Tag: Federal

  • The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 2: ESDC

    The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 2: ESDC

    Yesterday, I explained why the federal government now finds itself in a position where it has to cut program budgets by at least 15% just to keep the budget deficit to $50 billion by 2028. Today, I am going to explain how this will play out at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), which plays a major role in funding for skills and education in Canada, mainly through the Canada Education Savings Program (CESP) and the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP).

    Now, just a note at the start. It is vanishingly unlikely that the feds will actually look for 15% savings in every program. The 15% rule is for the Department as a whole, and ESDC is one big mother of a department. It includes all sorts of programs including EI (which in theory is exempt from cuts), and child care.

    So, let’s start with CESP, which delivers about a billion dollars a year via matching grants to parents saving for their kids’ education via Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs). This program doesn’t allow for a lot of nuance in cutting. The program gives out about $1.1 billion a year in Canada Education Savings Grants (CESGs), roughly 85% of which goes on a basic 20 cent-to the dollar match rate and about 15% of which goes to “additional” (i.e. higher) matching rates for lower-income Canadians (A-CESGs). It also runs the Canada Learning Bond Program, which is another roughly $150 million per year which is a non-matching grant of up to $2000 to children from low-income backgrounds to start their educational savings.

    There are basically four options here:

    1) The government could cut program spending across the board by 15%. That is, it could lower the base CESG matching rate from 20% to 17%, and A-CESG payment rates for lower income contributors to 26.5% and 34% from the current 30% and 40%. That would save about $150 million/year. It could also reduce the CLB payout to $1700.  

    2) The government could eliminate the A-CESG pieces entirely and go with a flat 20% coverage. That’s a pretty quick way to a 15% reduction.

    3) The government could axe the CLB. Again, a very quick way to get close to 15% reduction.

    4) The government could hold the A-CESG and CLB harmless and reduce the CESG base rate even further, to about 15%.  

    Now, personally, I think CESG probably comes out of this unscathed – that is, a 0% cut – because it’s one of the most popular government programs in existence. But these options give you a sense of what cuts might be, if applied uniformly across the department.

    (Yes, there are also presumably some savings to be made on the personnel side, but it’s a pretty simple and lean program – if you could get savings equal to even 0.5% of total expenditures from that, I’d be shocked).

    Let’s now head over to CSFAP spending and see how that might fare. It’s a bit more complex than CESG so it’s worth looking at its basic cost-structure. Using data from the CSFAP’s 2023 Actuarial report, it’s possible to look at overall direct program costs, as shown below in Figure 1. Technically, this is not a full state of program costs because there’s another billion or so in “alternative payments” to jurisdictions that do not participate in the CSFAP (i.e. Quebec, Nunavut and the NWT). But since this sum is calculated as a fraction of direct programs, we can more or less ignore them here – a 15% cut of the direct costs automatically translates through to a 15% cut in alternative payments as well. And our target number – given that CSFAP direct expenses are about $4.2 billion – would be about $628 million.

    Figure 1: Major areas of CSFAP spending, in millions, 2023-24

    So where do you carve out that much money from CSLP? Well for starters we could and should get rid of the $429 million we spent eliminating interest on loans after graduation. These subsidies do nothing for access; rather, they boost the incomes of middle-class 20–30-year-olds who have already finished school. And it is not a long-standing program. It is, in fact, a quite recent thing, announced by then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland in 2023 when the Liberals were desperately trying to throw a bone to house-poor urban twenty-somethings who at the time were threatening to vote not-Liberal. Now cutting this wouldn’t be a straight $429 million savings – loss of that subsidy would likely lead to increases in bad debt and Repayment Assistance program (RAP) charges somewhat. So, let’s call that a $350M win.  

    Where to find the other $275 million? Not administration: most of the admin money is tied up in payments to provinces for running the front end of the program or to the National Student Loans Service Centre (an outsourced agency which resides over by Square One in Mississauga for running the back end), neither of which can easily be changed in the short term. Maybe you could lose a couple of million in staff costs but not much more. Very little you can do about bad debts either.  RAP and interest subsidies before consolidation could be made less generous. In particular, the income threshold for access to RAP could be brought back down from the current $45K (roughly – it depends on family size) to say $38K, and interest during school could be brought up from zero to the current inflation rate or the government rate of borrowing (i.e. somewhere between 2 and 2.5%). I don’t have access to detailed financial figures on this, but my guess is that the RAP measure might save $50M or so; in-school interest might get you $100M.

    That still doesn’t quite get us to the required $625 million, so the only option left here is to start hacking away at grants. A straight cut in the maximum grant would be the easiest way to cut costs; bringing that down from $4200/year to, say, $3500/year would reduce spending by something along the lines of $400M/year. Another and more likely option would be for the feds to copy what Doug Ford did when he wanted to contain student aid costs – change grant eligibility criteria in such a way as to make grants harder to obtain. The obvious way to do this, I think, would be to change the rules for dependent/independent student status (i.e. the point at which students are considered to no longer get money from their parents) so that it took students five years to reach such independent status instead of four. I am not exactly sure how much that would save, but I’d wager it would be a minimum of a quarter-billion. 

    So, your menu of cut options for cutting CSFAP is, essentially:

    Bring back interest after graduation $350 million
    Admin $3-5 million
    Reduce RAP threshold to $38K $50 million
    Introduce in-school interest of 2.5% $100 million
    Cut maximum grants by $700/year $400/million
    Change definition of independent student $250 million

    (To be clear here, I am guessing a bit on some of these numbers. Intelligently, I hope, but they are guesses. Don’t take the numbers here as gospel. And if any friends at CSLP want to correct me, please do!)

    If it were me, to get to (roughly) the required $625 million I’d bring back interest after graduation – or introduce an equal-to-government-rate-of-borrowing interest rate for the entire life of the loan, which probably ends up with similar savings – and change the definition of independent students. Neither are pleasant but these are the ones that would probably affect access the least.  

    (Again, the Liberals may choose not to cut anything in CSFAP, because hey this is an income security program of a sort, and if we’re obsessing about “affordability” – but that just means cuts elsewhere in the portfolio will be larger).

    Of course, ESDC is much more than these two programs. Take a gander at the full list of programs the programs the Ministry runs (I make it about fifty if you include everything). A lot of those are scattered skills initiatives like Youth Employment and Skills, Indigenous Skills and Employment Training, the Skills and Partnership Fund, Skills for Success Program, the Innovative Work-integrated Learning Initiative. I have no idea what most of these do exactly, nor is it easy to access any budget data about them. But let’s put it this way – few of these programs have a particularly large policy constituency to back them up. My guess is that cuts across these programs will be significantly higher than 15% and some of them may cease to exist altogether.  

    Enough for today.  Tomorrow we’ll do research funding.

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  • The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 1

    The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 1

    The biggest thing everyone is going to be talking about this year – barring another university doing a surprise Laurentian – is the set of federal cuts coming down the pike. They are big. And they are nasty. So, it’s worth understanding exactly the scale of what is heading in our direction. This is going to be a three-parter. Today, I will talk about the overall size of the cuts to come, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I will talk about how this will affect the two ministries that have the most to do with post-secondary education: Employment and Skills Development Canada (ESDC, tomorrow) and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED, Wednesday).

    So: we don’t know the exact scope of the budget cuts the government is contemplating. What we do know is the following:

    Preliminary budget figures for Fiscal 2024-25 show that the government of Canada posted a budget deficit of $43.2 billion on revenues of $495B, program expenses of $480B, debt charges (that is, interest on existing debt) of $54B and actuarial losses of $4B. We didn’t have a budget this spring, but spending projections for 25-26 from the 2024-25 budget show a projected deficit of $39 billion on revenues of $515B, program expenses of $496B, debt charges of $55B and actuarial losses of $2B.

    The Liberal Manifesto for election 2025 planned deficits of $60 billion or so right through to 2028-29. Its fiscal plan was basically i) existing spending commitments, ii) 30-odd billion in new spending and tax cuts and iii) tiny revenue changes, plus $20 Billion or so in counter-tariffs for 2025-26. (Yes, they also promised “savings from increased productivity” – otherwise known as “frantic handwaving” – of $6B, $9B and $13B in fiscal years ’27, ’28 and ’29. I am excluding them here but will return to them in a sec).

    Figure 1: Government of Canada fiscal picture according to the Liberal manifesto, minus the handwaving, in Billions.

    (The foregoing might all sound strange to those of you who recall Carney making pledges about balanced budgets. But, of course, as I pointed out back here, he never actually promised that. He promised balanced operating budgets, that is budgets with an only vaguely defined “capital spending” netted out. By a complete coincidence, the Liberal platform claimed the government spent roughly $50 billion in capital, so basically the government is already basically in balance.  Neat trick, but not sure bondholders will see it that way. I digress.)

    Since the election, a few things have happened. Counter-tariffs are not collecting anything like the $20 billion forecast, we ditched the Digital Services Tax in a futile attempt to get the Americans to be nicer to us, and, most importantly of all, the prime minister promised to up defense spending by about $18 billion over the next four years in order to reach 2% of GDP by 2028. That means the actual fiscal picture, before any handwaving about savings, looks like this:

    Figure 2: Government of Canada fiscal picture, according to the Liberal Manifesto, minus the handwaving, including proposed spending and tariffs since April 28, in Billions.

    As you can see, we are a lot further away today from “operating balance” (i.e. a $50B deficit) than we were when Carney was elected. And this is where the handwaving/cuts come into play. So, let’s start thinking about how much money it would take to keep us at “operating balance”. In Figure 3, we see that by 2028-29, we are looking at about $32 Billion in cuts. The handwaving “efficiencies” in the Liberal manifesto were meant to cover just $13 billion of that, leaving another $19.2 billion or so to be made up, somewhere, somehow.

    Figure 3: Cuts Required Just to Keep the Government of Canada at Operating Balance (i.e. a $50B deficit), By Source, in Billions.

    I said “somewhere”, but there isn’t much mystery here. As Figure 4 shows, you divide government spending into four categories: debt charges (which the government has to pay regardless), transfers to provinces (which Carney has promised he won’t touch), transfers to individuals (ditto) and then “program spending”. As Figure 4 shows, the first three areas make up 58% of total spending. That means that the last area, program spending, is going to take up the entirety of these cuts. In 2025-26, program spending is estimated at $227 billion; a $32 billion cut to that equals an overall reduction in program spending of 14% by 2028. (Coincidentally, this was more or less exactly the size of the program cuts in the “savage” 1995 budget – $7 billion phased in over three years on a base budget of about $52 billion. Government grew back, as you can see.)  

    Figure 4: Government of Canada Expenditures by Category, 2025-26

    It’s worth being careful here. Overall program spending is $227 billion, but $46 billion of that is currently being spent on defense and housing, two areas that are almost certainly immune to cuts given the government’s overall priorities. Excluding these two fields from cuts means that the field of “cuttable” programs shrinks to $181 billion, and the size of the cuts required to meet the $50 billion target balloons to 17.7%.  

    This brings us to the program review that has been going on in Ottawa since July. Recall that Minsters were asked to bring forward scenarios that involved cuts of 7.5% for next year, 10% the year after that and 15% the year after that. Many thought initially that these numbers were deliberately overdone so that big cuts could be made in some departments so as to shield other departments from having to do the same. Now I am not so sure. That 15% target is awfully close to the 17% overall target the Liberals need to hit just to keep the deficit at $50 billion, and so I am starting to think that in fact the cuts might not be dispersed unequally between departments. They might really need 15% from everybody – and then some.

    There are a couple of alternatives of course that could lessen the blow. For instance, while Carney promised not to cut transfers to provinces, to my knowledge he never ruled out cutting the rate of growth of transfer payments (currently about 5% per year, across CHT, CST and equalization combined). Slash that in half and you’ve got yourself another $8 billion to play with by 2028, thereby reducing by a quarter the required amount of program cuts. Something similar could be achieved by de-indexing pensions for a couple of years. Or, unlikely as it seems, the Government could actually increase taxes (elbows up requires some sacrifices, no?). But, absent those measures, I think we need to seriously brace for impact. These cuts are real, they are huge, and even if they don’t hit this fall (it’s not impossible that the alleged fall budget might actually just be the usual fall economic statement under another name), they are for sure going to hit in early 2026.

    The question, really, is, what needs to be saved? What should the sectors’ priorities be? I’ll discuss that over the next two days.

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  • Education Department wants to streamline process for pulling federal funds from colleges

    Education Department wants to streamline process for pulling federal funds from colleges

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    Dive Brief:

    • The U.S. Department of Education plans to propose regulations for “streamlining” the process for pulling federal funding from the colleges it determines have violated civil rights law. 
    • The notice of the forthcoming proposal was published in the Trump administration’s Spring 2025 Unified Agenda, which provides a glimpse of the federal government’s regulatory priorities and schedule for releasing new rules. 
    • The new proposal — which could be released this month — is intended to simplify the process for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to seek “termination of Federal financial assistance to institutions that intentionally violate Federal civil rights laws and refuse to voluntarily come into compliance,” the notice says. 

    Dive Insight: 

    Under the Trump administration, the Education Department and other agencies have opened a flurry of civil rights investigations into colleges and K-12 schools. Some have targeted their diversity efforts and policies that allow transgender students to play on teams and use bathrooms aligning with their gender identities. Others have accused colleges of failing to address antisemitism. 

    Amid these investigations, the Trump administration has pressured colleges to strike deals with the federal government by freezing or pulling vast sums of federal research funding. 

    The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, resolved an Education Department investigation in July by agreeing to bar transgender women from competing on women’s sports teams. Penn also agreed to give Division I titles and records to cisgender women who had lost against Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who last competed on the university’s swim team in 2022.

    The deal came after the Trump administration had pulled $175 million in federal contracts from Penn. Similarly, Columbia University and Brown University — which were both accused of failing to address campus antisemitism — have paid lofty sums to settle the administration’s allegations after the federal government froze hundreds of millions of dollars of their research grants.

    The notice in the Unified Agenda says the Education Department plans to align civil rights enforcement procedures better with statutory requirements. The agency’s new regulations would pertain to enforcement of Title IX and Title VI. Title IX bars discrimination based on sex, while Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin. 

    The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. 

    Not every college targeted by the administration has been pressured into striking a deal. 

    The Trump administration froze $2.2 billion from Harvard University after the Ivy League institution refused to yield to demands to make sweeping changes to its admissions, hiring and campus policies. Harvard took the administration to court over the frozen funds, with a federal judge ruling in the university’s favor this week. 

    The Trump administration had said it was pulling the funding because the university had not done enough to address antisemitism on campus. Yet the judge overseeing the case said the evidence does not “reflect that fighting antisemitism was Defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard.” 

    The Unified Agenda also provides a look at the agency’s other regulatory priorities, with changes coming down the pike for rules governing accreditation, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, and colleges’ reporting requirements for foreign gifts and contracts. 

    The Education Department recently kicked off the process to craft regulations to implement the sweeping changes mandated by the massive domestic policy bill passed by Republicans this summer. 

    The legislation will phase out Grad PLUS loans, which allow graduate and professional students to borrow up to the cost of attendance. It also creates lifetime federal loan limits, with a cap of $100,000 for most graduate students and $200,000 for professional students. And it will consolidate a handful of federal loan repayment options into just two — one income-based repayment plan and one standard plan with fixed payments. 

    Additionally, the policy package threatens to cut off federal student loan eligibility to college programs that can’t prove they provide an earnings boost. Undergraduate programs, for example, must show that at least half of their graduates earn more than a typical high school student in their state.

    The American Council on Education and over 40 other higher education groups have urged the Education Department to work with Congress to delay implementing these changes until July 1, 2027. 

    The Education Department is currently on track to issue the rules no earlier than March 2026 — and likely later than that given the complexity of the law, according to the letter. As a result, the regulations would “impose major changes to financial aid and student loan repayment for millions of students and borrowers only months before they take effect,” the organizations said.

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  • University of California would need $5B if it lost federal funding, leader says

    University of California would need $5B if it lost federal funding, leader says

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    Dive Brief:

    • The University of California system’s president warned state lawmakers Wednesday that it would need at least $4 billion to $5 billion to minimize harm in the event of a major loss of federal funding. 
    • In a letter to state Sen. Scott Wiener, chair of California’s joint legislative budget committee, UC President James Milliken said the Trump administration’s actions “place the entire University of California system at risk,” noting there is a“distinct possibility of more to come.”
    • The federal government in August suspended $584 million in grants to the University of California, Los Angeles over antisemitism-related allegations. Milliken responded at the time that cuts “do nothing to address antisemitism.”

    Dive Insight:

    In his letter to Wiener, Milliken detailed the many ways the University of California depends on federal funding. That includes $5.7 billion in research funding and $1.9 billion in student financial aid per year. UCLA alone received over $875 million in federal grants and contracts in fiscal 2024, according to the latest system financials.

    He also described the potential impacts of losing this funding in dire terms. 

    “Classes and student services would be reduced, patients would be turned away, tens of thousands of jobs would be lost, and we would see UC’s world-renowned researchers leaving our state for other more seemingly stable opportunities in the US or abroad,” he wrote.

    Cutting off research funding, largely for scientific studies, has been the primary tool of the Trump administration when targeting colleges. Federal officials often link the cuts to allegations that colleges aren’t doing enough to respond to campus antisemitism that the administration ties to protests over Israel’s war against Hamas. 

    In some cases, the tactic has paid off for the federal government. Columbia University agreed to settle allegations by paying $221 million to the federal government in return for having most of its $400 million in suspended research grants restored. 

    The administration is also seeking $500 million from Harvard University, which has been navigating a multi-agency attack from the federal government. 

    However, a federal judge on Wednesday ruled that the Trump administration’s suspension of $2.2 billion of Harvard’s funding was unlawful. The judge in the case concluded that the evidence does not “reflect that fighting antisemitism was Defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard.”

    On the West Coast, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in June it was investigating the UC system over “potential race- and sex-based discrimination in university employment practices.”

    Meanwhile, the administration has also demanded $1 billion from UCLA specifically. While the UC system and UCLA have negotiated with the administration, Milliken in August said the sum “would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.”

    State officials have panned the administration’s demand in fiercer terms, with both Gov. Gavin Newsom and Wiener describing it as extortion. 

    In an August statement, Wiener likened the $1 billion demand to “classic mob boss behavior,” describing the administration as “threatening to illegally revoke funding — here, science funding — or take other punitive steps unless the university submits to his control, pays him off, and submits to his racist, transphobic, xenophobic dictates.”

    As it navigates the numerous financial risks at the federal level, as well as other structural financial pressures, UCLA has paused faculty hiring and is moving to consolidate its IT operations to save costs on top of past budget moves.

    In his letter to Wiener, Milliken described the current moment as “one of the gravest threats in UC’s 157-year history,” and suggested further actions from the Trump administration could be in store later. 

    In outlining the amounts the UC system would need to survive a blow to federal funding, he said that the UC system “will need the resolve and partnership of our state’s leaders.

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  • UC System Warns of Broader Risks in Federal Funding Fight

    UC System Warns of Broader Risks in Federal Funding Fight

    The Trump administration has already frozen $500 million in grant funding at UCLA.

    The University of California system is warning state lawmakers that federal funding cuts could extend well beyond UCLA as tensions between the Trump administration and American colleges continue to rise.

    UC president James B. Milliken wrote a letter to dozens of local elected officials Tuesday explaining that “the stakes are high and the risks are very real.” The system’s 10 institutions could lose billions of dollars in aid, forcing its leaders to make tough calls about staffing, the continuation of certain academic programs and more, he said.

    President Trump has already frozen more than $500 million in grants at UCLA, allegedly because the Justice Department accused the university of violating Jewish students’ civil rights. The president demanded the university pay a $1.2 billion fine to unlock the funds, and system officials are worried that more funding cuts are likely. California lawmakers have repeatedly urged the UC system not to capitulate.

    In an August letter, State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat and chair of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, and 33 other lawmakers told Milliken that Trump’s actions were “an extortion attempt and a page out of the authoritarian playbook,” the Los Angeles Times reported. 

    Milliken wrote in Tuesday’s letter that a loss in funding would “devastate” the system and harm students, among other groups.

    “Classes and student services would be reduced, patients would be turned away, tens of thousands of jobs would be lost, and we would see UC’s world-renowned researchers leaving our state for other more seemingly stable opportunities in the US or abroad,” he wrote.

    If the UC system loses federal funding, it would need about $4 to $5 billion a year to make up the difference, Milliken added. “That is what fighting for the people of California will take.”

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  • Federal Court Blocks Trump Administration’s $2.2 Billion Harvard Funding Freeze

    Federal Court Blocks Trump Administration’s $2.2 Billion Harvard Funding Freeze

    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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  • Northwestern President Michael Schill Resigns Amid Federal Funding Freeze

    Northwestern President Michael Schill Resigns Amid Federal Funding Freeze

    Northwestern University President Michael Schill announced his resignation Thursday, concluding a three-year tenure that brought record achievements alongside unprecedented federal challenges, including an ongoing $790 million funding freeze imposed by the Trump administration.

    Schill, who became Northwestern’s 17th president in September 2022, cited the need for “new leadership to guide Northwestern into its next chapter” in his message to the campus community. His departure adds to a growing list of university presidents who have stepped down amid tensions with the federal government and campus controversies.

    The resignation comes as Northwestern grapples with a federal funding freeze that began approximately four months ago, when the Trump administration halted $790 million in federal support. The action was reportedly connected to Title VI investigations, which examine discrimination in federally funded programs.

    The frozen funds support what Northwestern describes as “innovative and life-saving research,” including development of the world’s smallest pacemaker and Alzheimer’s disease research. University officials warned that “this type of research is now at jeopardy” due to the funding suspension.

    Northwestern joins other elite institutions facing similar federal actions, with universities like Cornell, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Virginia experiencing funding freezes or leadership changes amid disputes over diversity programs and responses to Gaza-related campus protests.

    During Schill’s tenure, Northwestern reached notable milestones while navigating significant challenges. Schill oversaw major academic initiatives, including the establishment of research centers like the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago and the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky. He also championed free expression initiatives, launching the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement and establishing the President’s Advisory Committee on Free Expression and Institutional Speech.

    However, his presidency was marked by significant controversies. Shortly after arriving on campus, Schill inherited a hazing scandal involving student-athletes, leading to new protective policies. More recently, he navigated campus tensions following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent protests.

    Republican lawmakers, including House Education and Workforce Committee Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, had criticized Schill’s handling of campus antisemitism. Stefanik called his resignation “long overdue,” claiming he “failed to protect Jewish students” and “caved to the demands of the antisemitic, pro-Hamas mob.”

    Northwestern officials counter that they have “fully cooperated with investigations by both the Department of Education and Congress” and implemented policy updates that resulted in a “dramatic decrease” in reported antisemitic incidents.

    White House spokesperson Liz Huston said the Trump administration “looks forward to working with the new leadership, and we hope they seize this opportunity to Make Northwestern Great Again.”

    The Northwestern Board of Trustees will name an interim president soon, with Schill continuing in his role until the transition is complete. Board Chair Peter Barris praised Schill’s leadership through “unparalleled challenges” and credited him with “lasting achievements that contribute robustly to Northwestern’s continued advancement.”

    After stepping down, Schill plans to take a sabbatical before returning to teach and conduct research as a faculty member at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. 

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  • Now Is the Time to Overhaul Federal Regulations

    Now Is the Time to Overhaul Federal Regulations

    Researchers spend more than 40 percent of their research time complying with regulations.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | kyoshino/iStock/Getty Images

    The rise of generative artificial intelligence and the Trump administration’s deregulation push make now the right time to streamline and reduce federal scientific research regulations, argues a report the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine published Wednesday.

    “At a time when the scientific enterprise is under a lot of pressure—we don’t want to pretend that’s not true—this is also a wonderful opportunity to streamline the workload not only of researchers, but of institutions and other individuals,” Alan Leshner, chair of the NASEM committee that produced the report, said at a public briefing. “We would be foolish not to take advantage of the policy climate that favors deregulation and unburdening our scientific enterprise from unnecessary, duplicative and uncoordinated rules and regulations.”

    The 125-page report, entitled “Simplifying Research Regulations and Policies: Optimizing American Science,” lays out a three-pronged framework to guide a cohesive national strategy toward implementing more economical regulations. Those prongs include harmonizing regulations and requirements across federal and state agencies and research institutions, ensuring that regulatory requirements match the risk related to the project, and using technology to make regulation-compliance processes more efficient.

    From there, the report offers a menu of 53 potential options across all aspects of research compliance, including research security, misconduct and grant management, designed for interagency adoption.

    It’s all part of an effort by the National Academies to seize this political moment and accomplish their long-standing goal of freeing scientists from the weight of often redundant, expensive and excessive regulations.

    Currently, researchers whose work is supported by grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense spend more than 40 percent of their research time complying with each agency’s varying administrative and regulatory requirements, “wasting intellectual capacity and taxpayer dollars,” according to Federal Demonstration Partnership data cited in the report.

    “There’s no question that regulation is necessary to ensure that the science we produce is of the best quality, the highest integrity and is conducted with full accountability and transparency to the American public,” said Leshner, who has previously held leadership positions at the NIH and the NSF. “Having said that, the current regulatory environment has grown to a point that it’s actually hampering innovation.”

    Despite previous calls by the NASEM and other groups to reduce regulatory burdens on researchers, few of those plans have come to fruition. Instead, data from the Council on Government Relations (COGR) shows that 62 percent of the regulations and policies federal agencies adopted or changed since 1991 were issued from 2014 to 2024.

    For example, both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare regulate animal research, but in some cases, their requirements conflict.

    When a research project is subject to both agencies’ requirements, it can create “confusion, redundancy, and extra work,” the report says. “The natural result is for academic institutions to create additional requirements of their own to manage the complexity and risk of noncompliance stemming from regulatory complexity.”

    ‘An Urgency to This’

    Complying with inconsistent or redundant regulations also costs a lot for universities, which are now facing significant cuts to federal research funding. In 2022, COGR estimated that institutions receiving more than $100 million in federal research funds spent an estimated $1.4 million a year to comply with the NIH’s Data Sharing and Management Policy while smaller institutions spend just over $1 million a year.

    The burden of regulatory compliance can also further exacerbate research inequities.

    “Typically, the more underresourced institutions—regional state institutions, minority-serving institutions, HBCUs and tribal colleges—may not have as large of a research infrastructure or staff to handle some of the regulations that filter down from the federal level,” said Emanuel Waddell, committee member and chair of the nanoengineering department at North Carolina A&T State University. “When the infrastructure isn’t there to answer questions, that burden falls on the researchers themselves to seek out answers, and it takes away time from pursuing intellectual curiosity.”

    And with looming cuts to federal research budgets, including mass layoffs at the federal agencies that oversee research, members of the committee believe now is the time to reduce the cost of regulatory compliance if the United States wants to remain a competitive producer of scientific innovation.

    “There’s an urgency to this. We really have to get this done. Think about how constrained budgets are—we have $37 trillion debt in this country and it continues to grow,” said Kelvin Droegemeier, a member of the committee and a professor and special adviser to the chancellor for science and policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “With relatively little cost, we can unlock a lot of money that is now being directed toward things which are not helpful and put that money toward doing research.”

    But making it happen will be up to the federal government.

    Matt Owens, president of COGR, urged federal policymakers in a statement Wednesday afternoon “to act this fall on the most actionable and timely of the options.”

    “If the administration and Congress are rightly interested in reducing regulatory burden and to promote scientific advancements, then they now have a clear roadmap for doing so efficiently and effectively,” he wrote. “What remains to be seen is whether federal policymakers will get behind the wheel, step on the gas, and accelerate through the finish line to fully deliver.”

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  • Federal judge strikes down Trump administration’s $2.2B funding freeze at Harvard

    Federal judge strikes down Trump administration’s $2.2B funding freeze at Harvard

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    Dive Brief:

    • The Trump administration violated Harvard University’s First Amendment rights and 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 Burroughs also 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.”

    • Burroughs struck 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 leadership rebuked 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’s refusal 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.

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  • College president fears that federal education cuts will derail the promise of student parents, student military veterans and first-gen students

    College president fears that federal education cuts will derail the promise of student parents, student military veterans and first-gen students

    As a college president, I see the promise of higher education fulfilled every day. Many students at my institution, Whittier College, are the first in their families to attend a university. Some are parents or military veterans who have already served in the workforce and are returning to school to gain new skills, widen their perspectives and improve their job prospects.  

    These students are the future of our communities. We will rely on them to fill critical roles in health care, education, science, entrepreneurship and public service. They are also the students who stand to lose the most under the proposed fiscal year 2026 federal budget, and those who were already bracing for impact from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” cuts, including to the health care coverage many of them count on. 

    The drive with which these extraordinary students — both traditionally college-aged and older — pursue their degrees, often while juggling caregiving commitments or other responsibilities, never fails to inspire me.  

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. 

    We do not yet know the precise contours of the spending provisions Congress will consider once funding from a continuing resolution expires at the end of September. Yet we expect they will take their cues from the president’s proposed budget, which slashes support for students and parents and especially hammers those already struggling to improve their lives by earning a college degree, with cuts to education, health and housing that could take effect as early as October 1.  

    That budget would mean lowering the maximum Pell Grant award from $7,395 to $5,710, reversing a decade of progress. For the nearly half of Whittier students who received Pell Grants last year, this rollback would profoundly jeopardize their chances of finishing school. 

    So would the proposal to severely restrict Federal Work-Study, which supports a third of Whittier students according to our most recent internal analysis, and to eliminate the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, which more than 16 percent of our student body relies upon. In addition, this budget would impose a cap on Direct PLUS Loans for Parents, which would impact roughly 60 percent of our parent borrowers. It would also do away with the Direct PLUS Loans for Graduates program.  

    These programs are lifelines, not just for our students but for students all across the country. They fuel social mobility and prosperity by making education a force for advancement through personal work ethic rather than a way to rack up debt. 

    If enacted, these proposed cuts would gut the support system that has enabled millions of low-income students to earn a college degree.  

    Higher education is a bridge. To cross it and achieve their full potential, students from all walks of life must have access to the support and resources colleges provide, whether through partnerships with local high schools or with professional gateway programs in engineering, accounting, business, nursing, physical therapy and more. Yet, to access these invaluable programs, they must be enrolled. How will they reach such heights if they suddenly can’t afford to advance their studies? 

    The harm I’ve described doesn’t stop with cuts to financial aid, loans and services. Proposed reductions also target research funding for NASA, NIH and the National Science Foundation. One frozen NASA grant has already led to the loss of paid student research fellowships at Whittier, a setback not just in dollars but in momentum for students building real-world skills, networks and résumés.  

    These research opportunities often enable talented first-generation students to connect their classroom learning to career pathways, opening the door to graduate school, lab technician roles and futures in STEM fields. We’ve seen how federal funding has supported student projects in everything from climate data analysis to environmental health.  

    Stripping away support for hands-on research undermines the federal government’s own calls for colleges like ours to better prepare students for the workforce by dismantling the very mechanisms that make such preparation possible. 

    Related: These federal programs help low-income students get to and through college. Trump wants to pull the funding 

    It’s particularly disheartening that these changes will disproportionately hurt those students who are working the hardest to achieve their objectives, who have done everything right and have the most to lose from this lack of investment in the future.  

    The preservation and strengthening of Pell, Work-Study, Supplemental Educational Opportunity grants and federal loan programs is not a partisan issue. It is a moral and economic imperative for a nation that has long been proud to be a land of opportunity.  

    Let’s build a system for strivers that opens doors instead of slamming them shut.  

    Let’s recommit to higher education as a public good. Today’s students are willing to work hard to deserve our continuing belief in them.  

    Kristine E. Dillon is the president of Whittier College in California. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about education cuts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter. 

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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