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Dive Brief:
A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled Friday that the Trump administration must continue to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during the ongoing government shutdown. A federal judge in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order on Friday that blocks the federal government from suspending SNAP funding, the National Council of Nonprofits, a party in the lawsuit against the federal government, said in an emailed press release.
In her ruling, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said that the decision to suspend SNAP payments was “based on the erroneous conclusion” that the USDA could not use contingency funds for SNAP. “This court has now clarified that Defendants are required to use those Contingency Funds as necessary for the SNAP program,” Talwani wrote.
The Trump administration has until Monday to tell the Massachusetts court if it will move forward with funding SNAP benefits, even partially, for November and the timeline for doing so.
Dive Insight:
The rulings come as the grocery industry braces for an unprecedented lapse in SNAP benefit distribution, given it’s unclear how the federal government will respond to the decisions and the logistics of loading funds onto EBT cards.
In a notice on its website, the USDA claimed that funding for SNAP benefits is set to run out due to the ongoing government shutdown and, as a result, the agency will not issue benefits on Nov. 1.
It’s unclear if the Trump administration plans to appeal to the rulings or how quickly federal funding for SNAP could get loaded onto program participants’ EBT cards.
The Massachusetts judge’s decision is tied to the lawsuit 25 states and Washington, D.C., filed against the Trump administration earlier this week, arguing that the USDA had planned to unlawfully halt the food nutrition program’s benefits for November. In the lawsuit, the states argued that the USDA is required to continue providing benefits as long as it has funding. The complaint claimed that the USDA has access to at least $6 billion in contingency funds appropriated by Congress, noting that the federal agency has appropriated funds to temporarily fund WIC, but has not done so for SNAP.
“USDA’s claim that the SNAP contingency funds cannot be used to fund SNAP benefits during an appropriation lapse is contrary to the plain text of the congressional appropriations law,” the lawsuit stated.
Nearly 42 million people participated in SNAP and received an average of $188 each in May, according to the most recently available USDA data. Some states, such as Virginia and Vermont, had prepared for temporary funding from their state funds for SNAP participants’ EBT cards to help curtail food insecurity.
In addition to putting people at higher risk of food insecurity, delayed November SNAP benefits would have created logistical challenges for retailers. Last week, Pennsylvania Food Merchants Association President and CEO Alex Baloga said in an emailed statement that delayed SNAP benefits could create “an operational nightmare” for food retailers and distributors across the state, possibly impairing accurate demand forecasting and leading to bare shelves of fresh foods like produce, dairy and meat.
The potential loss of SNAP funding added to a growing list of disruptions that grocers are facing with the federal nutrition assistance program. A number of grocers are currently preparing for restrictions that go into effect next year across a dozen states that will make certain items, like soda or candy, ineligible for SNAP. Upfront costs to implement purchasing restrictions are expected to total just over $305 million for grocers, according to a report from the National Grocers Association, the National Association of Convenience Stores and FMI – The Food Industry Association, which noted that grocers are projected to shell out more than $281 million annually for compliance.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Donald Trump signed this summer includes $186 billion in SNAP cuts over 10 years and tightens eligibility requirements for the program. Grocers are bracing for a potential decrease in SNAP sales as states implement the changes to participant eligibility, Stephanie Johnson, group vice president of government relations and political affairs at the NGA, told Grocery Dive in July.
In early March, less than two months after President Donald Trump took office, his administration canceled $400 millionin federal research funding to the Ivy League institution.The funding cut came just days after federal officials announced a probe into the university, claiming it failed to protect Jewish students from harassment.
More civil rights investigations and funding freezes followed — at Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University,University of California, Los Angeles and others. Along with allegations related to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests, the administration has attacked diversity efforts and policies allowing transgender women to compete on sports teams aligning with their gender identity.
The first to face a funding hit, Columbia in March also became the first university to agree to a host of demands from the Trump administration to see its federal funding restored.
The university then cut a larger deal in July. That agreement included a $221 million payment to the federal government,as well as academic and policy changes, in exchange for having its suspended funding mostly restored.Despite concerns in the higher education world about Columbia’s concessions, Brown, Penn and the University of Virginia also inked their own accords with the administration to resolve investigations.
Other deals could follow. Harvard, for example, has been supposedly on the cusp of a deal with the administration for months now — according to periodic news reports — as it seeks an end to a multi-front attack on the university by Trump’s government.
Moreover, the administration has directly offered priority for federal funding to select universities that agree to a broad set of terms covering academics, tuition, speech and other areas historically left to institutions to decide. So far, seven have rejected the compact and none have formally accepted, though Trump appeared to open the offer up to all colleges earlier in October.
Here’s a look at the deals signed so far between colleges and the government — and the impact on the institutions involved.
A federal district court in Massachusetts found yesterday that the government violated Harvard University’s First Amendment rights, as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when it stripped the university of billions in federal funding last April. At the time, the Trump administration’s explanations for the cuts strongly suggested its actions were based on hostility towards Harvard’s political viewpoint, though the government eventually shifted to an argument that they were an effort to fight campus anti-Semitism.
Much of the opinion covers a dispute about what court has jurisdiction to hear the case. But when it comes to the First Amendment and Title VI, the court’s reasoning echoes what FIRE has saidpublicly and in our own amicus brief in the Harvard case: Pursuing the worthy end of fighting anti-Semitic and other unlawful discrimination on campus does not justify flatly unlawful and unconstitutional methods.
Here are FIRE’s three quick takeaways about this decision and what it means for campus rights.
Government cannot force private institutions like Harvard to punish speech protected by the First Amendment
Like many universities, Harvard receives hundreds of millions of dollars every year in research grants and student aid. That money comes with both formal legal requirements and less-formal leverage over how the university operates.
In a letter it sent to Harvard in April, the federal government tried to use this leverage to make sweeping demands of Harvard if it wished to continue receiving federal funds, including prohibiting the admission of international students deemed “hostile” to “American values,” political litmus tests in the name of viewpoint diversity, and even the derecognition of pro-Palestinian student groups.
As our nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, if Harvard was unwilling to defend its rights in court, it was unlikely that any other institution would have the fortitude to do so.
But as FIRE’s amicus brief pointed out, “the government cannot strongarm private actors into punishing speech that the First Amendment protects from state intrusion,” noting that the Supreme Court reaffirmed this principle just last year in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, . In Vullo, the NRA accused New York state financial services chief Maria Vullo of using state power to coerce companies not to do business with the NRA because of the state’s opposition to the organization’s pro-gun viewpoint.
The district court read the law the same straightforward way. Comparing the government’s actions at each step to the actions at issue in Vullo, the court found:
Defendants (like Maria Vullo) urged and threatened Harvard (in the position of the insurer) to hire faculty and make curricula and research choices that better aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints, to the detriment of professors and researchers with competing views (like the NRA). Pursuant to Vullo, using this type of coercion to suppress speech, third-party or otherwise, is not permissible.
Whether it’s a state or federal official doesn’t matter: They may not use their power to coerce private actors to unconstitutionally do the government’s bidding.
Feds must follow Title VI if it wants to strip funding for Title VI violations
FIRE has also expressed alarm about the government’s failure to follow the procedures Congress prescribed when stripping funding from Harvard (and other universities) in the name of fighting race, color, and national origin discrimination (including anti-Semitic discrimination) under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Being stripped of federal funding under civil rights law has long been seen as a nuclear option. The loss would likely shut down all but the richest colleges and universities by barring them not just from federal research grants but also from federal student aid, such as Pell grants and federally subsidized loans. That’s why Title VI requires the government to give institutions like Harvard “notice, a hearing, and an opportunity to come into compliance voluntarily before the government can terminate funding,” as we wrote in our amicus brief. Yet the government skipped the process and failed to do so.
Again, predictably, this failure did not escape the court. It outlined the same procedures to which FIRE pointed in its brief, noting that it was “undisputed” that the government did not comply with them before freezing and terminating funding. Rejecting the government’s arguments that it could “combat anti-Semitism” at Harvard by terminating funding under different provisions, the court found that “Congress has…passed a law that explicitly provides for when and how an agency can terminate federal funding to address this type of discrimination—and that law is Title VI, which dictates that ‘no such action shall be taken until the department or agency’ has gone through the appropriate procedures.”
Harvard’s free speech record is terrible, but be thankful one university found its spine
FIRE has always been a critic of Harvard’s handling of student and faculty free speech issues. When I say always, I mean that literally. As we told the court, Harvard’s repeated failure to honor student and faculty rights over decades was a major contributor to Boston civil liberties lawyer (and Harvard Law alumnus) Harvey Silverglate’s decision to co-found FIRE in 1999. But none of Harvard’s problems excuse the government’s decision to make these unlawful, unconstitutional demands.
FAQ: Responding to common questions about the fight between Harvard and the Trump administration
Harvard vs. Trump isn’t just a headline, but a battle to decide whether the government can use funding to force ideological conformity. In this explainer, FIRE makes clear why not.
Harvard should be commended for standing up for its legal rights rather than settling under this intense government pressure. As our nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, if Harvard was unwilling to defend its rights in court, it was unlikely that any other institution would have the fortitude to do so.
The decision should also serve as a needed wake-up call for government agencies charged with enforcing our civil rights laws. As we wrote with regard to Columbia University, which recently settled with the government under similar circumstances, there’s plenty of reason to have legitimate concerns about Title VI violations on college campuses. But Title VI requires that the federal government follow the appropriate procedures for a reason. When followed in good faith, the process increases the chance of just outcomes for colleges, students, and faculty while combatting unlawful discrimination. Federal agencies must follow our Constitution and laws while they do their important work.
A federal judge delivered a sweeping victory for academic freedom Wednesday, ruling that the Trump administration’s freeze of $2.2 billion in federal grant funds to Harvard University was illegal and unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs determined that the administration imposed the funding freeze in retaliation for Harvard’s refusal to comply with demands that would have violated First Amendment protections, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and screening international students for ideological biases.
The ruling vacates all freezing orders affecting Harvard and bars Trump administration officials from enforcing those orders going forward.
The administration froze Harvard’s federal grants on April 14, just hours after the university rejected a list of ten demands. While only one demand related to antisemitism concerns, six others targeted ideological and pedagogical issues, including restrictions on who could lead, teach, and be admitted to the university, as well as what could be taught.
Judge Burroughs noted that the “swift termination” of funding occurred before the administration had learned anything substantive about antisemitism on campus or Harvard’s response efforts, suggesting the antisemitism concerns were “at best arbitrary and, at worst, pretextual.”
The funding freeze halted work on critical research projects spanning multiple fields, including studies on tuberculosis, NASA astronauts’ radiation exposure, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and a predictive model to help Veterans Administration emergency room physicians assess suicidal veterans. Burroughs ruled that none of these affected projects had any connection to antisemitism.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) celebrated the ruling as a landmark victory for higher education.
“This is a huge win for all of American higher education, for science, and for free and critical thought in this country,” said Dr. Todd Wolfson, National AAUP President. “Time and again, Trump has tried to restrict speech and cripple lifesaving university research. As today’s victory shows, Trump’s war on higher education is unconstitutional.”
Veena Dubal, National AAUP General Counsel, characterized the administration’s actions as “cynical and lawless, leveraging claims of discrimination to bludgeon critical research and debate.”
The Harvard AAUP chapter also praised the outcome. “This historic ruling underscores the importance of free inquiry, truth, and the rule of law in a democratic society,” said Kirsten Weld, AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter President.
Harvard President Dr. Alan Garber had previously stated that “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
The Education Department pushed back against the ruling through spokesperson Madi Biedermann, who criticized Burroughs as “the same Obama-appointed judge that ruled in favor of Harvard’s illegal race-based admissions practices” before the Supreme Court ultimately overturned those practices.
“Cleaning up our nation’s universities will be a long road, but worth it,” Biedermann said, suggesting the administration may continue its broader efforts to reshape higher education policies.
The ruling establishes important precedent for protecting academic freedom and research independence from political interference. Legal experts note that the decision reinforces constitutional limits on government retaliation against educational institutions for their speech, curriculum choices, and admissions policies.
AAUP leaders said that the victory demonstrates the importance of collective action in defending academic freedom, with faculty and administrators standing together against what they characterize as authoritarian overreach into university governance and research priorities.
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Dive Brief:
The Trump administration violated Harvard University’s First Amendment rightsand didn’t follow proper procedures when it froze $2.2 billion of the university’s federal funding earlier this year, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughsalso ruled that the federal government acted arbitrarily and capriciously when halting the funds. The judicial branch must ensure important research isn’t improperly terminated, she wrote,“even if doing so risks the wrath of a government committed to its agenda no matter the cost.”
Burroughsstruck down the Trump administration’s freeze orders and grant termination letters, opening the door for Harvard’s funding to be reinstated. But a White House spokesperson said the Trump administration will immediately move to appeal the decision and keep Harvard “ineligible for grants in the future,” in apparent defiance of the ruling.
Dive Insight:
In April, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contracts to Harvard, hours after the university’s leadershiprebuked its demands for changes to its admissions, hiring, governance and campus policies.
The federal government carried out the freeze under the auspices of the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which has alleged that the Ivy League institution has not done enough to fight antisemitism on its campus.Subsequent grant termination letters from multiple federal agencies repeated those claims.
But Burroughs questioned that rationale in her decision Wednesday, saying a connection between the federal government’s stated motivations and actions was “wholly lacking.”
The evidence does not “reflect that fighting antisemitism was Defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard,” the judge wrote in her 84-page ruling. “Even if it were, combatting antisemitism cannot be accomplished on the back of the First Amendment.”
U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon also told Harvard in a May 5 letter that it would cut the university off from all future research grants — an order that Burroughs also permanently blocked.
Burroughs also cast doubt on the Trump administration’s argument that its revocation of Harvard’s funding had nothing to do with university President Alan Garber’srefusal to comply with extensive federal ultimatums.
Among several wide-ranging requirements, the Trump administration sought to have Harvard hire a third party to audit programs and departments that it described as fueling “antisemitic harassment” or reflecting “ideological capture.” It also called for “meaningful governance reform” within the university, such as reducing the power of faculty engaged in activism.
The ultimatums and cut-off funds prompted Harvard to sue the federal government in April. It argued that the Trump administration violated its free speech by pulling funding for refusing to comply with viewpoint-based demands and that the government didn’t follow the proper procedures for terminating the grants.
Despite the Trump administration assertions that Harvard’s pulled funding was unrelated, Burroughs said its own members undercut its argument.
“Numerous government officials spoke publicly and contemporaneously on these issues, including about their motivations, and those statements are flatly inconsistent with what Defendants now contend,” the judge wrote.
Burroughs cited social media posts from President Donald Trump two days after the task force announced the funding freeze.
“Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds,” he wrote on April 16.
That post and others like it demonstrated that Trump’s ongoing concern was “untethered from antisemitism,” Burroughs said.
But a White House spokesperson doubled down on Wednesday, saying the federal government’s actions against the university are intended to “hold Harvard accountable.”
“To any fair-minded observer, it is clear that Harvard University failed to protect their students from harassment and allowed discrimination to plague their campus for years,” White House Assistant Press Secretary Liz Huston said in an email.Burroughs was “always going to rule in Harvard’s favor, regardless of the facts,” she added.
In late April, Harvard published two long-awaited reports about the climate of its Massachusetts campus — one on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias and another on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.
The reports found that Jewish, Israeli and Zionist students and employees at Harvard — along with their Muslim, Arab and Palestinian peers — at times felt shunned or harassed while at the university during the 2023-24 academic year.
“Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did,” Burroughs wrote before noting that the university is “currently, even if belatedly, taking steps it needs to take to combat antisemitism and seems willing to do even more if need be.”
But the federal government failed to consider this, the judge wrote.
“The agencies considered little, if any, data regarding the antisemitism problem at Harvard” and disregarded “substantial policy and other changes” the university enacted to address the issue, Burroughs said.
They also “failed to weigh the importance of any particular grant or to evaluate whether a particular grant recipient had engaged in antisemitic behavior before cutting off critical research,” she said.
The Trump administration’s aggressive stance toward higher education institutions is contributing to a precipitous drop in support among college-educated voters, with new polling data revealing the president’s approval rating among graduates has fallen to historic lows.
President Donald J. TrumpAccording to Gallup polling, Trump’s approval rating among college graduates plummeted from 34% in June to just 28% by August, with disapproval climbing to 70%. This represents a concerning trend for Republicans as they look toward the 2026 midterm elections, particularly given the growing influence of college-educated voters in key suburban swing districts.
The administration’s education policies have taken aim at what Trump characterizes as liberal bias and antisemitism on college campuses. Harvard University has faced the most severe federal intervention, with the White House canceling approximately $100 million in federal contracts and freezing $3.2 billion in research funding. The administration has also moved to block international student enrollment and threatened to revoke the institution’s tax-exempt status while demanding sweeping reforms to admissions processes and curricular oversight.
Similar measures have been enacted against Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University over issues ranging from pro-Palestinian campus activism to policies regarding transgender athletes in women’s sports. Harvard officials have characterized these interventions as an unprecedented assault on academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
The crackdown has generated significant campus unrest and drawn comparisons to Cold War-era loyalty investigations, raising questions about the federal government’s appropriate role in higher education governance.
The polling data reflects broader dissatisfaction with the administration’s educational approach. Only 26% of college graduates approve of Trump’s handling of education policy, while 71% disapprove. A separate AP-NORC survey from May found that 56% of Americans nationwide disapprove of the president’s higher education agenda.
However, the policies resonate strongly within Trump’s Republican base, with roughly 80% of Republicans approving his higher education approach—a higher approval rate than his economic policies garner. About 60% of Republicans express significant concern about perceived liberal bias on college campuses, aligning with the administration’s framing of universities as ideologically compromised institutions.
The Republican coalition shows some internal division on enforcement mechanisms, with approximately half supporting federal funding cuts for non-compliant institutions while a quarter oppose such measures and another quarter remain undecided.
While political controversies dominate headlines, economic concerns remain the primary driver of public opinion on higher education. Sixty percent of Americans express deep concern about college costs, a bipartisan worry that transcends ideological divisions around campus politics.
Current data from the College Board and Bankrate show average annual costs of $29,910 for in-state public university students, $49,080 for out-of-state students, and approximately $61,990 for private nonprofit institutions when including room, board, and additional expenses. Financial aid reduces these figures to average net prices of $20,800 at public universities and $36,150 at private colleges.
These costs reflect decades of sustained increases. EducationData.org reports that public in-state college costs have risen from $2,489 in 1963 to $89,556 in 2022-23 (adjusted for inflation). Over the past decade alone, in-state public tuition has increased by nearly 58%, while out-of-state and private tuition have risen by 30% and 27% respectively.
The economic pressures extend beyond college costs to post-graduation employment prospects. While overall unemployment among adults with bachelor’s degrees remains low at 2.3%, recent graduates face significant challenges. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that only 69.6% of bachelor’s degree recipients aged 20-29 were employed in late 2024, with unemployment among 23-27-year-olds reaching nearly 6%—substantially above the 4.2% national average.
These employment difficulties contribute to broader economic anxiety, with 39% of college graduates describing national economic conditions as “poor” and 64% reporting job search struggles.
The confluence of political and economic pressures creates a challenging landscape for Republicans heading into the 2026 midterms. College-educated voters represent a growing and increasingly decisive demographic, particularly in suburban areas that often determine control of swing seats.
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George Mason UniversityPresident Gregory Washington’s lawyer on Monday firmly repudiated the Trump administration’s allegations that thepublic Virginia institution had violated civil rights law.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights alleged that George Mason’s hiring and promotion practices violated Title VI, which bans federally funded institutions from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. An agency official singled out Washington as the leader of a “university-wide campaign to implement unlawful DEI policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race,” and the department demanded that he apologize.
In an 11-page letter to the college’s governing board sent on Washington’s behalf, his attorney Douglas Gansler called OCR’s allegations “a legal fiction,” and stressed that George Mason’sleadership has kept the university in compliance with federal law.“Far from needing to apologize, you all have a shared record to be proud of,” he wrote.
Since July, the Trump administration has opened at least four investigations into George Mason, targeting the large research institution over universitywide diversity initiatives, of which Washington has been a champion.
The Education Department’s findings came just six weeks after the agency opened the investigation, citing a complaint from “multiple professors at GMU” alleging that the university’s leaders had approved policies illegally giving certain underrepresented groups preferential treatment since 2020.
Gansler called out the brief length of the agency’s investigation and said OCR’s letter shows that federal officials “have not spent sufficient time finding critical and materials facts.”
“It is glaringly apparent that the OCR investigation process has been cut short, and ‘findings’ have been made in spite of a very incomplete fact-finding process, including only two interviews with university academic deans,” Gansler wrote.
The Education Department’s announcement last week focused much of its ire onWashington, alleging the university president’s prior statementswere proof of “support for racial preferencing.”
But some of the department’s evidence was out-of-context or “gross mischaracterizations of statements made by Dr. Washington”that didn’t lead to policy changes, Gansler wrote. And one contested policy would have predated Washington’s tenure, he argued.
In one example, the Education Department quoted a 2021 statement from Washington on adopting an inclusive hiring framework.
“If you have two candidates who are both ‘above the bar’ in terms of requirements for a position, but one adds to your diversity and the other does not, then why couldn’t that candidate be better, even if that candidate may not have better credentials than the other candidate?” Washington said at the time.
Gansler said the quote was pulled out of context and never resulted in a policy being enacted.
“His question was just that: a question, offered to provoke dialogue within the university community, as should be expected of a faculty member and academic leader of a university,” the attorney wrote. “The question does not suggest hiring minority candidates of lesser credentials, but rather considering how two equally qualified candidates may contribute differently to the campus.”
He added that Washington is not directly involved in evaluating candidates for faculty positions and that OCR would be unable to cite “any discriminatory hiring decision made based on it.”
It is glaringly apparent that the OCR investigation process has been cut short, and “findings” have been made in spite of a very incomplete fact-finding process.
Douglas Gansler
Attorney for George Mason University President Gregory Washington
The Education Department gave George Mason 10 days to voluntarily agree to a proposalit said would resolve the alleged violations. Part of that proposal would require Washington to publicly apologize to the university community “for promoting unlawful discriminatory practices in hiring, promotion, and tenure processes.”
In response, Gansler advised George Mason’s trustees against agreeing to the Education Department’s demand for an apology.
“If the Board entertains OCR’s demand that Dr. Washington personally apologize for promoting unlawful discriminatory practices in hiring, promotion, and tenure processes, it will undermine GMU’s record of compliance,” Gansler wrote. “An apology will amount to an admission that the university did something unlawful, opening GMU and the Board up to legal liability for conduct that did not occur under the Board’s watch.”
And while the proposed apology may help resolve the Education Department’s inquiry, it would not prevent other federal agencies from using that statement to penalize the university, the lawyer added.
Mike Fragoso, a lawyer representing the board, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
“Our sole focus is our fiduciary duty to serve the best interests of the University and the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” the board said in a Friday statement.
Publicly, George Mason’s board has said little as the Trump administration announced the litany of its investigations into the university. The response prompted George Mason’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors to approve a no-confidence resolution against the board last month and called on it to defend Washington.
“A cold wind just blew through every newsroom this morning.”
These were the words of my colleague Bob Corn-Revere upon hearing that Paramount Global had agreed to settle President Donald Trump’s 60 Minutes lawsuit — to the tune of $16 million.
Trump filed the lawsuit in November, demanding $10 billion over what he alleged was the “deceptive editing” of a 60 Minutes interview featuring then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The lawsuit claimed CBS’s “substantial news distortion” was calculated to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of last year’s election in her favor. But despite legalexpertswidelylabeling the lawsuit baseless, Paramount opted to settle.
Why?
Well, the lawsuit was a sticking point in the approval of the $8 billion Paramount-Skydance merger — approval which the Trump administration via the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), led by Chairman Brendan Carr, had the power to grant or deny. That approval was finalized last week, just two days after Trump formally dropped the lawsuit.
It’s an extortion regime much bigger than any one-time cash grab, enveloping the media industry in a cloud of weaponized uncertainty.
The timing is hard to ignore. And while the initial details of the dollar amount in the settlement attracted much controversy, it’s also been gradually revealed that the money was paired with other, more alarming agreements from Paramount Global.
First, they acceded to 60 Minutes releasing unedited transcripts of interviews with all future presidential candidates. Second, there was a rumored side deal — confirmed by Trump last week (SkyDance has not confirmed or denied)— that CBS will run advertising and public service announcements to promote Trump’s favored causes.
Finally, we learned that Skydance promised to appoint an ombudsman to review all complaints of “bias” involving CBS programming moving forward.
These components of the settlement stick out because it connects the ostensibly private matter of the 60 Minutes lawsuit to Trump’s presidential agenda. In other words, they are a function of the Trump administration’s policy priorities, blurring the boundary not just between Trump’s role as a private citizen and his role as president, but also between Paramount’s role as a private enterprise and as an arm of the White House.
But it gets worse. In fact, the Paramount settlement provides only a small window into a larger attempt — on the part of the president and his administration — to transform the relationship between the government and America’s media industry, powered by the machinery of the FCC.
It’s an extortion regime much bigger than any one-time cash grab, enveloping the media industry in a cloud of weaponized uncertainty created by lawsuits, selective regulatory investigations, and slow-walked merger approvals.
The ultimate aim? Getting some of America’s largest media companies to bend the knee and do the administration’s bidding.
Call it the extortion-industrial complex, and Paramount has been just one victim of it.
‘A cold wind…’
Let’s start with the implications of the 60 Minutes case.
First, there’s the “deceptive” editing of the 60 Minutes interview segment that was the target of the lawsuit, in which Harris was asked about the Israel-Hamas War. As FIRE explained in a filing to the FCC, the edited segment did not alter the substance of her response in any way. Rather, it was a routine and unremarkable trim — a simple shortening of a news segment to get to the point.
The president’s original complaint alleges the edit made her more “succinct,” and thus more palatable to voters. This is almost by definition true because an edit, by design, makes a candidate’s response briefer. But if an edit like this is legally actionable, then what editorial decision isn’t? The message to newsrooms, reinforced by the president’s litigious history, is that any anodyne decision they make could land them in court.
Then of course there’s the policy agreements in the settlement, including the ombudsman and the transcript requirements. These concessions serve to solidify private lawsuits as a powerful lever for enforcing the president’s agenda in areas that the government doesn’t actually control.
The role of the FCC
That brings us to the Trump-controlled FCC — the institutional machinery of the extortion-industrial complex that made Paramount’s acquiescence to Trump an almost foregone conclusion.
Paramount’s surrender is due in no small part to the FCC’s final authority over Paramount Global’s merger with Skydance Media, which as we saw, just received approval from the body. Reporting indicates it’s all but explicitly understood by CBS executives and Paramount Global controlling shareholder Shari Redstone that bringing the lawsuit to a close was part of clearing the way for the merger.
Further obstructing the merger was a parallel FCC probe into a consumer complaint about the editing of the 60 Minutes interview. The probe and the lawsuit are supposedly separate, but there’s reason to believe otherwise.
For one, the consumer complaint heavily informed the lawsuit. And while Chairman Carr has been careful to avoid linking the lawsuit itself to the merger talks (wink, wink), he said the consumer complaint is “likely to arise in the context of the FCC review” — meaning, essentially, that the probe allows him to connect the subject of the lawsuit to the merger.
These tools are the core of the extortion-industrial complex, and they have their roots in certain powers of the FCC granted by the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934, which birthed the agency itself. Those two laws granted the FCC regulatory power over who can use the radio and broadcast television waves, which sit at the low-frequency end of the electromagnetic spectrum (visible light sits in the middle of the spectrum). But signals at the low-end range often interfered with each other, prompting the government to step in and sort things out.
As a result, they introduced a government-sanctioned licensing regime, in which broadcasters could use part of the airwaves as long as they operated in the service of the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” If they didn’t, their license could be denied or revoked. This requirement became known as the “public interest standard,” which the Supreme Court upheld in the 1943 case NBC. v. United States on the basis that the properties of airwaves rendered it a “scarce” resource. This was a recurrent justification that became known as the “scarcity rationale,” and which the FCC used to set rules regulating broadcast programming.
To enforce these rules, the FCC was given a set of powers. They could deny or revoke licenses, decide the transfer of license ownership, and issue fines. In practice, this gave them power over any mergers and acquisitions when an owner of a broadcast station was involved. In addition to FCC’s direct oversight, members of the public could file complaints about violations that the FCC could investigate.
On the back of these powers and the public interest standard, the FCC issued regulations ranging from those on children’s programming all the way to rules governing balance in political coverage — including the well-known fairness doctrine, which required licensed broadcasters to present both sides of controversial issues of public importance.
As our understanding of the technological landscape changed and a vibrant media ecosystem outside broadcast took shape, content-based rules like the fairness doctrine came under scrutiny. A 1985 report commissioned by the FCC noted that not only was the fairness doctrine a “pervasive and significant impediment to the broadcasting of controversial issues of public importance,” It also found that the scarcity rationale “which ha[d] historically justified content regulation of broadcasting … is no longer valid” in the era of cable and satellite and, shortly thereafter, the internet. Why should broadcast operate underneath a web of restrictions that its competition is free from?
The courts and Congress also cast doubt on the viability of the scarcity rationale in the modern media landscape, culminating in the FCC’s 1987 repeal of the fairness doctrine.
In spite of the scarcity rationale falling into disrepute, the public interest standard and other content-based rules predicated on it stayed on the books. Whether those rules were overlooked or left intact as “symbolic regulation,” the remaining public interest-based regulatory infrastructure was a loaded gun left on the table.
Enter Brendan Carr
Despite having lots of nice things to say about free speech before his current position, Carr took on the FCC chairmanship in January with a bold new approach. He understood that while some seismic changes in the broadcast marketplace had rendered the public interest standard antiquated, others opened up new avenues to exercise government power in its name. Big companies began buying up more and more radio and TV stations, so fewer and fewer people owned the airwaves. At the same time, the corporations operating these stations and producing their content grew much larger and more influential.
The FCC already exercises a certain amount of power over the programming of the broadcast corporations through the stations and affiliates that run their content. But now, Carr has taken this to the next level, implicating the broader decisions of the conglomerates that own those broadcasters, and all the other media properties they control. His previously declared free speech principles took a backseat.
The FCC has authority over the licenses of broadcast stations (left column). In practice, Carr has treated that authority as expanding to their owners (middle column), including their vast portfolio of properties (right column).
One of his earliest moves as chairman was to unleash the FCC’s arsenal of tools in support of a top priority in Trump’s agenda that has little to do with the FCC’s traditional authority: the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
In February, Carr announced in a letter his intention to investigate the DEI programs of NBCUniversal and their parent company, Comcast. He also set his sights on the telecommunications industry, as a probe into Verizon’s diversity practices soon followed. In March, he came for Disney as well.
Around that time, Carr engaged in a strategy meeting with a conservative activist named Robby Starbuck, known for his pressure campaigns against the diversity efforts of Ford, Boeing, Walmart, and McDonald’s. Following the meeting, Starbuck posted, “Good luck with the FCC if you’re a woke company … You’re gonna need it!”
Two days later, Carr made clear that any businesses seeking approval for mergers or acquisitions — including Paramount Global — would be expected to “get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”
Corporations promptly complied with Carr’s demands. Verizon and TMobile sent letters to the FCC notifying Carr they had scrapped their DEI-related policies. Comcast withdrew from Pride march sponsorships and scrubbed their website. Just this week, Skydance confirmed to Carr a sweeping list of actions taken by Paramount to remove anything approaching DEI.
It’s important to understand the scope of Carr’s interventions. Under the FCC’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) rules, the commission can prevent radio and TV broadcasters from discriminating in hiring based on race, religion, or sex. So while he had a limited basis to, say, target affirmative action, Carr’s ambitions went beyond hiring practices and implicated First Amendment-protected speech.
For instance, the letter to Comcast notes the EEO rules, but there’s no direct mention of unlawful hiring practices on their part. What Carr does cite is the values of the company as described on their website, and the existence of employees and initiatives responsible for promoting DEI, including in TV and programming. With his letter to Verizon, this became a pattern.
The theory of authority behind all this is not completely new. After the events of the 2020 election and January 6th, 2021, a progressive watchdog group called the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) filed a petition to deny the broadcast license renewal application for Fox Corp-owned television station FOX 29 Philadelphia. Even though Fox News programming was not aired on the network (with the exception of then-host Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday), the petition cited their 2020 election coverage as grounds for the denial. Former Fox counsel and FCC officials supported it.
The response to these efforts from previous FCC Chairs was markedly different from Carr’s, however. Obama’s (retired) FCC Chair Tom Wheeler said of the broader scrutiny surrounding Fox, “Unfortunately, the FCC does not have jurisdiction over cable networks. In fact, it doesn’t even have jurisdiction over networks like CBS and NBC who use the airwaves.”
In January, outgoing Biden-appointed FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel rejected MAD’s petition, noting in a statement they sought to “weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.” She also rejected three other complaints: against NBC, ABC, and of course the infamous complaint against CBS and 60 Minutes.
Selling out the First Amendment is a debt that always comes due.
Upon assuming the chairmanship in January, however, Carr reopened all three complaints with identical orders, citing an “insufficient investigatory record.” While these orders did not provide specific justifications for the reopenings, in interviews Carr has pointed to enforcing the public interest standard and combating ideological bias in news. In practice, this has played out as combatting disfavorable coverage of Trump — as evidenced by Carr’s curiously leaving the previous petition targeting FOX 29 Philadelphia in the grave.
The three complaints capitalized on the mostly dormant FCC content rules left over from the spectrum scarcity era — including the news distortion rule, which prohibits networks from engaging in deliberate falsification of the news; and the equal opportunities rule, which requires networks to provide the roughly same amount of airtime to competing candidates in federal elections.
However, in both cases the claims fall short of their respective standards. The equal opportunities proceeding against NBC for example — centering around the brief appearance of Harris on NBC’s Saturday Night Live (SNL) — fundamentally misunderstands how the rule works.
As the FCC’s letter dismissing the original complaint points out, Trump came to an agreement with NBC after the SNL airing to give him coveted ad time during a Sunday evening NASCAR race, roughly equivalent in length to that of Harris’s appearance on SNL. The complaint says this is “too little, too late” — ignoring, as the FCC pointed out, “[a]n agreement reached after the use of broadcast facilities is a standard way for broadcasters to adhere to the equal opportunities rule.” FCCs records demonstrate that Carr himself knew that NBC complied with the rule, though that didn’t stop him from claiming otherwise.
This brings us to the news distortion rule, which has historically been understood as having a very high bar, requiring documented evidence that broadcast leadership directed reporters to deliberately mislead the public in order to actually threaten a broadcaster’s license. In fact, there has been only one finding of news distortion since 1982 — involving NBC staging a car explosion in a 1993 Dateline report warning about unsafe gas tanks. Even there, no adverse action was taken against the network beyond a frankly worded letter.
With this in mind, it should follow that the complaint against CBS and 60 Minutes would allege extensive evidence of an elaborate plot to rig then-candidate Kamala Harris’s responses, with orders coming from the very top. But as FIRE’s filing in the FCC’s docket on the matter points out, it did not do that.
The role of the Center for American Rights
Who filed the CBS complaint?
The same organization that filed the complaints against NBC and ABC: the Center for American Rights (CAR). It’s worth parking our car here for a second to get a sense for how rickety and rusty some of the foundation for the extortion-industrial complex is.
The paper-thin CBS complaint leans on speculation from conservative commentators as evidence, appoints CAR as a spokesman for the general public, and fails to actually allege an instance of news distortion, the purported violation CBS is guilty of. Other complaints aren’t much better, from citing Brendan Carr tweets as if they were case law to equating news coverage that mentioned the presence of an autistic child in the back of deported Salvadoran immigrant Abrego Garcia’s car when he was arrested with “villainiz[ing] the police.”
The role of CAR emphasizes how the public input can be abused by a commission with malign intentions. CAR gives the FCC specific public cover to engage in shakedowns of media entities. The chairman gets the benefit of the appearance that he is just looking into the duly filed legal grievances of the faithful public, even if he is granted some agency by the likes of CAR as to when and where those grievances appear.
Take one example from last April: Carr took issue with MSNBC and other outlets’ coverage of Abrego Garcia’s detention and deportation, and went as far as to post allegations of news distortion on the part of Comcast (again, the FCC has zero authority over cable news channels). Within a week of Carr’s social media posts, CAR filed a complaint alleging news distortion on the part of NBC, CBS, and ABC owned properties, citing coverage on their websites in addition to their broadcast channels. It’s like a dog responding to a whistle.
CAR has benefitted from its newfound role in the extortion-industrial complex, as Trump is reportedly considering CAR’s president Daniel Suhr for an appointment on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
The extortion-industrial complex threatens our First Amendment rights, but we can (and should) fight back
The combined effect of these components — the lawsuits, the complaints, and the FCC’s broader content-based regulatory regime — is to strangle America’s broadcast industry with a series of looming threats. That’s the extortion-industrial complex at its heart, and how they harmonize together is simple. Let’s review.
First, there is often a merger, acquisition, or some other needed regulatory approval coming down the pipeline that introduces a point of leverage for the government. The Skydance-Paramount merger is the second time an entity owning CBS News has been involved in a merger under Trump’s presidency, and the lead-up to a merger like that actually taking place can take years.
That’s ample opportunity for the government to make demands.
And if there isn’t a merger or acquisition coming to provide the government with the opportunity to extort? Then CAR or some other political front group can draft a complaint to the FCC and create one. If an FCC probe isn’t threatening enough, Trump’s legal team will bolster it with a lawsuit. And as we saw with Paramount, when the government’s desires are big enough, they’ll combine all three.
Provided Trump sues, the settlement agreement then acts as the depository for the targeted company’s tributes — whether money, policy concessions, or both. Job done.
The uncertainty with which all this places the companies operating under this protection racket’s thumb is what makes the extortion-industrial complex such an effective force. That uncertainty means less commercial investment, both into the company and out of it.
So, taking advantage of the natural corporate aversion to uncertainty, Trump and his extortion apparatus offer an off-ramp: don’t do anything we don’t like, and your business’s future looks a little more predictable and profitable.
That’s an incredible source of soft power.
This is why Skydance’s agreement to bring on an ombudsman to monitor bias in CBS’s news programming paints a worrying picture. It signals what Trump and Carr’s efforts could be building towards: a future where their interventions are no longer required because soft power does all the work.
That’s a five-alarm fire for free speech, and neither Carr nor the Trump administration show any sign of stopping. As Carr sees it, “the media industry across this country needs a course correction.”
We’ve seen Trump use similar extortionary tactics in other contexts — including with universities and law firms — and unfortunately, many of his targets have capitulated. This includes Columbia University, who acceded to a list of demands provided by the Trump administration and was later forced to pay $200 million dollars. It also includes law firms like Paul Weiss and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — targeted for the crime of employing Trump enemies — who settled under the expectation they would be doing pro bono work on behalf of causes like helping veterans, only to see Trump later suggest they’d be negotiating his trade deals.
All of this has provided us with a chilling reminder: extortion is seldom a one-time deal. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated, and too many have caved to the pressure at the expense of free speech in our country’s most important institutions. They’ll discover for themselves that selling out the First Amendment is a debt that always comes due.
Those capitulations are all the more frustrating because we have seen that fighting back can pay off. For example, the law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey all fought Trump’s executive orders — and they won. Enforcement of the orders have been blocked on First Amendment grounds for all four of them.
America’s media conglomerates would be wise to take their example. Also, fighting back isn’t limited to their leadership. The creators of South Park saw Paramount announce a $1.5 billion deal with them to create new episodes for their streaming service, and 10 hours later, they aired an episode featuring a scathing criticism of both Trump’s extortion and Paramount’s appeasement. While resistance will help fend off the immediate crisis, the root of the problem remains with the core machinery of the extortion-industrial complex itself. Thankfully, dismantling that wouldn’t be too tall an order.
For example, the next FCC chair can simply get rid of the news distortion rule, which serves little utility other than misuse. Similarly, the FCC could halt unnecessary investigations, both formal and informal, into the content decisions of those under its regulatory purview. FIRE has detailed both of these recommendations in previous filings to the FCC.
Finally, the FCC can use their discretion over the merger process to eliminate content-related considerations. These moves would align the commission with court and congressional guidance, and also close the government’s pivotal extortionary pressure points. Importantly, destroying these levers wouldn’t weaken legitimate oversight. Rather, it would restore the FCC to its core technical mission and insulate speech from bureaucratic ransom.
It’s a necessity that transcends partisan lines. One could very much imagine a future Democratic chairman taking Carr’s playbook, reviving the petition against FOX 29 Philadelphia, and reorienting the extortion-industrial complex’s machinery towards the conservative media ecosystem. If and when that happens, proponents of Carr’s current behavior may change their tune about how permissible and necessary these crackdowns are. And that will only make it more obvious that this usage of government power is not compatible with an open democratic society.
To preserve free expression and our First Amendment rights, the extortion-industrial complex must be dismantled.
A new report from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) office outlines the far-reaching consequences of the Trump administration’s efforts to defund and dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
Education at Risk: Frontline Impacts of Trump’s War on Students draws on responses from 12 national education organizations—including the American Council on Education—to paint an unsettling picture of disrupted services, rising costs for students, and weakened civil rights enforcement.
Among the report’s key findings:
Federal student aid operations are faltering. Layoffs at the Education Department’s (ED) office of Federal Student Aid have caused website outages, delayed financial aid, and left thousands of borrower complaints unanswered. ACE warned that such disruptions can prevent students from enrolling or staying in college, increasing the likelihood they’ll take on more debt to finish their degrees.
Graduate and low-income students are being squeezed. The administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” eliminates Grad PLUS loans, caps borrowing for parents, and replaces income-driven repayment plans with costlier alternatives, which is expected to reduce access and increase hardship for first-generation and financially vulnerable students.
Civil rights enforcement is eroding. ED’s Office for Civil Rights has lost nearly half its staff and closed seven regional offices. With over 22,000 complaints filed in 2024 alone, remaining staff are overwhelmed, and students facing discrimination are left without a path to resolution. ACE and others note the long-term danger of weakened oversight, especially for students with disabilities.
Essential education data are disappearing. The National Center for Education Statistics now has just three employees. Longstanding surveys like the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and College Scorecard are at risk, threatening everything from institutional benchmarking to accreditation.
Programs for students with disabilities are being dismantled. Key oversight and transition programs have been cut or reassigned to agencies like the departments of Health and Human Services and Labor, which lack educational expertise. Advocates warn this could roll back decades of progress toward inclusive education.
Education functions are being scattered across agencies. Proposals to move federal student loans to the Small Business Administration or Department of the Treasury and civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice raise serious concerns about cost, efficiency, and legal access. As ACE noted, scattering the department’s core responsibilities could reintroduce the very fragmentation ED was created to fix.
The report concludes that the cumulative effect of these actions threatens to leave millions of students without access to basic services, data, and legal protections at a time when they need them most.
What happened? On May 14, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo declaring that the Defense Department would move to cap reimbursement for indirect research costs to 15% for all new grants for colleges. Hegseth also ordered officials to renegotiate rates on existing awards. If colleges do not agree, DOD officials should terminate previously awarded grants and reissue them under the “revised terms,” he said.
Overall, Hegseth estimated the move would save the agency $900 million annually.
A group of higher education associations and research universities sued on June 16, arguing that the Defense Department overstepped its authority and noting that other courts had blocked the Trump administration’s caps at other agencies.
“As with those policies, if DOD’s policy is allowed to stand, it will stop critical research in its tracks, lead to layoffs and cutbacks at universities across the country, badly undermine scientific research at United States universities, and erode our nation’s enviable status as a global leader in scientific research and innovation,” they wrote in court documents.
The next day, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy granted a temporary restraining order blocking the Defense Department from implementing its policy until further ordered.
What’s next? Murphy has scheduled a July 2 hearing on the temporary restraining order.
