Over the course of just 13 weeks, President Donald Trump has made it clear that he’ll use billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, primarily for research, as a lever to force colleges and universities to bow to his agenda and increase the representation of conservative ideology on their campuses.
The cuts don’t follow any typical investigative process and sometimes lack clear explanations or legal justifications. And such an aggressive ad hoc strategy is one that that many higher education lawyers, policy analysts and administrators say could reshape postsecondary education for years to come.
“It’s certainly unprecedented and deeply disturbing,” said John King Jr., former secretary of education under President Obama and current chancellor of the State University of New York system. Trump’s actions “really threaten the long-standing partnership between the federal government and higher education in the pursuit of both innovation and economic mobility.”
Trump and his advisers have signaled their intent to crack down on “woke” higher education but haven’t said how they will do so. Instead, a cadre of conservative policy analysts plotted how to leverage other agencies and sources of funding, beyond access to the $130 billion distributed annually in federal student loans and Pell Grants.
“At the beginning it felt like I was the only one fighting,” Chris Rufo, an influential anti-DEI advocate and a member of the Board of Trustees at New College of Florida, said on The Daily, a New York Times podcast last week. “Now, fast-forward five years, [and] some of the ideas that I had cobbled together have suddenly become reality, they’ve become policy, they affect billions of dollars in the flow of funds.”
But efforts to send colleges and universities into “an existential terror,” as Rufo put it, have required the Trump administration to move at a dizzying pace and leverage multiple mechanisms that most higher education lawyers, policy analysts and officials say are incredibly novel.
To catch up, here are four things you should know about Trump’s funding threats to colleges and universities.
Broad Scope of Attack
A large part of what makes the Trump administration’s current push to crack down on colleges and align their actions with his agenda so unprecedented, experts say, is its sheer magnitude, from the amount of money at risk to the number of investigations involving various agencies.
The Education Department has historically taken the lead on holding colleges accountable, leveraging institutions’ eligibility for student aid programs to force compliance. But this time around, it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort with a magazine of federal programs used as ammunition.
At least four departments beyond Education—Justice, Defense, Energy and Health and Human Services—have also been involved, cutting off scientific research grants, which are typically considered immune from political attacks.
James Nussbaum, who leads the higher education practice at the Indiana law firm Church Church Hittle + Antrim, said that as Trump took office he often warned clients to be aware of any contracts they held with the Department of Education. But some of the cuts caught even him by surprise.
“People had their focus on one ball in the air and hadn’t seen that these others might be affected,” he said.
To review federal funding for colleges that it believes have violated students’ civil rights, the Trump administration launched a federal antisemitism task force that spanned several agencies and has led some of the most public actions against colleges so far.
The group launched reviews of Columbia and Harvard Universities, demanded sweeping changes and froze $400 million and $2.2 billion in grants and contracts, respectively. The funds at risk support a wide range of research at the universities, including on cancer, tuberculosis and the effects of environmental pollution on health. Faculty have warned of dire consequences if the freezes continue.
In addition to Columbia and Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell, Brown and Princeton Universities have had some of their federal funds frozen, though it’s not clear why or who made that decision and under what legal authority. (The Wall Street Journal reported that White House staff were behind the Cornell funding freeze.)
The Trump administration also froze $175 million at the University of Pennsylvania to penalize administrators for allowing a transgender athlete to swim on the women’s team three years ago.
What the Trump administration is doing enters a “whole new territory,” Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber said in a recent interview with The New York Times.
Starting with the freeze at Columbia, “the government was using its tremendous power over research dollars to try to control what a private university was doing in terms of matters that are generally considered part of academic freedom,” Eisgruber added. “There’s a very fundamental threat here right now … to America’s research universities that anybody who cares about the strength of this country, our economy, our prosperity, our security, our health should be worried about.”
Colleges also face other threats from the federal government. The Department of Education has launched or actively pursued at least 97 investigations concerning alleged antisemitism and DEI programs, which could imperil those institutions’ access to federal financial aid. And the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy moved to cap reimbursements for costs indirectly related to research, which, if enacted, could cost colleges billions.
Bypassing Standard Processes
Adding to the difficulty for colleges, the Trump administration is largely ignoring regulatory standards and procedures when it cuts funding.
For instance, cabinet members have broadly used the term “investigation” to describe the ways they are cracking down on colleges. But in most cases, the review process has lasted only a few days and resulted in little to no evidence of the alleged violation. Often, universities have been presented with a list of ultimatums or policy changes they must make in order to avoid a funding freeze or restore their funds.
The stop-work orders that have been issued so far have been “arbitrary” and “often unsupported,” said King of SUNY. If there is rationale, it often “seems disingenuous.”
And some universities have yet to receive a formal notification about a funding freeze. For example, Brown officials have not received any official word of a rumored $510 million cut.
“We have nothing to actually substantiate what’s being reported,” Brian Clark, Brown’s vice president for news, told Inside Higher Ed in an email.
For civil rights investigations, investigations typically begin when the Education Department notifies an institution of the allegations made in thorough detail, experts explained. Then, the Office for Civil Rights conducts an in-depth investigation that includes talking to students, faculty and staff and gathering documents or data regarding the allegations. That process allows colleges to voluntarily resolve the investigation and negotiate a settlement with the department. The resulting agreement usually outlines various changes that colleges must make to comply with federal law. Some conservative critics have said those settlements or resolution agreements were “toothless.”
If the parties cannot agree or a college refuses to comply with the federal law, the department could sue a college. But that’s rare, and the Education Department has never pulled a college’s federal funding over civil rights violations—a move that’s considered a nuclear option.
Brendan Cantwell, a higher education professor at Michigan State University, noted that despite the quick turnaround, the administration’s investigations do, at times, parallel the motivations of traditional reviews. But what makes this approach so unprecedented and unlawful, in his mind, Cantwell said, is its “unmeasured” and “blanketed” nature.
“So while there are precedents and similar examples in the past, beyond very superficial similarities, the similarities fall apart,” he said.
Breaking Contract Law
The means by which Trump is terminating grants and contracts is also novel, a lawyer who specializes in government contracts told Inside Higher Ed.
Generally, the only people who have authority to take contract-based actions on behalf of the United States are contracting officers or agreements officers, said Jayna Marie Rust, a partner at Thompson Coburn LLP. But under the Trump administration, it’s often unclear if this is the case, especially with the Department of Government Efficiency reviewing contracts and grants and touting decisions to cancel millions in agreements.
Rust said she has not seen any of the direct communications between government agencies and universities regarding contract/grant termination that are due to the identity of the institution and therefore can’t say if the notifications come from contracting or agreements officers. But notifications coming from others is something she has seen in other terminations that schools are receiving.
“But to the extent these communications are not coming from the agreements officers or contracting officers, that is unusual,” Rust said.
And much like the procedure for investigating and addressing policy violations, the government is supposed to ensure due process before excluding schools from receiving federal funds, which is effectively what the terminations have done. The Trump administration has seemingly bypassed those steps. (Several faculty groups and associations have sued to restore the canceled funding.)
Even when the administration has completed a process to determine whether an entity can be excluded from receiving federal funds, contracting and agreements officers also often conduct a risk analysis to see if the benefit of letting that entity complete a contract or grant outweighs the benefit of cutting ties (which could result in losing the benefit of work that’s already completed), Rust said. It appears that the Trump administration also hasn’t gone through that review.
More Than Money at Stake
As a result of the sweeping scope of Trump’s attacks and the lack of precedent, the risks for colleges and universities are more than financial, higher ed experts say.
Yes, losing billions of dollars in federal funding is a problem, and not one that elite institutions’ endowments can solve. But more than that, what’s at risk is the core mission and ethos of American higher education, King said.
“From the technology inside of your phone to the treatment you may receive at your doctor—all of that can be traced back to research conducted at America’s higher ed institutions. And it’s under threat,” he said.
And though the dollar amounts of funding pulled from smaller private liberal arts institutions and state universities may be “more modest,” they’re still significant, he added. “For those researchers, it’s heartbreaking, and it will ultimately harm economic development and national security.”
The full impact of these funding freezes is not yet clear. But until the courts weigh in, colleges are stuck between a rock and a hard place, said Nussbaum, of Church Church Hittle + Antrim.
“Schools are trying to make that decision of how can we make decisions consistent with our mission and values in a way that’s not going to get us called out?” Nussbaum said. “I think we’ll have a little bit more certainty on where the means and bounds of the discretion of the executive agency is in the funding. But I think in the meantime, a lot of schools are trying to wait out that clock.”
