On March 14, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit issued a decision allowing the Trump administration to enforce Executive Orders 14151 and 14173, both of which target “illegal … DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities” in the public and private sectors and in federal contracts. The 4th Circuit’s decision effectively overrules a February 21 preliminary injunction issued in a U.S. District Court in Maryland that had blocked the administration from enforcing some provisions in the orders.
As a reminder, orders 14151 and 14173 revoke prior executive orders, including Executive Order 11246, which required federal contractors to maintain affirmative action plans. Among other things, orders 14151 and 14173 also mandate that:
federal agencies include provisions in federal contracts requiring that contractors agree to comply with nondiscrimination laws and certify they do not operate any DEI programs that violate discrimination laws;
the Office of Management and Budget terminate all “‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ ‘equitable decision-making,’ ‘equitable deployment of financial and technical assistance,’ ‘advancing equity,’ and like mandates, requirements, programs, or activities, as appropriate;” and
each agency “identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, State and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.”
CUPA-HR will continue to share further developments regarding the lawsuits challenging orders 14151 and 14173.
Recent federal executive orders from President Donald Trump have put a halt to some university operations, including hiring and large swaths of academic research. The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, among others, have paused grant-review panels to comply with the orders and cut funding, leaving researchers in limbo.
Graduate students often receive educational stipends from federal agencies for their research, putting their work—and their own degree attainment—at risk.
To alleviate some hardships, the University of Hawaiʻi’s UH Foundation launched a Graduate Student Success Fund, which will provide direct relief for learners who have lost funding.
Fewer than a dozen graduate students in the system have been impacted to various degrees to date, but “like most institutions, the extent of the possible impact is unknown,” a UH spokesperson said.
On the ground: Michael Fernandez, a first-year UH Mānoa doctoral student in the botany program, is a participant in the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, which supports learners pursuing research-based master’s or doctoral degrees in STEM education fields. The five-year fellowship includes three years of financial aid for tuition and fees and an annual stipend.
“I and other fellows in the program feel uncertain about future funding from the fellowship,” Fernandez said in a press release. “This is especially concerning for me, as the NSF-GRFP is currently my primary and sole source of funding for my graduate studies.”
University of Hawaiʻi president Wendy Hensel spurred the creation of the Graduate Student Success Fund for grad students at UH Mānoa and UH Hilo. The fund, supported by private donations, mirrors an undergraduate student success fund available to bachelor’s degree seekers who need help paying for tuition, books and fees.
The UH Foundation will also support undergraduate researchers who may have had their work interrupted due to federal freezes.
The Graduate Student Success Fund is designed to aid student retention and financial wellness and also support career development and future talent in Hawaiʻi.
“It is critical that we do all we can to ensure that our university graduates, the next generation of talent, desperately needed for Hawaiʻi’s workforce,” Hensel said. “These graduate students are our scientists, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, engineers, educators and leaders of tomorrow.”
Details as to how funds will be distributed, including amounts and number of recipients, are still being determined, the spokesperson said.
The bigger picture: Federally funded research projects that address diversity, equity, inclusion, gender, green energy or other alleged “far-left ideologies” have come under fire in recent weeks.
Trump Administration Weaponizes Funding Against Institutions
On March 7, the Trump administration announced it had canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University for “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The federal government has also threatened to pull funding from any educational institution that invests in diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In February, the National Institutes of Health announced it would cut funding for indirect costs of conducting medical research, including hazardous waste disposal, utilities and patient safety. In 2024, the agency sent around $26 billion to over 500 grant recipients connected to institutions.
“For UH, the impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” Hensel wrote. “The university is supported by 175 awards and subawards from the NIH with a current value of $211 million. NIH’s reduction of UH’s current negotiated [indirect compensation] rate of 56.5 percent at the JABSOM [UH Mānoa John A. Burns School of Medicine] and the [UH] Cancer Center alone will eliminate approximately $15 million in funding that UH uses to support its research programs, including ongoing clinical trials and debt service payments.”
How is your college or university supporting students affected by federal action? Tell us more.
The Tennessean reported last week that the chronically underfunded historically Black university in Nashville is preparing to lose $14.4 million, the remainder of an $18 million grant it received from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. It’s one of hundreds of colleges and universities across the country facing financial uncertainty as the Trump administration moves to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget.
“This is going to impact our people,” Jim Grady, TSU’s chief financial officer, said at a finance committee meeting Wednesday evening. “We’ll continue to evaluate the volatility … and the potential impact to employees, students and university operations.”
Grady said nothing would change for at least 90 days after receiving notice of the grant cancellation, and it’s not yet clear how many jobs will be eliminated as a result. And that’s not the only federal grant in question, according to The Tennessean.
In February, the U.S. Department of Agriculture—which includes the National Institute of Food and Agriculture—canceled $45 million in federal grants to the cash-strapped university, which eliminated 114 positions last fall amid a looming budget shortfall.
Earlier this month, the USDA restored about $23 million of those grants, though another $115 million could be suspended or frozen. TSU’s federal grants fully fund 62 employees and partially fund another 112.
In the midst of the financial uncertainty, TSU has suspended its search for a permanent president, WKRN reported.
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Columbia University received a daunting laundry list of tasks Thursday from the Trump administration: Suspend or expel protesters. Enact a mask ban. Give university security “full law enforcement authority.”
The Ivy League institutionmust comply with these and other demands by March 20 or further endanger its “continued financial relationship with the United States government,”according to a copy of the letter obtained by multiple news sources.
Last week, the Trump administration’s newly created Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism canceled $400 million of Columbia’s federal grants and contracts,alleging the university had failed to take action “in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” It also noted that Columbia has $5 billion in federal grant commitments at stake.
The stunning move came only four days after the task force opened an antisemitism investigation into the university.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education also sent warnings to 60 colleges — including Columbia — that it could take punitive action if it determines they aren’t sufficiently protecting Jewish students from discrimination or harassment.
In Thursday’s letter, Trump administration officials said they expected Columbia’s “immediate compliance” after which they hope to “open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms that will return Columbia to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence.”
The letter’s edicts are just the latest in a series of decisions made by the Trump administration and Columbia officials that have put the well-known New York institution into a tailspin.
Strong language, few details
Officials at the Education Department, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and U.S. General Services Administrationsent Columbia Interim President Dr. Katrina Armstrongnine policy changes the Trump administration expects the university to make to retain federal funding.
The agencies — all of which are part of the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force — accused Columbia of failing “to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” along with other alleged violations of civil rights laws.
But despite the high stakes, the task force’s demands are ambiguous.
For example, its letter orders the university to deliver a plan on “comprehensive admissions reform.”
“The plan must include a strategy to reform undergraduate admissions, international recruiting, and graduate admissions practices to conform with federal law and policy,” it said.
The task force’s letter offers no further insight into what it expects Columbia to change or how it believes the university is out of line with federal standards.
The letter goes far beyond what is appropriate for the government to mandate and will chill campus discourse.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
The GSA directed an emailed request for comment to the Education Department. Neither the Education Department nor HHS responded to inquiries Friday.
The task force also ordered the university to ban masks that “are intended to conceal identity or intimidate others,” while offering exceptions for religious and health reasons.But it did not give criteria to determine why someone is wearing a mask.
“We are reviewing the letter from the Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, and General Services Administration,” a spokesperson for Columbia said Friday. “We are committed at all times to advancing our mission, supporting our students, and addressing all forms of discrimination and hatred on our campus.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil rights watchdog, criticized the federal officials’ demands Friday.
While the group has been critical of Columbia’s handling of student protesters, it said the letter does not follow “the normal procedure for revocation of federal financial assistance for violations of Title VI.” Title VI refers to the law barring discrimination on race, color and national origin at federally funded educational institutions.
“While these include some policy steps that Columbia should already have taken, the letter goes far beyond what is appropriate for the government to mandate and will chill campus discourse,” FIRE said in a statement.
A change in due process
The Trump administration’s task force is demanding Columbia completeongoing disciplinary proceedings against pro-Palestinian protesters who occupied campus buildings and organized encampments last year. The university must dole out meaningful discipline — meaning expulsions or multi-year suspensions — the letter said.
The same day the task force’s letter is dated, Columbiaannounced it had issued “multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions” related to the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
In April 2024,pro-Palestinian protesters occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall after then-President Minouche Shafik announced Columbia would not divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Columbia brought New York City Police onto its private campus for the second time that month — and only the second time since 1968— against the authority of the University Senate. Officers arrested more than 100 people.
The disciplinary rulings from Columbia’s University Judicial Board, the panel that reviews misconduct cases and issues sanctions, came 11 months later.
It is unclear if the UJB issued its rulings before or after Columbia received the task force’s letter. And a university spokesperson said in an email Friday that Columbia could not confirm who or how many protesters had been sanctioned due to student privacy laws.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student organizations that helped organize the protests, said on social media Thursday that 22 students had been disciplined.
Columbia University’s immediate submission and betrayal of the core mission of higher education reflects cowardice and capitulation to a government that seems intent on destroying US higher education.
Todd Wolfson
President of the American Association of University Professors
And the United Auto Workers union announced that the university had expelledGrant Miner, president of UAW Local 2710, which represents student workers at Columbia.
The move, effectively firing Miner, came “one day before contract negotiations were set to open with the University,” the union said in a statement.
“It is no accident that this comes days after the federal government froze Columbia’s funding, and threatened to pull funding from 60 other universities across the country,” it said. “It is no accident that the University is targeting a union leader whose local went on strike in the last round of bargaining.”
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, condemned Columbia’s decision against Miner as “a severe violation of student and worker rights aimed at silencing all voices of dissent who have spoken out for peace and against the war in Gaza.”
He also accused the university of being willing to “sacrifice its own students to the demands of an authoritarian government.”
“Columbia University’s immediate submission and betrayal of the core mission of higher education reflects cowardice and capitulation to a government that seems intent on destroying US higher education,” he said in a Friday statement.
The task force also told Columbia to dissolve UJB.The five-member board includes representatives from the faculty, student body and the university’s noninstructional employees such as librarians and administrative staff.
In lieu of this due process system, the letter instructed the institution to shift its disciplinary proceedings entirely under Armstong’s office.
Columbia must enact “primacy of the president in disciplinary matters,” giving the president’s office unilateral power to suspend and expel students and oversee the appeals process, the letter said.
Law enforcement on campus
The Trump administration also demanded that Columbia give its security force the power to arrest and remove “agitators who foster an unsafe or hostile work or study environment” or interfere with classroom instruction.
President Donald Trump has sought to crack down on campus demonstrations, threatening to pull federal funding from colleges that allow “illegal protests” and to arrest, deport and expel student demonstrators.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the first step toward fulfilling that promise last week, again putting Columbia at the center of a firestorm.
On Saturday, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student who completed his graduate studies in December, in his university housing.
Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident who holds a green card, served as a driving force behind the pro-Palestinian protests onColumbia’s campus and represented student activists in negotiations with the university’s administration.
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson alleged that he “led activities aligned to Hamas,” according to The Associated Press.
Khalil’s arrest and continued detention by ICE immediately drew condemnation from free speech and civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which joined his legal team this week.
His detainment, which is shaping up to be a landmark civil rights case, has not deterred the Trump administration.
An official at the U.S. Department of Justice, which is also on the antisemitism task force, said Friday that the agency is investigating if campus protesters broke federal anti-terrorism laws and whether Columbia’s handling of earlier incidents violated civil rights laws.
“This is long overdue,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press conference.
And on Thursday, agents from Homeland Security searched two on-campus residences at Columbia, according to Armstrong.
“The University requires that law enforcement have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including residential University buildings,” she said in a statement. “Tonight, that threshold was met, and the University is obligated to comply with the law.”
No one was arrested or detained, and nothing was taken from the residents, Armstrong said.
“I understand the immense stress our community is under,” Armstrong said. She closed the letter with counseling and well-being resources for students and, in a separate statement that day, reiterated Columbia’s commitment to its international community.
On Friday, over 100 demonstrators gathered outside of the campus’ gates to protest the sanctions against the Hamilton Hall occupiers and the university’s response to Khalil’s detainment, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit just sided with free speech, joining five of its sister circuits in holding the First Amendment protects academic research, writing, and teaching at public colleges and universities. This carves out an important exception to the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos holding that public employees’ speech pursuant to their official duties is not protected.
This is a big deal. Just ask Jason Kilborn, a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago suspended in late 2021 for using a redacted racial slur “n___” on a final exam question about employment discrimination. He also used the redacted term “b___” in the same question.
UIC suspended Kilborn and launched an investigation into his (non-)use of the terms. That’s when FIRE stepped in — defending Kilborn, writing to UIC administrators, and securing him a lawyer through our Faculty Legal Defense Fund. With help from that lawyer, UIC briefly reached a resolution with Kilborn but it later reneged on that agreement and forced him to write reflection papers and participate in months-long training sessions before he could return to teaching.
Kilborn sued, alleging administrators violated his constitutional right to academic freedom — and while the district court had dismissed the case, on Wednesday, the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit agreed the First Amendment protected Kilborn’s speech. That court rejected UIC’s “invitation to extend Garcetti to speech involving university teaching and scholarship when the Supreme Court was unwilling to do so,” and sent the case back to the district court.
With the rejection of that application of Garcetti, the district court will analyze this case using the balancing test from Pickering v. Board of Education, which directs courts to weigh “the interests of the [employee] in commenting upon matters of public concern” against “the interest of the state, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.”
This is now the sixth federal appeals court to establish this exception to Garcetti, extending academic freedom protections to public university faculty throughout Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. FIRE is currently awaiting a decision from the Atlanta-based Eleventh Circuit, where we’ve asked that court to do the same with respect to the Garcetti exception. Stay tuned for more as we continue to press and follow this issue closely.
As the higher education sector grapples with federal funding cuts and other disruptions, a growing number of colleges across the country—from public flagships to Ivy League institutions—are freezing hiring and spending and pausing graduate student admissions.
This week, Brown University, Duke University, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington and others joined the list of more than a dozen colleges that have temporarily paused hiring and vowed to hold off on some discretionary spending.
“It is meant to preserve our financial flexibility until we better understand how changes in federal policy will take shape and can assess the scale of their impact,” Harvard president Alan Garber wrote this week in a message to the campus community. “We plan to leave the pause in effect for the current semester but will revisit that decision as circumstances warrant.”
Garber added that Harvard will continue to advocate for higher education in Washington, D.C.
“Expanding access to higher education for all, preserving academic freedom, and supporting our community’s research, teaching, and learning will always be our highest priorities,” he wrote.
Colleges and universities started to curb costs last month after the National Institutes of Health said it plans to cap reimbursements for costs indirectly related to research—a move expected to cost colleges at least $4 billion. A federal judge has since blocked that proposal from moving forward, but the Trump administration has essentially stopped awarding new NIH grants, creating financial uncertainty for many colleges.
The latest wave of freezes comes after the Trump administration announced it was pulling $400 million in federal grants and contracts from Columbia University, warning that other universities could see a similar penalty as part of the government’s crackdown on alleged campus antisemitism. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was essentially shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has provided billions to colleges over the years. And the Education Department laid off nearly half its staff, which could cause disruptions for colleges, though the financial impact is not clear.
Congress is also considering proposals to put some colleges on the hook for unpaid student loans and to raise the endowment tax on wealthy institutions, among other ideas that could affect universities’ bottom lines.
Penn officials said this week that while the final impact of the federal changes and cuts isn’t yet clear, the university is already “experiencing reduced funding.” In addition to a hiring freeze, Penn is reducing noncompensation expenses by 5 percent and reviewing all spending on capital projects.
“The scope and pace of the possible disruptions we face may make them more severe than those of previous challenges, such as the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID pandemic,” Penn officials wrote in a letter. “With careful financial management, however, Penn is well-positioned to navigate them.”
At the University of Washington, officials are facing not only the federal policy changes but also potential state funding cuts. Officials have noted that the university is in a good financial position over all but said they need to take proactive measures—such as stopping all nonessential hiring, travel and training—to prepare for any losses.
“These risks together have the potential to jeopardize the full scope of our work, including existing and new research projects, patient care, instruction and basic operations,” university provost Tricia Serio wrote in a blog post.
Beyond hiring freezes, some colleges continue to re-evaluate graduate student admissions, particularly for Ph.D. students who are typically supported by federal grants.
On Wednesday, the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester rescinded provisional offers of acceptance to students who planned to pursue a doctorate, a spokesperson confirmed to Inside Higher Ed.
“With uncertainties related to the funding of biomedical research in this country, this difficult decision was made to ensure that our current students’ progress is not disrupted by the funding cuts and that we avoid matriculating students who may not have robust opportunities for dissertation research,” the spokesperson said. “All impacted applicants are being offered the opportunity to receive priority consideration without the requirement to reapply, should they wish to join our Ph.D. program in a future admissions cycle.”
Neither current students nor those at the medical school’s other graduate schools are affected.
Iowa State University also rescinded some acceptance offers, The Iowa Capital Dispatchreported, joining other colleges that made similar decisions in the last month.
As the list grows, academics worry about the long-term consequences of the cost-cutting measures. The hiring freezes and disruptions to graduate student admissions have thrown a wrench into the plans of early-career researchers, who are now looking to Europe and the private sector for job opportunities.
Puskar Mondal, a lecturer on math at Harvard and a research fellow, wrote in an opinion piece for The Harvard Crimson that the hiring freeze is “troubling.”
“The hiring freeze isn’t just a financial or administrative issue—it’s something that could have a ripple effect across all disciplines at Harvard,” Mondal wrote. “It could lead to fewer opportunities for students, more pressure on faculty, and a slowdown in research that could take years to recover from. And that’s not just bad for Harvard—it’s bad for all of us.”
Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic first forced schools and colleges into remote learning, researchers, policymakers and higher education leaders may no longer have access to the federal data they need to gather a complete picture of how those disruptions have affected a generation of students long term—or hold states and colleges accountable for the interventions they deployed to address the fallout.
That’s because the National Center for Education Statistics, the Education Department’s data-collection arm that’s administered surveys and studies about the state of K-12, higher education and the workforce since 1867, is suddenly a shell of itself.
As of this week, the NCES is down to five employees after the department fired nearly half its staff earlier this week. The broader Institute of Education Sciences, which houses NCES, also lost more than 100 employees as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to eliminate alleged “waste, fraud and abuse” in federal funding.
The mass firings come about a month after federal education data collection data took another big blow: In February, the department cut nearly $900 million in contracts at IES, which ended what some experts say was critical research into schools and fueled layoffs at some of the research firms that held those contracts, including MDRC, Mathematica, NORC and Westat.
“The backbone of accountability for our school systems begins with simply collecting data on how well they’re doing. The fact that our capacity to do that is being undermined is really indefensible,” said Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “One could conceive this as part of an agenda to undermine the very idea of truth and evidence in public education.”
But the Education Department says its decision to nearly eliminate the NCES and so many IES contracts is rooted in what it claims are the agency’s own failures.
“Despite spending hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds annually, IES has failed to effectively fulfill its mandate to identify best practices and new approaches that improve educational outcomes and close achievement gaps for students,” Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the department, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed Thursday.
Biedermann said the department plans to restructure IES in the coming months in order to provide “states with more useful data to improve student outcomes while maintaining rigorous scientific integrity and cost effectiveness.”
But many education researchers disagree with that characterization of IES and instead view it as an unmatched resource for informing higher education policy decisions.
“Some of these surveys allow us to know if people are being successful in college. It tells us where those students are enrolled in college and where they came from. For example, COVID impacted everyone, but it had a disproportionate impact on specific regions in the U.S. and specific social and socioeconomic groups in the U.S.,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“Post-COVID, states and regions have implemented a lot of interventions to help mitigate learning loss and accelerate learning for specific individuals. We’ll be able to know by comparing region to region or school to school whether or not those gaps increased or reduced in certain areas.”
Without uniform federal data to ground comparisons of pandemic-related and other student success interventions, it will be harder to hold education policymakers accountable, Odle and others told Inside Higher Ed this week. However, Odle believes that may be the point of the Trump administration’s assault on the Education Department’s research arm.
“It’s in essence a tacit statement that what they are doing may potentially be harmful to students and schools, and they don’t want the American public or researchers to be able to clearly show that,” he said. “By eliminating these surveys and data collection, and reducing staff at the Department of Education who collect, synthesize and report the data, every decision-maker—regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum—is going to be limited in the data and information they have access to.”
A now-fired longtime NCES employee who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation said they and others who worked on those data-collection programs for years are still in the dark on the future of many of the other studies IES administers.
“We’ve been out of the loop on all these conversations about the state of these studies. That’s been taking place at a higher level—or outside of NCES entirely,” said the terminated employee. “What these federal sources do is synthesize all the different other data sources that already exist to provide a more comprehensive national picture in a way that saves researchers a lot of the trouble of having to combine these different sources themselves and match them up. It provides consistent methodologies.”
Even if some of the data-collection programs continue, there will be hardly any NCES staff to help researchers and policymakers accurately navigate new or existing data, which was the primary function of most workers there.
“We are a nonpartisan agency, so we’ve always shied away from interpreting or making value judgments about what the data say,” the fired NCES worker said. “We are basically a help desk and support resource for people who are trying to use this data in their own studies and their own projects.”
‘Jeopardizing’ Strong Workforce
One widely used data set with an uncertain future is the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study—a detailed survey that has followed cohorts of first-time college students over a period of six to eight years since 1989. The latest iteration of the BPS survey has been underway since 2019, and it included questions meant to illuminate the long-term effects of pandemic-related learning loss. But like many other NCES studies, data collection for BPS has been on pause since last month, when the department pulled the survey’s contract with the Research Triangle Institute.
In a blog post the Institute for Higher Education Policy published Wednesday, the organization noted that BPS is intertwined with the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, which is a comprehensive nationwide study designed to determine how students and their families pay for college and demographic characteristics of those enrolled.
The two studies “are the only federal data sources that provide comprehensive insights into how students manage college affordability, stay enrolled and engaged with campus resources, persist to completion, and transition to the workforce,” Taylor Myers, assistant director of research and policy, wrote. “Losing these critical data hinders policy improvements and limits our understanding of the realities students face.”
That post came one day after IHEP sent members of Congress a letter signed by a coalition of 87 higher education organizations and individual researchers urging lawmakers to demand transparency about why the department slashed funding for postsecondary data collection.
“These actions weaken our capacity to assess and improve educational and economic outcomes for students—directly jeopardizing our ability to build a globally competitive workforce,” the letter said. “Without these insights, policymakers will soon be forced to make decisions in the dark, unable to steward taxpayer dollars efficiently.”
Picking Up the Slack
But not every education researcher believes federal data is as vital to shaping education policy and evaluating interventions as IHEP’s letter claims.
“It’s unclear that researchers analyzing those data have done anything to alter outcomes for students,” said Jay Greene, a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the right-wing Heritage Foundation. “Me being able to publish articles is not the same thing as students benefiting. We have this assumption that research should prove things, but in the world of education, we have very little evidence of that.”
Greene, who previously worked as a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas, said he never used federal data in his assessments of educational interventions and instead used state-level data or collected his own. “Because states and localities actually run schools, they’re in a position to do things that might make it better or worse,” he said. “Federal data is just sampling … It’s not particularly useful for causal research designs to develop practices and interventions that improve education outcomes.”
Other researchers have a more measured view of what needs to change in federal education data collection.
Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, has previously called for reforms at IES, arguing that some of the studies are too expensive without enough focus on educators’ evolving priorities, which as of late include literacy, mathematics and how to handle the rise of artificial intelligence.
But taking a sledgehammer to NCES isn’t the reform she had in mind. Moreover, she said blaming federal education data collections and researchers for poor education outcomes is “completely ridiculous.”
“There’s a breakdown between knowledge and practice in the education world,” Lake said. “We don’t adopt things that work at the scale we need to, but that’s not on researchers or the quality of research that’s being produced.”
But just because federal education data collection may not focus on specific interventions, “that doesn’t mean those data sets aren’t useful,” said Christina Whitfield, senior vice president and chief of staff for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
“A lot of states have really robust data systems, and in a lot of cases they provide more detail than the federal data systems do,” she said. “However, one of the things the federal data provides is a shared language and common set of definitions … If we move toward every state defining these key elements individually or separately, we lose a lot of comparability.”
If many of the federal data collection projects aren’t revived, Whitfield said other entities, including nonprofits and corporations, will likely step in to fill the void. But that likely won’t be a seamless transition without consequence.
“At least in the short term, there’s going to be a real issue of how to vet those different solutions and determine which is the highest-quality, efficient and most useful response to the information vacuum we’re going to experience,” Whitfield said. And even if there’s just a pause on some of the data collections and federal contracts are able to resume eventually, “there’s going to be a gap and a real loss in the continuity of that data and how well you can look back longitudinally.”
Johns Hopkins University is planning for staff layoffs after the Trump administration canceled $800 million in U.S. Agency for International Development grants for the Baltimore-based institution, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The grants supported a variety of health-related initiatives overseen by Johns Hopkins, including a breastfeeding support project in Baltimore and mosquito-net programs in Mozambique.
The foreign aid agency was one of the first targets of the Trump administration’s crusade against alleged widespread “waste, fraud and abuse” of federal funding. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this week that he’s purged 83 percent of USAID’s programs and the remaining contracts will be administered by the U.S. Department of State.
The $800 million in cuts comes on top of another $200 million Johns Hopkins stands to lose if the National Institutes of Health succeeds in capping indirect research costs at 15 percent. Johns Hopkins is among numerous universities, states and other organizations that have sued the National Institutes of Health over the plan to limit research funding, which a federal judge has temporarily blocked.
“At this time, we have little choice but to reduce some of our work in response to the slowing and stopping of grants and to adjust to an evolving legal landscape,” JHU president Ronald Daniels wrote in a letter to campus, according to The Baltimore Banner. “There are difficult moments before us, with impacts to budgets, personnel, and programs. Some will take time to fully understand and address; others will happen more quickly.”
Such drastic cuts to Johns Hopkins—the nation’s largest spender on research and development and the biggest private employer in Baltimore—will reverberate far beyond the campus itself.
“Johns Hopkins has bet very heavily on a century and a quarter of partnership with the federal government,” Theodore Iwashyna, a JHU critical care physician who is currently overseeing an NIH grant studying at-home care for pneumonia patients, told the Journal. “If the federal government decides it doesn’t want to know things anymore, that would be bad for Johns Hopkins and devastating for Maryland.”
Protesting in public parks is as American as apple pie. It’s at the heart of our First Amendment — and one of our nation’s most time-honored principles. That right does not disappear merely because a private entity operates the public park on the government’s behalf.
That’s why FIRE and the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law are appealing a district court ruling that weakens this First Amendment right. And we are proud to be backed by a broad coalition of prominent organizations as “friends of the court.”
Here’s what happened. Several years ago, animal welfare advocates Daraius Dubash and Dr. Faraz Harsini took to Houston’s largest public park to raise awareness about the harms of industrialized farming. For Dubash, this activism is rooted in his Vedantic Hindu faith, which compels him to promote the teaching of ahimsa, or nonviolence. To communicate their message, Dubash and Harsini serve as co-organizers for an international nonprofit animal-rights group. Their signature event involves volunteers showing muted documentary footage of farming practices to passersby, while others remain available to answer questions.
Dubash and Harsini’s right to peacefully advocate on this issue in a public park is beyond dispute. But on three separate occasions, the public park’s private management ordered them to leave. The fourth time, park management had Houston police arrest Dubash for criminal trespass and banned them both from showing their video footage in the park in the future. Why? Because the park’s private managers and city police deemed their message “offensive.”
With the help of FIRE and the Law and Religion Clinic, Dubash and Harsini filed suit in 2023 against the City of Houston, the park management corporation, its then-president, and the arresting officers. But in September, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas dismissed their claims, ruling that none of the defendants were responsible for violating Dubash and Harsini’s constitutional rights in a public park.
We disagree.
FIRE and the Clinic appealed to the Fifth Circuit, arguing that the ruling effectively lets the government bypass the First Amendment by delegating the management of public spaces to private organizations. And the court’s limited interpretation of governmental liability would make it nearly impossible for anyone to challenge violation of their constitutional rights by municipalities or law enforcement.
Last week, 12 prominent organizations from across the ideological spectrum filed nine amicus curiae briefs in support of Dubash and Harsini:
The ACLU of Texas argues the park management company was acting as a state actor and public-private partnerships “cannot serve as an end run around the First Amendment.” The brief also argues the district court erred by failing to hold the arresting officers accountable based on their “mistaken belief” that the park was private. As the brief explains, probable-cause findings must be based on “objective facts and circumstances rather than subjective beliefs.”
Young America’s Foundation, Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, and Advancing American Freedomexplain that Houston cannot bypass its duty to protect free speech in its public spaces by granting oversight authority to a private third party. The brief also emphasizes the sweeping implications of the district court’s decision, including in the academic context where state universities are increasingly attempting to evade First Amendment protections by outsourcing park management to nominally private entities like student governments.
Liberty Justice Center argues the district court’s decision “blurs the line between state and private actors,” allowing Houston to “contract out of its constitutional obligations.” We could not agree more.
The Center for American Liberty, in a brief submitted through Reeves Law LLC, argues that maintaining a public park is a traditional and exclusive government function, with public parks serving “as public forums for the expression of speech,” whether or not they are managed by a private entity.
The National Press Photographers Association, in abrief submitted through the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, explains how the district court’s ruling “threatens the sanctity of the spaces where speech is deserving of the highest protection.”
Law Enforcement Action Partnership and the National Police Accountability Projectexplain that accountability for law enforcement officers and municipalities is crucial to preserving public confidence in the police and the government, and that failing to hold police officers accountable “undermines public trust in law enforcement.” The brief also argues that municipalities should know their police officers “need training and guidance to appropriately respond” to peaceful expressive activity, and failing to provide that training is sufficient to establish municipal liability.
Protect the First Foundation, in a brief submitted through the Religious Freedom Clinic at Harvard Law School and Schaerr Jaffe LLP, highlights that Dubash was motivated to proselytize nonviolence by his deeply held religious beliefs, and describes the long history and tradition of public proselytization, from the persecution of religious minorities in the colonies through the legal protections established by First Amendment jurisprudence.
The Hindu American Foundation, in a brief submitted through Jackson Walker LLP, explains that Dubash’s religious motivation to advocate for nonviolence towards animals is consistent with Hindu teachings. The brief also argues that his “arrest, detention, and the ongoing prohibition on his method of proselytizing” do not pass constitutional muster.
The American Hindu Coalition, in a brief submitted through the Free Exercise Clinic at Yale Law School, emphasizes the history of public parks and streets as centers of religious activity, how marginalized faiths rely on these spaces to exercise their faith, and that Dubash’s activism is rooted in his religious beliefs.
Our clients and their counsel are grateful for the support of this impressive and diverse amicus coalition. This case will play a critical role in protecting the rights of other protesters and religious minorities to engage in protected expression as guaranteed under the First Amendment.
Dr. Katrina ArmstrongColumbia University is grappling with significant financial challenges after the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced $400 million in cuts to federal funding, a development that Interim University President Dr. Katrina Armstrong says will “touch nearly every corner of the University.”
The task force described the cuts as a consequence of Columbia’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students” and warned that this represents only the “first round of action,” with “additional cancellations” to follow.
This announcement comes just four days after the task force revealed it would consider stop work orders for $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia and the federal government and conduct a “comprehensive review” of more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments to the institution.
In her communication to the Columbia community, Armstrong acknowledged that the cuts would have an immediate impact on research and critical university functions, affecting “students, faculty, staff, research, and patient care.” Federal funding constituted approximately $1.3 billion of Columbia’s annual operating revenue in the 2024 fiscal year.
“There is no question that the cancellation of these funds will immediately impact research and other critical functions of the University,” Armstrong wrote in en email to the campus community, while emphasizing that Columbia’s mission as “a great research university does not waver.”
The situation at Columbia highlights the increasing tensions between academic institutions and the Trump administration, particularly regarding how universities respond to claims of antisemitism on campus. Since October 2023, Columbia has been at the center of pro-Palestinian student protests, drawing federal scrutiny, especially from the Trump administration.
President Trump recently stated on Truth Social that “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.”
Armstrong, who assumed her interim position following former University President Minouche Shafik’s resignation in August 2024, described Columbia as needing a “reset” from the “chaos of encampments and protests.” She emphasized that the university “needed to acknowledge and repair the damage to our Jewish students.”
Armstrong affirmed the university’s commitment to working with the federal government on addressing antisemitism concerns, stating: “Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism on our campus. This is our number one priority.”
Armstrong, however, did not outline specific plans for how Columbia would adapt to the significant loss of federal funding, instead focusing on the university’s broader mission and values.
“Antisemitism, violence, discrimination, harassment, and other behaviors that violate our values or disrupt teaching, learning, or research are antithetical to our mission,” Armstrong noted. “We must continue to work to address any instances of these unacceptable behaviors on our campus. We must work every day to do better.”
The situation at Columbia raises important questions for higher education institutions nationwide about balancing free speech, campus safety, and federal compliance in the age of the Trump presidency. As universities increasingly face scrutiny over their handling of contentious social and political issues, the consequences—both financial and reputational—can be severe.
Armstrong called unity within the Columbia community to maintain the university’s standing and continue its contributions to society.
“A unified Columbia, one that remains focused on our mission and our values, will succeed in making the uncommonly valuable contributions to society that have distinguished this great university from its peers over the last 270 years,” she said.
