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Tag: Federal
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Documents from US Department of Education (Federal Register)
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Federal Policy Uncertainty Impacting College Budgeting
Economic uncertainty—the kind that dominated headlines for the first half of 2025—makes long-term financial planning difficult. But nearly two in three college and university chief business officers say that uncertainty surrounding federal policy for higher education is hindering their ability to conduct even basic financial planning. That’s according to Inside Higher Ed’s forthcoming annual survey of CBOs with Hanover Research.
“Higher education has not faced this level of financial uncertainty in generations,” said Robert Kelchen, chair of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who reviewed preliminary survey data.
While recent history offers one comparison—the early days of the pandemic, when uncertainty was similarly “off the charts”—the federal government at that time “quickly stepped in to provide support,” Kelchen continued. Today, by contrast, the federal government “is causing the uncertainty.”
According to the survey, federal policy uncertainty under the second Trump administration is moderately impacting basic financial planning at 49 percent of institutions represented, meaning that challenges have arisen but CBOs and their colleagues have managed to adapt. Another 14 percent of institutions are severely impacted, meaning basic financial planning has been extremely difficult, leading to major disruptions. This is consistent across sectors.
The survey was fielded in April and May, with CBOs from 169 institutions, public and private nonprofit, associate to doctoral degree–granting, responding. The full 2025 Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers will be released later this month. It includes additional findings on the second Trump administration’s impact on institutional finances so far, mergers and acquisitions, value and affordability, and more.
CBOs see federal student aid policy changes as a major risk, with 68 percent citing this as a top federal policy concern from a longer list of options. A distant second: research funding levels, cited by 24 percent of all CBOs. Public institution CBOs are relatively more concerned about research funding, at 36 percent versus 9 percent of private nonprofit peers.
Questions about the future of federal student aid come on top of last year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid fiasco. And nearly four in 10 surveyed CBOs (38 percent) report having already experienced significant to severe disruptions related to that FAFSA rollout.
In Kelchen’s assessment, there’s no guarantee that the federal financial aid system will work as intended this fall—especially for colleges that require additional oversight before receiving funds, given recent mass layoffs at the U.S. Education Department. Congress also last week passed what he described as the largest set of changes to federal higher education policy in decades, via the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with potential “downstream effects for state budgets due to cuts to federal benefits.”
Throw in cuts to federal research funding and big changes for international students, and colleges’ budgets “are highly uncertain,” Kelchen said.
Case in point: Michigan State University president Kevin Guskiewicz recently announced a plan to cut spending, including faculty and staff positions. He blamed expectations that the university will receive “less money from the federal government due to research cuts and restrictions on international enrollments, although the magnitude of those impacts is uncertain.” Also at play: increasing operating costs and state budget concerns.
In another example of uncertainty in action, Val Smith, president of Swarthmore College, announced in late May that the institution’s Board of Managers had been unable to carry out “one of its primary fiduciary responsibilities: approving the college’s operating budget,” at least as usual. Given the “confluence of uncertainties we currently face,” she said at the time, the board moved forward with an interim operating budget for the first three months of the new fiscal year. It plans to revisit and adopt a full operating budget in the fall, “when we expect to have more clarity.”
To Kelchen, interim budgets such as Swarthmore’s can make sense if revenues are “highly volatile.” So he said he wouldn’t be surprised if other institutions were quietly making similar moves.
In an additional expression of uncertainty, most surveyed CBOs describe the impact of the second Trump administration’s policies on their institution’s financial outlook—both current and over the next 12 months—as somewhat or very negative.
Most CBOs report minimal federal funding cuts under Trump so far. A handful do indicate that their funding has been reduced significantly, by more than 10 percent. An additional 11 percent report that funding has been reduced by 5 to 10 percent. And about as many aren’t sure. But the rest say funding has decreased by less than 5 percent or stayed consistent.
While the ultimate impact of federal policy changes remains to be seen—and will look different at different institutions—strategist Rebeka Mazzone advised frequent collaboration and communication between CBOs and other cabinet-level leaders, “so that you always know what’s happening on a more real-time basis.”
Also critical: forecasting, or “having a tool that allows you to constantly update the dollars you have so that you understand the impact.” Mazzone, founder of FuturED Finance, said that this real-time process is underused and very different from typical budgeting, in a which a yearlong spending plan is developed based on a particular moment in time. But the “smaller and the more cash-strapped the institution is, the more important the forecast becomes.”
Fancy software isn’t necessary, she said, as forecasting can happen on a spreadsheet. What matters is “capturing changes and overlaying them on the budget so that you understand where you’re going to end the year, and that helps you to more proactively manage the outcomes.”
Another important tool? Five-year projections. “If you have lower enrollment this year, that is going to affect you also for the next three years. If you have a higher discount rate this year, that is going to affect you also for the next three years.” So when institutions “suddenly” close, Mazzone said, “it’s not so sudden. They just weren’t using these tools to really understand how bad things were—and how quickly things were heading in the wrong direction.”
To Mazzone’s point, while federal policy uncertainty is challenging short-term planning, many institutions now making budget cuts have significant underlying issues.
What’s Kelchen’s advice for colleges and universities struggling with present uncertainty—including those navigating longer-term financial woes? Prepare multiple budget scenarios “ranging from something close to business as usual to the possibility of losing most federal funding.”
Institutions will get “some answers on what actual revenues look like as the start of a new academic year draws nearer, but this will take time,” he said. Those in stronger positions can “operate more at business as usual and absorb losses if needed. But if there is underlying weakness, colleges need to budget for the worst right now and hope for something better.”
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George Washington University hints at layoffs amid federal policy upheaval
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.Dive Brief:
- Faced with an “unsustainable compounding deficit,” George Washington University is freezing hiring and could lay off employees down the road, the private Washington, D.C.-based institution said in a community message Tuesday.
- The hiring freeze applies to positions funded directly by the university and is set to last at least until Oct. 1. GWU also plans to review large procurement contracts, cut back on capital spending, and tighten budgets for travel, events and entertainment, among other moves.
- Despite earlier budget-tightening measures, senior university leaders said the outlook for the upcoming fiscal year has deteriorated since April. Officials plan to present a full fiscal 2026 budget to the university’s governing board in early September.
Dive Insight:
In their announcement, university President Ellen Granberg, Interim Provost John Lach and other officials cited political, economic and demographic challenges that are exacerbating GWU’s budget pressures.
On the policy front, they pointed to the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to limit funding for indirect research costs, such as facilities, utilities and other overhead, to federal grant awardees. While federal courts have paused or struck down those moves at four federal agencies, they have created deep financial uncertainty for many universities.
The officials also pointed to “significant changes in the overall federal research landscape,” which has big implications for the university, a major nexus for federal grants. In fiscal 2024, GWU spent a total of $471.6 million in federal grants from a wide array of federal agencies and other grantors.
Along with research funding disruption, officials pointed to a slowdown in visa processing and President Donald Trump’s recent move to ban or restrict travel from 19 countries. They described these changes as “constraints on our ability to enroll international students.” In 2024, GWU enrolled 3,661 international students, according to institutional data.
Moreover, the university, with its deep ties to the D.C. area, is beginning to see domestic enrollment impacts from the Trump administration’s massive slashes to federal agency workforces, as well as general financial uncertainty among American consumers.
Even more pressure on graduate enrollment could come amid the elimination of Grad PLUS loans and caps on total student borrowing, brought on by the massive budget bill passed by Republicans and signed by Trump last week.
But GWU had financial challenges before Trump took office. As Granberg, Lach and other officials noted, revenue growth averaged 6.1% from fiscal 2022 through 2024 while expenses grew 6.8%.
“While this difference might not seem significant, its cumulative effect is an unsustainable compounding deficit,” they said.
That budget gap resulted from pre-Trump structural challenges in the higher education world, including rising costs and declining master’s degree enrollments.
Between 2018 and 2023, GWU’s total fall graduate student enrollment declined 9.2% to 14,181 students, according to federal data. The officials pointed to declines in international student enrollment, which began at the university before Trump’s newest travel bans and “at this point can no longer be viewed as temporary.”
University leaders in April announced a pause on merit-based salary increases and a 3% budget cut across units. But the challenges have only deepened since then.
Now officials aim for deeper budget cuts for fiscal 2026, “which we recognize will likely lead to some reductions in the number of staff and certain faculty positions, a step we have tried to avoid but cannot any longer,” they said Tuesday.
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Senate Introduces Legislation to Increase Federal Minimum Wage to $15 per Hour – CUPA-HR
by CUPA-HR | June 24, 2025
On June 10, Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Peter Welch (D-VT) introduced the Higher Wages for American Workers Act (S. 2013). The Higher Wages for American Workers Act would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour and directing the secretary of labor to adjust the minimum wage annually based on inflation.
Higher Wages for American Workers Act
The bill proposes to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour beginning January 1 of the first year after enactment. Each year after, the secretary of labor is directed to increase the minimum wage annually by “the percentage increase, if any, in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers.”
Although the federal minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, several states have increased their state minimum wage above the current $7.25 per hour. As of January 1, 2025, 30 states and the District of Columbia have minimum wage laws set above the federal level, and 10 states and the District of Columbia have a minimum wage of $15 per hour or higher. All other states must follow the minimum wage set by Congress through the FLSA.
Looking Ahead
While legislation has been introduced in recent years to increase the federal minimum wage, calls to increase the level to $15 per hour have mostly come from Congressional Democrats. It is therefore notable that Republican Senator Josh Hawley is leading efforts on this issue. It remains to be seen if enough Republicans in the Senate will also support this effort to give the legislation the chance to receive 60 votes to bypass the filibuster and whether House Republicans will take up similar legislation.
CUPA-HR will keep members apprised of further developments related to federal minimum wage laws.
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Federal court backs teachers fired over trans protest
FIRE helped secure a victory this week for two educators in Oregon when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sent Damiano v. Grants Pass School District back down to the federal district court, as FIRE had asked it to in our amicus brief.
When their school district passed a policy requiring teachers to address transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns, the plaintiffs, Oregon assistant principal Rachel Sager and teacher Katie Medart, started the grassroots campaign “I Resolve” to voice their opposition to the policy. Following complaints by students, parents, and community members, their local school district fired the teachers but later reinstated them to different roles.
The teachers sued. But the lower court ruled the school district was entitled to fire the teachers and granted summary judgment, meaning it did not see a need to go to trial.
FIRE saw things differently. And now, so has the appellate court. Our brief to the Ninth Circuit argued that Sager and Medart’s speech on a matter of public concern — as speech on the debate around gender issues undoubtedly is — must be properly balanced against the school district’s interest in providing services to the public. FIRE wrote:
Almost twenty years ago, this Court held “it is well-settled that a teacher’s public employment cannot be conditioned on her refraining from speaking out on school matters.” … Yet the district court here held that, under Pickering, Grants Pass School District could do exactly that. The court incorrectly concluded that the district did not violate the First Amendment by firing an assistant principal (Rachel Sager, née Damiano) and teacher (Katie Medart) for speaking out against the District’s gender identity policy … because their actions—namely, publishing an alternative model gender-identity education policy and accompanying video called “I Resolve”—allegedly caused significant community disruption.
The lower court put too much weight on the discomfort and controversy the teachers caused with their advocacy, and too little weight on their First Amendment right to speak as private citizens on a matter of public concern.
On top of that, the court found a genuine dispute to be resolved over whether the teachers’ advocacy actually disrupted the school’s operation. As such, the Ninth Circuit reversed the lower court’s opinion — meaning the educators’ First Amendment claim can now proceed to trial.
With its ruling, the Ninth Circuit has sent a pointed reminder that public employees don’t surrender their constitutional rights just because they work for the government.
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Federal Judge Won’t Block Trump’s Cuts to IES
A federal district judge declined to issue an injunction that would block the Trump administration’s recent cuts to staff and contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences—an agency charged with collecting and analyzing data about both K–12 and higher education.
In an opinion released last week, Maryland judge Stephanie A. Gallagher acknowledged that the new administration has terminated 90 percent of the agency’s staff and therefore IES “is not doing a number of tasks Congress requires of it.” Gallagher, a Trump appointee, also empathized with the two education research associations that filed the lawsuit—the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness—saying she trusts that not receiving the data they expected from IES “will harm them.”
But that does not mean the plaintiffs have a strong enough case to stop the Trump administration from continuing to dismantle the agency. Gallagher said that the associations’ arguments are at times too broad or too narrow, that they lump together numerous cuts—some of which may be justified—and that they include “factual discrepancies” and improper interpretations of “no fewer than a dozen statutes.”
Over all, she said, “They have not shown they are entitled to this sort of extraordinary relief.”
“These Plaintiffs have alleged, and have provided some evidence to support, a troubling pattern of conduct at IES,” Gallagher wrote. “But because they cannot make the requisite showings on the preliminary injunction factors, and in particular have not shown they have standing to seek the relief they are asking for, their motion for a preliminary injunction must be denied.”
This ruling is not final, however, and “should not be taken as predictive of this Court’s ultimate decision,” Gallagher added.
But the Education Department is already walking back some of the IES cuts, according to court filings in the lawsuit that The Hechinger Report first reported on. Department officials disclosed earlier this month that they are reinstating at least 20 out of the 101 contracts that were terminated. The restored contracts include one that requires the National Center for Education Statistics to participate in the Program for International Student Assessment. (According to Hechinger, Congress mandates that the department take part in international assessments.)
SREE president Elizabeth Tipton told Hechinger that the limited reversal was “upsetting” and not enough to fix the problem.
“They’re trying to make IES as small as they possibly can,” she said.
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Week in review: Major federal policy changes loom over colleges
The number of university civic centers established through a 2023 Ohio law in a bid to increase “intellectual diversity” at the state’s public colleges. Now, Republican lawmakers have released a budget proposal that would give the centers more influence by having their directors advise policymakers on “curriculum development and standards” at Ohio public colleges. -
Federal Funding Uncertainty Halts Construction Projects
Earlier this year the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees approved the design of a $228 million research facility that would expand UNC’s work on virology, vaccine development and other areas. But now that project is suddenly on hold.
UNC Chapel Hill is one of several major research universities pausing construction plans due to financial uncertainty provoked by the Trump administration’s efforts to cap federal research funding reimbursement rates.
In recent months multiple federal agencies have announced plans to cap research reimbursement rates at 15 percent. (While such rates typically hover just under 30 percent, some institutions have negotiated reimbursement rates upward of 50 percent.) Though court challenges have halted the rate cuts for now, the uncertainty has prompted some institutions to pause certain construction projects—particularly research labs and related facilities.
Institutions pausing or slowing plans to build new projects include some of the nation’s wealthiest private universities: Yale, Johns Hopkins and Washington U in St. Louis, which posted endowments of $41.4 billion, $13 billion and $11.9 billion, respectively, in the last fiscal year, according to a recent study of endowments. (UNC Chapel Hill is among the nation’s wealthiest public institutions, with a $5.7 billion endowment.)
In some cases, construction on other facilities, like a new residence hall at UNC Chapel Hill, is moving forward while projects such as research labs have been halted.
Projects on Hold
Yale has paused construction on 10 planned projects, according to The New Haven Register.
“We’re riding out a bad period,” Alexandra Daum, Yale’s associate vice president for New Haven affairs and university properties, said at a local Chamber of Commerce event earlier this month.
One of those projects is the planned conversion of a street into a pedestrian and cyclist-only plaza, which officials decided in February to delay, Daum told The New Haven Independent, another local news outlet. Yale has not identified the other nine projects it plans to put off.
Daum pointed to uncertainty about federal funding as the reason for the pause.
“Like many, Yale is tracking federal funding closely and anticipating there will be impact to projects in the planning pipeline,” Daum wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “We don’t know how much of an impact federal decisions will have on these projects, so we are being prudent.”
Construction on projects already underway will reportedly continue.
Johns Hopkins University announced a similar decision in early June. Administrators wrote in a message to campus that the university has experienced “a steady stream of research grant terminations, suspensions, and delays” that created uncertainty, particularly when coupled with the proposals for lower research reimbursement rates. The rate caps could deal the university a loss of more than $300 million a year in federal research funding, officials wrote.
JHU is taking a number of measures to handle budget concerns, including a staff hiring freeze, as well as pulling back on planned construction projects.
“Prudence dictates cutting back our ambitions in the near term, and we have decided to reduce our capital construction and renovation plans by approximately 10-20%,” officials wrote. “Final decisions on these reductions will be made over the summer in consultation with the divisions, with an emphasis on continuing mission-critical projects, essential deferred maintenance, and projects that are already far along in the permitting, demolition, and construction process.”
JHU did not identify what specific projects might be pushed back.
Washington University halted construction of a new arts and sciences building in April; work was expected to begin earlier this year, according to a news release from last fall.
WashU officials also cited federal funding concerns.
“We regret that it’s necessary to take these actions, but in our current climate, it is simply not prudent to continue with these projects as scheduled,” Chancellor Andrew D. Martin said in a news release. “We are always careful stewards of the university’s resources, but at this time, given the uncertainty around federal research funding and other potential government actions, we have to take a careful look at every aspect of our operations. We hope that once we have a clearer sense of the financial picture, we may be able to revisit some of these investments.”
UNC Chapel Hill offered similar reasons for halting construction on the research lab.
“Due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding federal research funding, the University has paused plans for the Translational Research Building. We are currently evaluating our research infrastructure, including our research facilities, and will continue to monitor funding trends. Scenario planning is underway to help us remain prepared for future opportunities,” a UNC Chapel Hill spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed in an emailed statement.
However, the university is moving forward with some projects, including a $93 million residence hall.
In neighboring Virginia, Republican governor Glenn Youngkin rejected $600 million in funding requests for 10 planned renovation and expansion projects at public universities last month, The Virginia Mercury reported. In a letter to state legislators, Youngkin cited economic uncertainty.
“I am optimistic about Virginia’s longer-term prospects for Fiscal Year 2027 and Fiscal Year 2028, and beyond, but there are some short-term risks as President Trump resets both fiscal spending in Washington and trade policies that require us to be prudent and not spend all of the projected surplus before we bank it,” Youngkin wrote to state lawmakers in May.
Some of those planned projects were research-oriented, though many were not.
The Outlook
While a few universities have publicly walked back big projects, that doesn’t appear to be happening en masse, experts say. Planned construction is still happening at many colleges.
“Projects, generally, are moving ahead. There are some larger projects that have been paused. The ones that have been stopped tend to be research-focused projects,” said Chris Purdy, director of higher education at SmithGroup, a design and planning firm that works in the sector.
Other buildings, particularly those that are student-focused or in high-growth areas such as health sciences and STEM, are also moving ahead, he noted. Purdy pointed out that research labs and related facilities are often highly specialized and therefore the most expensive to build.
“They’re primed to be under the most scrutiny just because they’re very expensive buildings,” Purdy said.
He noted that SmithGroup continues to see requests for proposals for campus construction and is optimistic that colleges won’t back off of planned projects throughout the rest of the year. But looking ahead to next summer, or fiscal year 2027, Purdy is less sure about where things will stand, noting the looming economic uncertainty for many institutions.
“At that point they’re going to have a different outlook on funding for capital projects,” Purdy said.
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Preserving the Federal Data Trump Is Trying to Purge
Within days of taking office, the Trump administration began purging federal demographic data—on a wide range of topics, including public health, education and climate—from government websites to comply with the president’s bans on “gender ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Over the past five months, more than 3,000 taxpayer-funded data sets—many congressionally mandated—collected by federal agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Census Bureau, have been caught in the cross fire.
One of the first data sets to disappear was the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, an interactive map of U.S. Census tracts “marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution,” according to a description written under a previous administration.
It’s the type of detailed, comprehensive data academics rely on to write theses, dissertations, articles and books that often help to inform public policy. And without access to it and reams of other data sets, researchers in the United States and beyond won’t have the information they need to identify social, economic and technological trends and forge potential solutions.
“Removing this data is removing a big piece of knowledge from humanity,” said Cathy Richards, a civic science fellow and data inclusion specialist at the Open Environmental Data Project, which aims to strengthen the role of data in environmental and climate governance. “A lot of science is about innovating on what people did before. New scientists work with data they may have never seen before, but they’re using the knowledge that came before them to create something better. I don’t think we fully understand the impact [that] deleting 50 years of knowledge will have on science in the future.”
That’s why she and scores of other concerned academic librarians, researchers and data whizzes are collaborating—many of them as unpaid volunteers—to preserve as much of that data as they can on nongovernment websites. Some of the groups involved include OEDP, the Data Rescue Project, Safeguarding Research and Culture, the Internet Archive, the End of Term Archive, and the Data.gov Archive, which is run by the Harvard Law School Library.
For Richards at OEDP, data-preservation efforts started right after Trump won the election in November.
She and her colleagues remembered how Trump, a climate change denier, had removed some—mostly environmental—data in 2017, and they wanted to get a head start on preserving any data that could become a target during his second term. OEDP, which launched in 2020 in response to the first Trump administration’s environmental policies, which prioritized fossil fuel extraction, compiled a list of about 200 potentially vulnerable federal data sets researchers said would be critical to continuing their work. They spent the last two months of 2024 and the first weeks of 2025 collecting and downloading as many data sets as they could ahead of Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, which they then transferred to stable, independent and publicly accessible webpages.
“That took time,” Richards said, noting that not every data set and its accompanying metadata was easy to replicate. “Each varied significantly. Some required scraping. In one case I had to manually download 400 files, clicking each one every few minutes.”
While they made a lot of headway, OEDP’s small team wasn’t able to preserve all of the data sets on their list by late January. And once Trump took office, the research community’s fears that the president would start scrubbing federal data were quickly realized.
“Data started to go down very quickly,” at a much larger scale compared to 2017, Richards said, with anything that mentioned race, gender or the LGBTQ+ community, among other keywords, becoming a target. “We started getting emails from people saying these websites were no longer working, panicking because they needed it to finish their thesis.”
As of this month, OEDP has completed archiving about 100 data sets, including the CDC’s Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, and the White House’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. As it works to complete dozens more, it’s also in communication with the other data-preservation efforts to make sure the work isn’t duplicated and that researchers and the general public can maintain access to as much data as possible.
‘Disrupted Trust’
Prior to Trump’s inauguration, 307,851 data sets were available on Data.gov. One month later, the number had dipped to 304,621. In addition to data-rescue efforts, the winnowing prompted outcry from the research community.
“As scientists who rely on these data to understand the causes and consequences of population change for individuals and communities, but also as taxpayers who have supported the collection, dissemination, and storage of these data, we are deeply concerned,” read a joint statement that the Population Association of America and the Association of Population Centers published in early February. “Removing data indiscriminately, even temporarily, from secure portals maintained by federal agencies undermines trust in the nation’s statistical and scientific research agencies and puts the integrity of these data at risk.”
Federal judges have since ordered the government to restore many of the deleted data sets—as of Sunday, Data.gov said there are 311,609 data sets available—and the Trump administration has complied, albeit reluctantly. For instance, the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which since 2007 has tracked communities that may need support before, during or after natural disasters, came back online in February. But it now has a warning label from the Trump administration, which claims that the information does “not reflect biological reality” and the government therefore “rejects it.”
Richards, of OEDP, remains skeptical about the return of some of the data, speculating that the government may alter it to better fit its ideological narratives before restoring it. Thus, capturing the data before it gets taken down in the first place is “important for us to have that baseline proof that this is how things were on Jan. 18 and 19,” she said.
Lynda Kellum, a longtime academic data librarian who is helping to run the Data Rescue Project—which has already finished archiving some 1,000 federal data sets with the help of hundreds of volunteers—said she’s also “a little bit pessimistic” about the future of data collection. That’s not only because the Trump administration has fired thousands of federal workers who carry out that data collection, canceled billions in research contracts and removed reams of public data; it’s also because the Department of Government Efficiency has accessed protected personal data contained within some of those data sets.
“How do we actually talk to people about what’s protected and what those protections are for the data the government is collecting? DOGE has disrupted that trust,” she said. “For example, someone sent us a message asking us why they should participate in the American Community Survey when they weren’t sure what was going to happen with their (confidential, legally protected) data … There are still those protections in place, but there’s skepticism about whether those protections will hold because of what has happened in the past five months.”
Some legal protections are already eroding. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in determining that DOGE should have—for now—access to information collected by the Social Security Administration, including Social Security numbers, medical and mental health records, and family court information. (The case is now headed to a federal appeals court in Virginia that will decide on its merits.)
Henrik Schönemann, a digital history and humanities expert at Humboldt University of Berlin, who helps run the Safeguarding History and Culture initiative, which has also archived high volumes of federal data since January, said efforts to rescue federal data collections are vital to the global research community. “Even if the United States falls out of it, we are still here and we still need this data,” he said. And if and when this political moment passes, “hopefully having this data can help [the United States] rebuild.”
While Schönemann thinks it’s an “illusion” that independent federal data-preservation efforts can effectively counter the United States’ slide into autocracy, he believes it’s better than nothing.
“It’s building communities and showing people they can do something about it,” he said. “And maybe this empowerment could lead them to feeling empowered in other areas and give people hope.”
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Federal judge approves $2.8B settlement, paving way for US colleges to pay NCAA athletes millions (12 News, Phoenix, Arizona)
Higher Education Inquirer : Federal judge approves $2.8B settlement, paving way for US colleges to pay NCAA athletes millions (12 News, Phoenix, Arizona)