CSIRO staff will have to wait until the new year to find out if they still have a job, as Australia’s premier science research organisation begins consultations to determine how it will divide up to 350 job losses.
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AI speech is speech, and the government shouldn’t get to rewrite it. But across the country, officials are pressuring AI developers to bend outputs to their political preferences.
That danger isn’t theoretical. In July, Missouri’s (now former) Attorney General Andrew Bailey sent OpenAI a letter threatening to investigate the company. In it, Bailey accused their AI chatbot ChatGPT of partisan bias after it ranked President Donald Trump lowest among recent presidents on anti-Semitism. Calling the answer “objectively” wrong, Bailey’s letter cites Trump’s relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords, and his Jewish family ties as proof the ranking defies “objective facts.”
Although no lawsuit was filed, the looming threat no doubt put considerable pressure on the company to revise its outputs — a preview into how common and far-reaching such tactics will become if courts ever say, as some critics of AI are arguing, that AI speech isn’t explicitly protected by the Constitution.
Lawsuits against Character.AI — another chatbot geared more towards companionship and casual conversation — such as Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc., show that judges are already being asked to decide whether AI outputs are speech or something else entirely. If courts adopt the view that AI isn’t protected by the First Amendment, nothing would stop government officials from just mandating outputs rather than applying pressure. That’s why FIRE filed an amicus curiae “friend-of-the-court” brief in this litigation to emphasize that the First Amendment shields this expressive technology.
Free expression shouldn’t rise and fall with the party in power, forcing AI engineers to reshape their models to fit every new political climate.
The First Amendment’s protections don’t vanish simply because artificial intelligence is involved. AI is another medium (or tool) for expression. The engineers behind it and the users who prompt it are practicing their craft in much the same way writers, directors, and journalists are practicing theirs. So when officials pressure AI developers to alter or delete outputs, they’re censoring their speech.
By framing ChatGPT’s ranking as “consumer misrepresentation,” Bailey tried to turn protected political speech into grounds for a fraud investigation. Instead of using consumer protection laws for their intended purpose — to, for example, investigate faulty toasters or false advertising — Bailey’s gambit bends them into mechanisms for censoring AI-generated speech. The letter signals to every developer that just one politically sensitive answer could yield a government investigation.
The irony here is striking: Bailey represented the state of Missouri in Murthy v. Missouri, the high-profile lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of jawboning social-media platforms into removing COVID-19 content. In that case, Bailey argued the federal government’s nudging violated the First Amendment because it coerced private actors to police speech the government couldn’t ban outright.
New polling shows voters fear AI — but fear government censorship more. As lawmakers push new rules, are they protecting elections or silencing speech?
Government pressure is already reshaping AI in other ways. OpenAI’s new policy now warns that your ChatGPT conversations may be scanned, reviewed, and possibly reported to the police. This means users are faced with a choice of whether to risk a visit from law enforcement or forgo the benefits these AI tools offer. Absent robust First Amendment safeguards, the result is government censorship (including jawboning) on one side, and surveillance on the other. Both narrow the space for open inquiry that AI ought to expand.
FIRE’s answer is for the government to first apply the First Amendment appropriately to AI speech, and then improve government transparency to ensure the government is doing so. Our Social Media Administrative Reporting Transparency (“SMART”) Act would require federal officials to disclose their communications with an interactive computer service (like a chatbot) about moderating content. This way users, developers, and the public can see when officials try to influence what AI says. Similar state-level reforms could ensure that no government coercion occurs in the dark.
Free expression shouldn’t rise and fall with the party in power, forcing AI engineers to reshape their models to fit every new political climate. If we want AI to widen the marketplace of ideas, strong First Amendment protections are the place to start.
Based on the latest HEPI data, the Institute estimates the levy could “hamper universities’ ability to compete with institutions in other countries,” said independent researcher Mark Fothergill, who compiled the data.
The proposed 6% levy on international students’ tuition fees was first introduced in the government’s highly anticipated immigration white paper, coming as a surprise to many in the sector.
HEPI has warned that the policy will hit both large internationally engaged universities and smaller specialist institutions. According to the analysis, the largest financial losses are expected to hit big metropolitan universities with high proportions of international students.
Namely, University College London (UCL), which derives 79% of its fee income from non-UK students, could be faced with financial losses of £42m.
Meanwhile, Manchester University and King’s College London (KCL) could also be hit with heavy losses of £27m and £22m respectively, with 19 institutions paying at least £10m.
Stakeholders have pointed out that while the levy is intended to raise money for the “higher education and skills system”, it is unclear if all the money will come back out of the treasury, and how it will be spent if it does.
“International students are the backbone of our higher education system, contributing over £10 billion in fees to English universities – around £4.50 of every £10 of fee income,” Fothergill said.
“No wonder the 6% levy is seen as a tax on one of the country’s best-performing sectors,” he added.
With more details expected in the autumn budget, universities are left with two options: pass the cost onto students and become less competitive or absorb the costs and leave less funding for teaching and research, HEPI suggested.
While universities haven’t announced to what extent they would try to absorb the extra costs, a reduction in international student numbers – whose fees subsidise university research – would also hamper sector finances.
Speaking at a conference last month, the UK skills minister Jacqui Smith maintained the government was “not levying international students directly”, suggesting it would help show students’ economic contribution to local communities.
The levy is a shadow looming large over universities as they prepare for the next academic year
Nick Hillman, HEPI
“Threatening an expensive new tax on one of the country’s most successful sectors with only a rough idea of how the money will be used seems far from ideal,” said HEPI director Nick Hillman.
“Currently, the levy is a shadow looming large over universities as they prepare for the next academic year,” he added.
Amid policy volatility in other markets, the UK has increasingly been cited by students as the most stable of the ‘big four’ study destinations, with stakeholders keen to preserve this reputation.
“There are good reasons why Australia opted not to implement a levy when it was proposed there a couple of years ago,” warned Fothergil.
With the UK higher education sector already facing severe financial headwinds, Hillman said university leaders were worried the levy will be “yet another weight dragging them down in the struggle to remain globally competitive”.
According to OfS data, 72% of providers could be in deficit by 2025/26, with a sector-wide deficit totalling £1.6bn.
Alongside the levy, the government’s white paper proposed shortening the graduate route visa from two years to 18 months, and tougher Basic Compliance Assessments (BCA), with the latter set to be introduced in September.
Colleges have been bracing for potential revenue and enrollment hits since the second Trump administration quickly struck an aggressive approach to immigration and international students.
When the administration moved to bar Harvard University from enrolling international students, the private institution sought and won a court order temporarily blocking the move the next day.
The ongoing legal spat underscores just how critical international enrollment is for the Ivy League university. In the 2024-25 academic year, Harvard’s roughly 6,800 foreign students made up 27.2% of the university’s total student body.
And just this week, George Washington University cited, among other federal moves, a slowdown in visa processing and President Donald Trump’s travel bans when explaining the need for painful budget measures, including possible layoffs.
International students make up over 20% of enrollment at 11% of the colleges rated by Moody’s. But that figure may understate the financial impact of lower international enrollment.
Foreign students typically pay full tuition and fees at colleges, noted Moody’s analysts Debra Roane, vice president and senior credit officer, and Emily Raimes, associate managing director. And they do so at a time when the ranks of traditional-age college students are projected to decline significantly in the coming years.
“Universities intending to fill the gap with more international students may fall short,” Roane and Raimes said in the report.
The analysts ran a stress test on colleges rated by Moody’s to look at the financial impact of international student enrollment declines. Given a 10% drop in international enrollment, 54 out 392 institutions would suffer a hit to a measure of their operating performance of at least half a percentage point. Seven of those colleges would see those margins decrease by two to eight percentage points.
With a 20% drop in international enrollment, 130 colleges would lose at least half a percentage point from their margins, and 18 among them would lose two to eight points. Those with already low margins could face “significant financial stress,” Roane and Raimes said.
The analysts noted, however, that highly selective colleges or those with considerable financial reserves might “better absorb the impacts by adjusting operations or increasing domestic enrollment.” Other prominent colleges might be able to mitigate international student declines through alternative revenue sources like fundraising and endowment spending.
But others could have a much tougher time. Roane and Raimes pointed to specialty institutions, such as arts colleges — which are already facing a tough environment — whose student bodies can be over 30% international.
As political funding decisions continue to pose threats to both the welfare of disabled people and the higher education sector as a whole, disabled students find themselves caught up in a crossfire of financial cuts.
This was the subject of many coffee-break conversations at this year’s National Association of Disability Practitioners Conference, at which growing concerns around the financial viability of supporting disabled students effectively were shared by a number of specialist staff across the sector.
As a practitioner, and as a disabled student myself, it’s hard to shake the feeling that current support mechanisms are stretched to their limits. Without urgent investment and reform, it’s disabled students who will continue to bear the brunt.
Earlier in the year, Jim Dickinson flagged the potential fallout for disabled students arising from reforms to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) proposed in the government’s Pathways to Work Green Paper.
With over 100 Labour MPs signing an amendment opposing the changes, if rumours about the government’s compromise are to be believed, new students will soon lose out on some of the support that many existing disabled students are entitled to.
In the months since the reforms were first proposed, I’ve heard from a number of disabled students who shared serious concerns about what these cuts mean for their wellbeing, autonomy, and academic futures.
That’s what Alex*, a disabled student at the University of Brighton, told me. Alex currently uses their PIP to cover a number of health related costs, from “feeding tube equipment that isn’t covered by the NHS, mobility equipment and repairs, and [support to cover] additional travel costs to get to [their] appointments.”
Sadly, yet unsurprisingly, considerations of dropping-out of university are not uncommon. Recent data within the Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey revealed that disabled students are almost twice as likely to have considered quitting, with 83 per cent of disabled students reporting challenges related to the cost-of-living.
In my day-job, I often encounter the mistaken assumption that Disabled Students’ Allowance has the ability to fill all of the financial gaps that disabled students may face throughout their studies. DSA can act as a vital source of support for study-related costs, but it is not designed to replace social security.
For many disabled students, Personal Independence Payment is a lifeline for maintaining independence whilst at university. But with persistent delays and restrictions on DSA support and the proposal to restrict PIP even further for young people, many students like Alex are at risk of starting their studies without access to either.
In my own context, full-time students are expected to commit around 50 hours per week to their studies to meet the notional learning hours set by the SCQF. Yet, in the midst of the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, an estimated 68 per cent of undergraduates now work paid jobs alongside full-time study, exposing a continued disconnect between policy expectations and the lived reality of students today. A balancing act of work and study is unsustainable for many, and for disabled students, the pressures are even greater.
Abi* reflected this in her conversation with me: “I can’t work alongside my course with my health issues […] as student finance is so little, I use my PIP to stay afloat every month,” she says. “I wouldn’t be able to have my car, with my carer driving me – which is the only way I can get out of the house.”
At last check, Scope estimated that disabled households require an additional £1067 per month to meet basic living costs, as a result of the many financial barriers associated with existing as a disabled person in a society that is not constructed to compensate for a wide variety of access needs. Whilst PIP is not intended as an out-of-work benefit, many disabled students rely on it to fill the gaps left by inadequate financial support. Abi’s experience reflects the additional strain placed on disabled students by the “disability price tag”.
Systemic barriers were emphasised by a number of the students I spoke with. For Daisy* securing accessible housing has been a particular challenge financially.
Reflecting on her own living situation, she said: “I live in a very inaccessible city and can only live in university halls,” “it’s more expensive than most private rentals, but there’s no alternative.”
Back in Brighton, Alex* shared similar concerns: “my only option is to live in university accommodation, which costs significantly more on average than most house shares in my city.”
These accounts reflect a wider set of structural barriers that have a direct impact on the disabled student experience. Recent data from Disabled Students UK highlighted that affordable, accessible housing is often scarce, with 46 per cent of disabled students reporting that they’ve ended up paying more for housing that met their access needs.
And housing can’t be considered in isolation – it’s tied to the broader context of inaccessible transport, barriers to timely healthcare, inadequate personal care support, and the high costs associated with assistive equipment.
When these basic needs go unmet, it becomes significantly harder for disabled students to engage with university life: academically, socially, and beyond. Abi shared this concern, expressing fears that the removal of PIP would prevent her from having a wider student experience: “without my PIP, I wouldn’t be able to do anything extracurricular.”
If disabled students can’t afford to live independently, how can they fully participate in university life, let alone thrive outside of it?
That’s the question Katie* posed to me when we spoke. Preparing to undertake a PhD in Newcastle, Katie found the transition from university into work daunting and unsupported. “There’s still an expectation that you get your degree, then get a job,” she said. “But there’s very little recognition of how much harder that is for disabled graduates.”
A recent report from the Shaw Trust highlighted the persistence of the disability employment gap amongst graduates, emphasising that the gap is not about a lack of aspiration, it’s about structural and systemic barriers.
Katie’s experience reflects a broader trend – while much of the discourse centres around “employability” and economic outcomes, little is said about the lack of disability-informed careers support or the inflexibility of most graduate job opportunities. “Trying to find ‘disability confident’ employers reduces the job pool even further,” she adds. “Half of the jobs which could be hybrid or online aren’t. And trying to find a flexible job that allows time for medical appointments? Nearly impossible.”
These conversations emphasise access to equitable higher education risks being eroded by benefit restrictions, ongoing delays to DSA support, and widespread cuts to university funding.
While higher education institutions have made important strides in recent years, through the development of Disabled Student Commitment, and an increased focus on compliance with the Equality Act, service cuts across the sector threaten to undermine that progress.
According to our research at Disabled Students UK, only 38 per cent of disabled students currently feel that their support needs have been met by their institution. As public funding continues to shrink, many universities are being forced to reassess spending, with many opting to restructure services and streamline provision. But if disabled students are sidelined in these processes, the consequences will be stark.
In a climate of compounding cuts, institutions must take care to ensure that the interests of disabled students are not excluded from decision-making or deprioritised in budget reviews. Otherwise, we risk further entrenching inequity within a sector that prides itself on widening participation.
At the heart of all of this is one clear message – disabled students are not asking for luxury. They’re seeking the basic conditions needed to study, participate, and succeed. If we cannot meet even the baseline needs of disabled students, at both an institutional and state level, then we need to seriously question what kind of higher education system we are building, and who it’s truly for.
Disabled Students UK’s Annual Disabled Student Survey, the largest survey into HE accessibility and the disabled student experience in the UK, is open for responses until the end of July.
The Trump administration has ended $60 million in federal grant funding for Harvard University amid an ongoing fight with the private institution over concerns about alleged campus antisemitism.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced the move late Monday night.
“HHS is taking decisive action to uphold civil rights in higher education,” the agency posted on social media. “Due to Harvard University’s continued failure to address anti-Semitic harassment and race discrimination, HHS is terminating multiple multi-year grant awards—totaling approximately $60 million over their full duration. In the Trump Administration, discrimination will not be tolerated on campus. Federal funds must support institutions that protect all students.”
HHS also linked to a report from The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, which noted that the $60 million in grants came from funding via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Daily Caller reported that federal government officials sent a letter to Harvard that cites the university’s own findings of antisemitism on campus as detailed in a report published last month.
A CDC official, according to The Daily Caller, told the university that funding an institution that the Trump administration perceives as discriminatory would be inconsistent with the CDC’s mission. The CDC official concluded that “no corrective action is possible here.”
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
The latest move comes as the Trump administration has already pulled other grants and federal contracts and frozen more than $2.7 billion in federal funding—about a third of Harvard’s federal funds.
Harvard is also facing several investigations from the Trump administration.
The university has been locked in conflict with the federal government for months since it spurned Trump’s demands to overhaul governance, hiring, admissions and more, which prompted retaliation in the form of a funding freeze. Harvard sued the Trump administration last month, arguing that it sought to “impose unprecedented and improper control over the university.”
A hearing in that case is set for July.
Northwestern and Johns Hopkins began self-funding some of their own research after hundreds of millions of their federal funding had been lost or frozen due to the Trump administration.
Since Trump retook office, several federal agencies have abruptly changed their funding policies, cutting off billions in grants and contracts with little to no warning. The National Institutes of Health alone slashed $1.8 billion in a little over a month, according to findings published in JAMA last week.
Harvard is now similarly self-funding affected research. But the federal government’s attacks against it outpace those directed at many of its peers.
Last month, the Trump administration canceled over $2.2 billion in federal funds to Harvard after the Ivy League institution publicly rebuked its ultimatums, arguing they overstepped the federal government’s authority. Among the demands, the administration sought a third-party audit of the viewpoints of university employees and students and wanted Harvard to selectively curtain the power of certain employees based on their activism.
The university is now bracing for even more cuts and mounting a legal battle against the Trump administration to regain its federal funding.
The university intends to fight the government’s “unlawful freeze and termination” of many of its grants and is doing what it can in the interim, Garber and Manning said Wednesday.
“Although we cannot absorb the entire cost of the suspended or canceled federal funds, we will mobilize financial resources to support critical research activity for a transitional period as we continue to work with our researchers to identify alternative funding sources,” they said.
They added that the university will advocate for “the productive partnership between the federal government and research universities” that has existed for over eight decades.
Over 50 higher ed organizations, led by the American Council on Education, made a similar plea in a joint statement Wednesday.
“The entire country benefits when policymakers and higher education leaders respect a common understanding of the vital role colleges and universities play in advancing the social, cultural, and economic well-being of the United States,” the organizations said.
They argued that the release of research funds should not be contingent on which students colleges enroll, what programs they offer or how they oversee their instructors. The signatories also include the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the New England Commission of Higher Education, Harvard’s accreditor.
Prior to its announcement Wednesday, Harvard had already implemented a hiring freeze for the spring semester. And dozens of faculty members have pledged 10% of their salaries to shore up against the “severe financial damage” the university faces as it takes the Trump administration to court.
Garber recently made a similar pledge. He will take a voluntary 25% pay cut beginning in July, a university spokesperson said Thursday.
Harvard has not yet publicly disclosed the new president’s salary. But his predecessors have made north of $1 million annually, meaning his voluntary pay cut in fiscal 2026 would likely net the university six-figure savings.
Garber, a longstanding Harvard employee, has taken a pay reduction during turbulent financial times before. As provost, Garber took a 25% cut in 2020 in response to the pandemic, as did the university’s then-president and executive vice president.
The outlook for federal spending on education research continues to be grim.
That became clear last week with more cutbacks to education grants and mass firings at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that supports both research and education in science, engineering and math.
A fourth round of cutbacks took place on May 9. NSF observers were still trying to piece together the size and scope of this wave of destruction. A division focused on equity in education was eliminated and all its employees were fired. And the process for reviewing and approving future research grants was thrown into chaos with the elimination of division directors who were stripped of their powers.
Meanwhile, there was more clarity surrounding a third round of cuts that took place a week earlier on May 2. That round terminated more than 330 grants, raising the total number of terminated grants to at least 1,379, according to Grant Watch, a new project launched to track the Trump administration’s termination of grants at scientific research agencies. All but two of the terminated grants in early May were in the education division, and mostly targeted efforts to promote equity by increasing the participation of women and Black and Hispanic students in STEM fields. The number of active grants by the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM within the education directorate was slashed almost in half, from 902 research grants to 461.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
Combined with two earlier rounds of NSF cuts at in April, education now accounts for more than half of the nearly 1,400 terminated grants and almost three-quarters of their $1 billion value. Those dollars will no longer flow to universities and research organizations.
Cuts to STEM education dominate NSF grant terminations
More than half the terminated grants…
… and nearly three-quarters of their $1 billion value are in education
The cuts are being felt across the nation. Grant Watch also created a map of the United States, showing that both red and blue states are losing federal research dollars.
It remains unclear exactly how NSF is choosing which grants to cancel and exactly who is making the decisions. Weekly waves of cuts began after the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE entered NSF headquarters in mid April. Only 40 percent of the terminated grants were also in a database of 3,400 research grants compiled last year by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican. Cruz characterized them as “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” Sixty percent were not on the Cruz list.
Other NSF cuts also affect education. Earlier this year, NSF cut in half the number of new students that it would support through graduate school from 2,000 to 1,000. Universities are bracing to hear this summer if NSF will continue to support graduate students who are already a part of its graduate research fellowship program.
Related: Education research takes another hit in latest DOGE attack
Developing story
NSF watchers were still compiling a list of the research grants that were terminated on May 9, the date of the most recent fourth round of research cuts. It was unclear if any research grants to promote equity in STEM education remained active.
The Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM, a unit of the Education Directorate, was “sunset,” according to a May 9 email sent to NSF employees and obtained by the Hechinger Report, and all of its employees were fired. According to the email, this “reduction in force” is slated to be completed by July 12. However, later on May 9, a federal judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked the Trump administration from implementing its “reduction in force” firings of federal employees at the NSF and 19 other agencies.
Several congressionally mandated programs are housed within the eliminated equity division, including Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) and the Eddie Bernice Johnson initiative, which promotes STEM participation for students with disabilities.
The process for reviewing and approving new grant awards was thrown into chaos with the elimination of all NSF division directors, a group of middle managers who were stripped of their powers on May 8. In addition, NSF slashed its ranks of its most senior executives and its visiting scientists, engineers and educators. That leaves many leadership positions at NSF uncertain, including the head of the entire education directorate.
Legal update
An initial hearing for a group of three legal cases by education researchers against the Department of Education is scheduled for May 16. At the hearing, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., will hear arguments over whether the court should temporarily restore terminated research studies and data collections and bring back fired Education Department employees while it considers whether the Trump administration exceeded its executive authority.
A first hearing scheduled for May 9 was postponed. At the May 16 hearing, the court will hear two similar motions from two different cases: one filed by the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) and the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), and the other filed by National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). A third suit by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) was filed in federal court in Maryland and will not be part of the May 16 hearing.
Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].
This story about NSF education cuts was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.
Historically, much of Duke’s research enterprise has been devoted to work on behalf of the government. Federal grant support made up nearly three-quarters of the $1.5 billion in sponsored research funds that Duke received in fiscal 2024, much of it going toward health science.
The university, in its latest financial statement, described its medical school as “one of the largest biomedical research enterprises in the country.” And funding just from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — which houses the National Institutes of Health — accounted for 58% of all of Duke’s sponsored research funding.
The National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy also accounted for tens of millions of dollars in the university’s funding.
Since President Donald Trump retook office, those agencies and others have been cutting and delaying grant awards at a frantic pace, including moves to cap reimbursement for indirect research costs at NIH and the Energy Department. Both funding caps have been blocked in courts — at least for now — but the Trump administration is continuing to fight the legal cases against the policies.
Uncertainty over the funding will likely loom for some time to come.
For Duke, the NIH indirect cost cap would mean $194 million in lost funding each year, President Vincent Price and other leaders said in February.
“Much is at stake,” the officials said then. “Our nation’s world-leading research enterprise has been enabled by — and will only be sustained by — partnership and co-investment from both the government and higher education.”
They also signaled at the time that “careful planning and difficult decisions” could lie ahead.
Today, Duke is trying to cut $350 million from its budget, according to reports of the university’s presentation, as it grapples with funding gaps under the Trump administration.
As it trims down, Duke has paused capital spending on buildings, renovations and other projects that are “not fully funded or deemed essential,” the university said Wednesday.
It’s also reviewing universitywide programs — such as technology adoption, off-campus real estate and on-campus space consolidation — for potential cost-savings.
Employee benefits could also be on the chopping block.
“A study is also under way to assess how certain changes to the university’s benefits may generate savings while protecting the program’s strong competitive position,” Duke said.
However, Executive Vice President Daniel Ennis told employees Wednesday that the university still plans to give out merit raises and will not change its tuition grant program for children of employees.
Universities around the country have been scrambling in recent months to open breathing room in their budgets to cope with the uncertainty and disruption created by cuts and delays at federal agencies. Many have frozen hiring and budgets to maintain financial flexibility while others have laid off employees to cope with cuts.
Education research has a big target on its back.
Of the more than 1,000 National Science Foundation grants killed last month by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, some 40 percent were inside its education division. These grants to further STEM education research accounted for a little more than half of the $616 million NSF committed for projects canceled by DOGE, according to Dan Garisto, a freelance journalist reporting for Nature, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that also covers science news.
The STEM education division gives grants to researchers at universities and other organizations who study how to improve the teaching of math and science, with the goal of expanding the number of future scientists who will fuel the U.S. economy. Many of the studies are focused on boosting the participation of women or Black and Hispanic students. The division had a roughly $1.2 billion budget out of NSF’s total annual budget of $9 billion.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
Neither the NSF nor the Trump administration has provided a list of the canceled grants. Garisto told me that he obtained a list from an informal group of NSF employees who cobbled it together themselves. That list was subsequently posted on Grant Watch, a new project to track the Trump administration’s termination of grants at scientific research agencies. Garisto has been working with outside researchers at Grant Watch and elsewhere to document the research dollars that are affected and analyze the list for patterns.
“For NSF, we see that the STEM education directorate has been absolutely pummeled,” Noam Ross, a computational disease ecologist and one of the Grant Watch researchers, posted on Bluesky.
The steep cuts to NSF education research follow massive blows in February and March at the Department of Education, where almost 90 research and data collection projects were canceled along with the elimination of Regional Education Laboratories and the firing of almost 90 percent of the employees in the research and data division, known as the Institute of Education Sciences.
Many, but not all, of the canceled research projects at NSF were also in a database of 3,400 research grants compiled by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican. Cruz characterized them as “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”
Ross at Grant Watch analyzed the titles and abstracts or summaries of the terminated projects and discovered that “Black” was the most frequent word among them. Other common words were “climate,” “student,” “network,” “justice,” “identity,” “teacher,” and “undergraduate.”
At least two of the terminated research studies focused on improving artificial intelligence education, which President Donald Trump promised to promote in an April 23 executive order,“Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth.”
“There is something especially offensive about this EO from April 23 about the need for AI education… Given the termination of my grant on exactly this topic on April 26,” said Danaé Metaxa in a post on Bluesky that has since been deleted. Metaxa, an assistant professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, was developing a curriculum on how to teach AI digital literacy skills by having students build and audit generative AI models.
Another canceled grant involved college students creating educational content about AI for social media to see if that content would improve AI literacy and the ability to detect misinformation. The lead researcher, Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, was almost midway through her two-year grant of less than $270,000. “There is not a DEI aspect of this work,” said Fiesler. “My best guess is that the reason it was flagged was the word ‘misinformation.’”
Confusion surrounded the cuts. Bob Russell, a former NSF project officer who retired in 2024, said some NSF project officers were initially unaware that the grants they oversee had been canceled. Instead, university officials who oversee research were told, and those officials notified researchers at their institutions. Researchers then contacted their project officers. One researcher told me that the termination notice states that researchers may not appeal the decision, an administrative process that is ordinarily available to researchers who feel that NSF has made an unfair or incorrect decision.
Related: DOGE’s death blow to education studies
Some of the affected researchers were attending the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Denver on April 26 when more than 600 grants were cut. Some scholars found out by text that their studies had been terminated. Normally festive evening receptions were grim. “It was like a wake,” said one researcher.
The Trump administration wants to slash NSF’s budget and headcount in half, according to Russell. Many researchers expect more cuts ahead.
Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].
This story about NSF education research cuts was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.