action mode: how do we get to all the people that understand how important it is and what’s at stake?” said Ethan Karp, President and CEO of MAGNET. 

“We help small and medium manufacturers, as a nonprofit, grow,” Karp explained. 

The Cleveland-based nonprofit has assisted local manufacturers for over 40 years. This includes helping them implement new technology to stay competitive, providing workforce training to help fill positions in manufacturing, and helping companies create prototypes. 

“That’s a start-up who has an idea on the back of their napkin that makes changing air filters easier,” Karp said. “This space we would actually prototype for those companies.”

They get state and federal funding through Ohio’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program, or MEP program, which funds six similar organizations throughout the state that aim to assist local manufacturers. 

The funding freeze was announced in a letter from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that funds Ohio’s Department of Development. The Ohio Department of Development is the department that runs the MEP program.  

In the letter, the NIST cites an ongoing audit as the reason for the freeze.

“Preliminary findings in connection with an active financial assistance audit being performed by the DOC Office of Inspector General (OIG) which identifies various instances of material noncompliance by the Recipient and/or its Subrecipients, several of which were confirmed by the Recipient or the applicable Subrecipient.” – Letter from NIST to Ohio’s Department of Development announces funding freeze

The audit of Ohio’s MEP program started over a year ago, and the results aren’t set to be published until Spring 2026. 

The letter specifically cites three MEP programs for misreporting income. MAGNET is not one of the programs mentioned specifically in the letter. 

One program that is mentioned is the Center for Innovative Food Technology (CIFT). In the letter announcing the freeze, CIFT states:

“CIFT did not report 2.3 million in unreported program income on the earlier five-year award. CIFT has acknowledged at least 1.8 million is unreported program income.” 

CIFT President and CEO Rebecca Singer denies any wrongdoing and says the discrepancy is because of unclear guidelines about what a program should report as income.

“CIFT has fully cooperated with the audit and the statements are misleading and inaccurate,” Singer said in a statement. “Any issues that occurred were administrative in nature and we are prepared to address them once a drafted report is provided. There is consistency in the findings among the organizations further demonstrating lack of clarity and understanding on administrative reporting. Several OIG audits of other state programs have noted under-reporting of program income but they have been given the opportunity to counter findings.”

Singer said that the typical process of an audit has not been followed, and CIFT did not see a draft of the audit and respond, which she said is the standard process for a financial audit. 

According to Singer, because of the freeze CIFT lost $1.6 million in public funding and, as a result, they are suspending operations on Monday, Dec. 15. Singer said 13 employees will be affected as well as 22 businesses that rely on CIFT’s mini food processing kitchen, which allows them to make their products to sell at retail outlets. 

With the freeze of federal funds, the state of Ohio has also frozen its portion of funding to the MEP program. 

In a statement, Mason Waldvogel, the Deputy Chief of Media Relations for Ohio’s Department of Development, explains that the state funding is tied to federal funding. 

“The majority of state funding provided to Ohio MEP partner organizations consists of matching dollars, which cannot be spent without corresponding federal funds. Therefore, the Department of Development has suspended the program at the state level.”

The freeze affects roughly $14 million in funds to Ohio manufacturing nonprofits over the next year, with MAGNET receiving $5.9 million of those funds. 

Karp said MAGNET has been complying with the audit and is frustrated the freeze was started before there had been communication with the MEP programs about the findings. 

“If there is an issue, then you need to tell somebody there is an issue and give somebody a chance to fix it. In this case, there’s nothing for us to fix because we don’t know what, or if, there are findings and a report. That lack of transparency, that lack of process makes no sense,” Karp said. 

Karp said the funding cut-off will change how MAGNET functions, prompting decisions to be made about potential lay-offs of their staff of roughly 75 people. 

“We’re going to have to structurally make huge changes at MAGNET to continue at a much smaller scale,” Karp said. 

According to Karp, approximately 35% of their budget comes from state and federal funding. The rest is from a private industry that pays for MAGNET’s services. However, Karp said they can only provide many of those services because of their public funding. 

“Helping people understand that the investment that the state and federal governments have been making for 40 years, this is a 40-year partnership — shouldn’t be turned off at a moment’s notice, depriving all these people and companies of necessary support.”

This funding freeze could impact the manufacturing sector in Ohio. 

“We’re saying we want to restore manufacturing? Well this is not how you restore manufacturing. This is not how you bring jobs back from overseas; we are actually going to be cutting Ohio jobs as a result of this decision,” said Jack Schron, President of Jergens Incorporated, a Cleveland-based manufacturer.

Schron sits on MAGENT’s board and has used its resources to test out Jergens products. 

Micheal Canty, president and CEO of Alloy Precision Technologies, said the freeze will impact small and medium-size companies the most. 

“I think it will be devastating to manufacturing,” Canty said. “If MAGNET and all the MEP’s are gone, then a lot of those projects to develop and promote smart manufacturing and manufacturing in general go away.”

Karp said the irony is that MAGNET’s goals align with the current administration’s efforts to make U. S manufacturing more competitive. 

“I desperately want tariffs to help companies. Every single day I am out there talking about how we need to compete against international sources and how our companies need to be the most technologically advanced in the world. It is the same thing the Trump administration says, and we are totally aligned. So it is ironic that this is happening to us now,” Karp said.

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Indiana basketball coach Darian DeVries and senior forward Tucker DeVries met with reporters after the Hoosiers’ 72-60 loss to Kentucky on Saturday night at Rupp Arena in Lexington.

Here’s what the DeVries duo said during their near-seven-minute press conference.

Q: I guess, Darian, it’s sort of another night where it feels like it just kind of gets difficult to really break down an opponent off the dribble, kind of get that inside-out sort of paint touch to three looks you want, just like what, I guess, are you guys, what’s not happening there, what’s just kind of sort of failing at the source offensively when that’s not working? 

DD: Yeah, I thought the first half, you know, we got some pretty good action, pretty good movement, I thought the second half, Kentucky certainly turned up the pressure and was able to get into us and we didn’t respond well enough and we turned the ball over too much and live ball turnovers against them are really hard because now they’re out in transition playing in space, so the turnovers and the offensive rebounding, I mean, that flipped the game around that second half. 

Q: On Kentucky’s long run, what was the problem there?

Yeah, I thought the turnovers, it was a combination of things, I thought, you know, we left our feet a few times, I thought we just, you know, got on our heels a little bit and didn’t play as disciplined as we needed to, you know, as that, you know, the crowd got cranked up and things, that’s the time where you got to really dig in a little bit more, your screen’s got to be better, you got to play off of two feet more, and then the offensive rebounds, you know, they just went and got them and, you know, we didn’t do a good enough job of creating space and getting bodies and going and securing the ball. 

Q: What do you think you need to improve on, the team needs to improve on against ball pressure at the point of attack? 

DD: Yeah, the number one thing when you get at ball pressure is everything from an execution standpoint and a movement standpoint, it’s just got to be done with more force, you can’t continue just to get pushed out and everybody stands, so you have to find ways to give yourself up with a back hook, give yourself up with a screen, set up those screens with more force, you know, and get some movement to, you know, even as, you know, they had gotten ahead and we started to break it off a little bit, once we got movement again, we were able to get those clean looks or better looks, so it’s something we got to get better at, there’s no question.

Q: Tucker, your individual line tonight was really great, I mean, your effort was fantastic, 15 points, 7 rebounds, a lot of the three point shots tonight didn’t go down like they normally do for the Hoosiers, what do you think that is, was it just not seeing the basket as well, was it the defense, was it not in the offense where you were getting clean looks? 

TUCKER DEVRIES: To be honest, making and missing shots, I thought tonight, honestly, wasn’t a problem, I know, certainly, I did not shoot it great, as a team we didn’t shoot that great either from three, but, you know, even with that being said, I think there were certainly areas that we needed to be a lot better at, as a group, and if we were able to, you know, especially in the second half, execute in those areas, I think that would have made up for some of those, you know, shooting habits and miscues, but, you know, making them missing shots sometimes is basketball, but I thought in the other areas, if we could just, you know, execute there a little bit.

Q: On that, if shots maybe weren’t the problem, what kind of was, do you think?

TUCKER: I mean, he hit on it pretty good, the turnovers and obviously the offensive rebounds they had, especially in the second half. I mean, I take full responsibility for both of those areas. Obviously, four turnovers is far too many. As a group, I think when they pick up the pressure, I think we just need to really focus on our execution a little bit more on every possession. But good thing is we get a good week here before we play again to really dial in on some of those areas that we’ve maybe lacked in the beginning.

Q: When Lamar picked up his fourth foul and missed nearly nine minutes, what went wrong offensively?

DD: Yeah, I don’t remember the exact sequences there, but, you know, not having Lamar out there is certainly a big part of our offense, and, you know, his foul trouble tonight certainly limited him with only the 21 minutes because he was, again, he’s, you know, a big focal piece of what we try to run our offense through, so, you know, I believe during that little stretch that he wasn’t out there, that’s when the turnovers started to happen and 

we weren’t able to get into, you know, maybe some of our actions the way we needed to. 

Q: Darian, you mentioned Kentucky’s offensive rebound and kind of flipping that game. Was that just their physicality, their effort out beating you guys or something else that you saw going on? 

DD: Yeah, I thought their effort, their physicality in the second half was, you know, really good. I mean, they certainly cranked it up a notch in that second half and we needed to respond to it, but, you know, I thought their aggressiveness defensively, their aggressiveness in the offensive glass, you know, was ultimately the factor. 

Q: Darian, you mentioned Lamar, but how much did the foul trouble for not just him, but other guys, affect you tonight?

DD:  I mean, foul trouble is foul trouble. You have it every night, so you’ve got to figure out a way to deal with it and, you know, we just didn’t do a good enough job with that.

Q: Just to follow up on that, with this team, and you’ve talked about sort of where you are with the two bigs and things like that, like does foul trouble become sort of a compounding problem when it disrupts rotations? It felt tonight like maybe guys were just not either on the floor long enough to find the rhythm or maybe had to be on the floor too long because other guys were in foul trouble. 

DD: Again, our guys, you know, their numbers are called, they’re ready to go. You know, certainly, you know, a guy like Lamar, you want him out there, but when he’s not out there, I feel very confident that the guys that are coming in are going to do their part and do their job and, you know, we certainly have a lot of faith in them, so, you know, unfortunately it just didn’t work out the way we wanted it to tonight.