Australia’s first national plan for artificial intelligence aims to upskill workers to boost productivity, but will leave the tech largely unregulated and without its own legislation to operate under.
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Dozens of the Education Department’s programs were scattered across Washington D.C. last week, but a few core components remain at the Lyndon B. Johnson Building on Maryland Avenue: the offices for civil rights, special education and federal student aid (FSA).
These three offices, particularly FSA, oversee some of the department’s most direct services to taxpayers—including the Pell grant, federal student loans, discrimination complaints and individualized education programs for students with disabilities—so moving them would likely be more complicated and controversial.
Since President Trump first took office, some of the more vocal pushback to his plan for shutting down the department has come from the parents, families and advocacy groups who depend on these offices. But other programs at ED, including those in the Office of Postsecondary Education, were outsourced to other agencies Tuesday through a series of six interagency agreements as part of a broader effort to diminish the department. And even though the three offices were spared in this latest round of dismantling, they may not be safe in the long run.
President Trump has talked about moving FSA to the Small Business Association and sending special education to the Department of Health and Human Services. Plus, as the Department of Justice has become increasingly involved in education issues, several experts anticipate OCR could be relocated there.
A senior department official told reporters last week that ED is “still exploring the best plan” for those offices and the programs they oversee.
In the meantime, here’s a rundown of what we know about Trump’s latest effort to dismantle ED.
The Trump administration has been clear from the start: its “final mission” is to shut down the department. Officials touted this latest action as a key step toward that goal.
Even though ED is still going to oversee the programs, this move is a way for Trump officials to show they don’t need the department itself to ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” as stated in Trump’s executive order.
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Education Secretary Linda McMahon told department staff last week that it’s all part of an effort to “streamline bureaucracy” and “return power to the states.” But she acknowledged that the agreements are a temporary solution and that Congress will need to sign off eventually.
Further, she told staff that it’s important to explain to the American public that, in the long run, shutting down the department doesn’t mean getting rid of all its programs.
“So it is important how we message that,” McMahon said, citing survey data that showed the majority of Americans opposed shutting down the department but that changed when they learned the programs would remain. “Because honestly, folks, and I’m not trying to sugarcoat this, in the end of this the goal will be to have Congressional votes to close the Department of Education.”
This move comes after years of conservatives lambasting the department for being too woke. They, like McMahon, have said reducing the federal role in education will be a way to protect students’ and parents’ rights.
“Each of us in this room has a chance to be part of history,” McMahon said.
Many higher education policy analysts say not much. Aside from outsourcing dozens of grant programs and adding extra steps to the award allocation process, little is expected to change (at least directly). Still, higher ed experts are divided on whether the funding system can survive such a transition.
Congress will still decide how much money is available and what it should go toward. And the Department of Education will still receive funding, post grant applications and set guidelines for the competitions. But now, rather than that money going directly from ED to institutions, it will be funneled through four other agencies: the Departments of Health, Interior, Labor, and State, which will then dole out the money to colleges and universities.
These agencies, particularly the Department of Labor and its Employment and Training Administration, will now be the ones to actually run the competition, decide who wins and allocate the funds. When colleges have questions about drawing down federal dollars or staying in compliance with department policies, it won’t be ED they contact.
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Most of the higher education grant programs are heading to the Department of Labor, including TRIO, programs supporting historically Black colleges and universities and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education.
This shift follows a growing push across the country to better align higher education with workforce demands. Some, including the Trump administration argue that it makes sense to move college grant programs to the Department of Labor, where the mission is improving “the welfare of the wage earners” and “advanc[ing] opportunities for profitable employment.”
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
One senior department official told reporters that if education is about creating the workers of tomorrow then “nowhere is it better housed than at the Department of Labor [which] thinks about this night and day.” In fact, the department has already integrated its Office of Career Technical and Adult Education with Labor and a handful of states have merged their departments of education and workforce. (During President Trump’s first term, officials briefly proposed merging Education and Labor, though that idea didn’t move forward.)
But critics fear that Labor won’t be able to effectively oversee grants for short-term, technical training programs, let alone broader initiatives focused on college access, equity and student success. Largely, they worry that the plan could sow confusion, weaken accountability measures and eventually lead to the consolidation of programs that are similar but not duplicative and intentionally separate.
Angela Hanks, a Democrat who previously served as ETA’s acting assistant secretary, said in a social media post that “it’s hard to describe” the “nonsensical” nature of what Trump and McMahon are doing and compared the transfer of power to “having a frog carry a camel on its back.”
Currently, Hanks said, the main youth-focused program at Labor serves about 130,000 students while TRIO alone serves about 870,000. The office would also take on even larger programs like Title I funding for low-income kids at K-12 schools, which serve up to 26 million students.
The interagency agreements do appear to maintain the operation of existing programs for now, but critics argue details both large and small in the text that add bureaucracy and confusion to the process rather than reducing it.
For example, while the seven grant programs for minority-serving institutions are still expected to continue, various parts are being sent off to different agencies. Four grants that involve Alaskan-, Native American–, Asian American– and Pacific Islander–serving institutions will be housed at the Department of Interior. Labor will oversee the remaining three, which support HBCUs as well as predominantly Black- and Hispanic-serving institutions.
Federal policy restricts some institutions from receiving multiple awards across different grant designations despite being eligible, but spreading out various MSI grants could still create complications. Historically, when deciding which grant program is the best fit or clarifying compliance standards, institutions could go to one office for the answers. Now, they may have to contact multiple different staffers.
Multiple higher ed experts have also expressed the concern that rather than cutting grant funds, which only Congress can do, the Trump administration may try to consolidate programs that are similar but not identical.
For example, CCAMPIS, a program focused on subsidizing child care for student parents, is being moved to HHS, which already oversees the Community Services and Child Care and Development Block Grants. These programs target a broader swath of low-income individuals and families, so college access advocates fear that if the funding pots are merged, it could pull grant dollars away from the student parents they were intended for.
Language describing such efforts to “integrate” programs appears in the announcement’s news release, as well as in the fact sheets and agreements. But legal experts say that’s what Congress was trying to avoid by creating ED, and they expect the agreements to face court challenges.
“The Department’s actions will expand federal involvement, rather than streamline it,” said Josie Eskow Skinner, a former general counsel attorney at ED who is now a partner at Sligo Law Group. “As a result of these agreements, states will now have to deal with the potentially conflicting or duplicative demands of multiple federal agencies with no central point of coordination or technical assistance.”
In a hearing held by the House Education and Workforce Committee the day after McMahon announced the interagency agreements, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, said the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “laid the groundwork for this illegal move of this program and shutting down the Department of Education.”
Project 2025, a sweeping 900-page manual, outlines a multitude of recommended changes across nearly all sectors of the federal government, including how to shut down ED. Following last week’s decision, the Trump administration has made several of the suggested changes including moving career education and postsecondary programs to Labor and transferring tribal college programs to the Interior Department. (Lindsey Burke, who now serves as ED’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs, authored the manual’s education chapter.)
Still remaining on the Project 2025 to-do list include moving the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice and giving Treasury control of federal student aid.
Trump has repeatedly denied involvement with the project, even though actions in the first few months closely follow the project’s recommendations.
But there’s one key way McMahon’s actions so far differ from Project 2025—she’s not making funding cuts or eliminating programs. Project 2025 recommends doing so through an act of Congress.
As required by SUSF regulations, the 12-university system has conducted productivity reviews of degree programs every three to four years for roughly the past decade and a half, Sikes said.
Over that time, the system’s institutions have axed over 100 programs based on those reviews, she said. Most of those programs were cut in 2011, when the first such review yielded 492 programs deemed to be underperforming, leading university officials to terminate 73 of them.
In this year’s review, SUSF officials looked for bachelor’s programs graduating fewer than 30 students over the last three years, master’s programs awarding fewer than 20 degrees and doctorate programs with fewer than 10 graduates during that period.
Master’s programs made up 55% of the 214 that fell below graduate thresholds. But, Sikes added, there is a reason for that: SUSF universities often award master’s degrees to students who don’t complete doctoral programs so they have something to show for their time and effort.
Another 31% of the underperforming programs were bachelor’s, and 14% were doctorate.
For the eight programs set for suspension, the universities will stop enrolling students and “take a hard look” at either updating the curriculum to improve the program or deciding to wind it down, Sikes said.
While Florida’s university system has reviewed its program productivity for years, other states have begun mandating their public colleges trim their offerings along similar lines.
This summer, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education announced that six of the state’s public colleges planned to eliminate 75 programs, suspend another 101 and consolidate 232 others in response to a new state law.
In April, Indiana lawmakers introduced graduation quotas for public college programs, requiring a three-year average of at least 15 graduates for bachelor’s programs, 10 for associate degrees, seven for master’s programs and three for doctoral degrees. The quotas were part of a controversial last-minute bonanza of new higher ed policies that lawmakers baked into a budget bill this year.
The speed of the program cuts led to confusion and chaos for some Indiana faculty this summer. “Even tenured faculty are wondering, am I going to have a job in two months?” one faculty governance leader in Indiana told local media in June.
Ohio enacted a similar law this spring, called SB 1, which has led to dozens of proposed program cuts at the state’s public universities.
Australian National University (ANU) staff feel “fundamentally disconnected” from the university’s leadership, a group of academics told a federal governance inquiry on Wednesday.
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Immigration Minister Lena Diab told a House of Commons committee last week that the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act (Bill C-12) would target “people who are going to be committing large-scale fraud”.
However, an opposition member, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner, rejected the idea that the Liberal government needs sweeping powers to keep the immigration system functioning.
“That sounds like an authoritarian dictatorship to me,” Rempel Garner said.
Languages Canada Executive Director Gonzalo Peralta told The PIE News there was a need to define under what conditions Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) could cancel student visas.
“The term ‘public interest’ as grounds for cancelling visas or applications is vague and does not provide the assurances needed to ensure that legitimate students are not inadvertently impacted by the legislation,” Peralta said.
At the committee meeting, Rempel Garner argued: “It seems like you’re trying to give yourself and your department more powers to correct mistakes in the system that they could have made in screening out potential fraud to begin with.”
The term ‘public interest’ as grounds for cancelling visas or applications is vague and does not provide the assurances needed
In the wake of a large number of fraudulent study permit applications made by unscrupulous education agents, in 2023 the department implemented a system requiring applicants to present a verified letter of acceptance from a designated learning institution in order to obtain a study permit.
In many cases, the students said they were not aware that their agent was submitting fraudulent documents on their behalf.
MP Rempel Garner called out the minister for blaming students and other newcomers to Canada. “Why don’t you make the system work instead of punishing the victims of human trafficking,” she demanded at the meeting.
Larissa Bezo, president of the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE), told The PIE her group supports measures to uphold the integrity of the International Student Program. “However, we do not want to see international students who have been the victims of fraud unfairly punished,” Bezo said.
Peralta of Languages Canada condemned the Liberal government for failing to consult with the sector about this legislation and other policy changes.
“In the case of the proposed Bill C-12, a more comprehensive definition is needed of the specific conditions under which IRCC could cancel visas,” Peralta said.
Canadian immigration policy has hit the headlines over the past week after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government set out its intention to cut new international study permits by more than 50% in 2026-2028 – going further with enrolment caps that are already causing significant problems for the international education sector.
Michigan State University has cut 99 positions as part of a comprehensive cost-reduction strategy aimed at addressing mounting financial pressures, President Kevin Guskiewicz announced in a recent letter to campus stakeholders.
The elimination of positions—spanning executive roles, support staff, faculty, and academic staff—represents the first phase of an $85 million budget reduction plan the institution unveiled in May. The cuts do not include non-renewed fixed-term appointments.
The predominantly white institution in East Lansing is targeting a 6% spending reduction this fiscal year, totaling $50 million, with plans to cut an additional $35 million—or 3%—in the following fiscal year.
Departments were directed to minimize personnel reductions during the initial year of cuts. Nearly two-thirds of this year’s $50 million reduction came from non-personnel expenses, including supplies and services, though layoffs proved unavoidable.
Beyond internal budget constraints, federal funding cuts eliminated an additional 83 positions at the university. In late July, 94 MSU Extension staff members lost their positions following the discontinuation of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed), which provided nutrition and physical activity programming to low-income families.
Combined, the reductions have impacted 1.3% of MSU’s workforce since March 1.
Guskiewicz attributed the budget crisis to multiple factors: double-digit increases in employee healthcare costs, federal funding reductions, and accumulated general fund deficits from previous years.
The financial challenges persist despite MSU reporting its second-largest fall enrollment of 51,838 students and receiving a modest 2.1% increase in state appropriations, totaling approximately $333.8 million.
“We have taken the first difficult and necessary steps to assure the university’s financial sustainability,” Guskiewicz wrote, thanking faculty and staff for their commitment to the institution’s mission.
The university will launch its next budgeting cycle shortly, with request letters scheduled for early November and submissions due Jan. 23. Guskiewicz pledged to share additional information as the fiscal year concludes.
MSU is providing outplacement services to eligible individuals affected by the cuts. The president acknowledged that some reductions continue to unfold through union and Human Resources processes.
“I appreciate the compassion our teams are showing one another during this period, as well as your patience in understanding that we are trying to share information transparently and in a timely manner,” he stated.
The university operates on a nearly $3.7 billion budget, with $1.7 billion allocated to the general fund.
This event is in collaboration with studentsriseup.org
Students Rise Up (Project Rise Up) is a plan to organize millions of students to disrupt business as usual and force our schools and our political system to finally work for us.
Right now, billionaires and fascists are attacking our schools because they know that student protest could bring them down. Our power is that we outnumber them. If working people and students unite to use our power of disruption and non-cooperation, we can crack the foundations of their power.
It all starts on November 7th, 2025 with walkouts and protests at hundreds of schools around the country. Join us.
More than three dozen higher education organizations, led by the American Council on Education, are urging the Trump administration to reconsider its plan to require colleges to submit years of new data on applicants and enrolled students, disaggregated by race and sex.
As proposed, the reporting requirements would begin on Dec. 3., giving colleges just 17 weeks to provide extensive new admissions data, ACE President Ted Mitchell wrote in an Oct. 7 public comment. Mitchell argued that isn’t enough time for most colleges to effectively comply and would lead to significant errors.
ACE’s comment came as part of a chorus of higher education groups and colleges panning the proposal. The plan’s public comment period ended Tuesday, drawing over 3,000 responses.
A survey conducted by ACE and the Association for Institutional Research found that 91% of polled college leaders expressed concern about the proposed timeline, and 84% said they didn’t have the resources and staff necessary to collect and process the data.
Delaying new reporting requirements would leave time for necessary trainings and support services to be created, Mitchell said. The Education Department — which has cut about half its staff under President Donald Trump — should also ensure that its help desk is fully crewed to assist colleges during implementation, Mitchell said.
In August, Trump issued a memo requiring colleges to annually report significantly more admissions data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
The Education Department’s resulting proposal would require colleges to submit six years’ worth of undergraduate and graduate data in the first year of the IPEDS reporting cycle, including information on standardized test scores, parental education level and GPA.
In a Federal Register notice, the Education Department said this information would increase transparency and “help to expose unlawful practices″ at colleges. The initial multi-year data requirement would “establish a baseline of admissions practices” before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions, it said.
But the department’s proposal and comments have caused unease among colleges, higher ed systems and advocacy groups in the sector.
“While we support better data collection that will help students and families make informed decisions regarding postsecondary education, we fear that the new survey component will instead result in unreliable and misleading data that is intended to be used against institutions of higher education,” Mitchell said in the coalition’s public comment.
The wording of the data collection survey — or lack thereof — also raised some red flags.
Mitchell criticized the Trump administration for introducing the plan without including the text of the proposed questions. Without having the actual survey to examine, “determining whether the Department is using ‘effective and efficient’ statistical survey methodology seems unachievable,” he said.
The Education Department said in the Federal Register notice that the additional reporting requirements will likely apply to four-year colleges with selective admissions processes, contending their admissions and scholarships “have an elevated risk of noncompliance with the civil rights laws.”
During the public comment period, the department specifically sought feedback on which types of colleges should be required to submit the new data.
Several religious colleges voiced concerns about the feasibility of completing the Education Department’s proposed request without additional manpower.
“Meeting the new requirements would necessitate developing new data extracts, coding structures, validation routines, and quality assurance checks — all while maintaining existing reporting obligations,” Ryon Kaopuiki, vice president for enrollment management at the University of Indianapolis, said in a submitted comment.
The religious college’s Office of Institutional Research has just two staff members, Kaopuiki said. The Education Department would not provide additional funding and did not suggest it would offer technical support.
Vanguard University of Southern California, another religious institution, said in a public comment that the new work would fall on just one staff member.
A majority of the college leaders surveyed by ACE and AIR said it would take their institution between 250 to 499 hours of work to comply with the new reporting requirements. The federal proposal estimated that the changes will create over 740,000 hours of additional work across the higher ed sector.
But the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities said required labor will be much worse.
“The strain this collection will place on institutions cannot be overstated,” NAICU, which signed on to ACE’s letter, said in a separately submitted comment. “The proposal greatly underestimates both the burden and timeframe, particularly for colleges with limited staff, infrastructure, and resources already stretched thin” by other new reporting requirements.
Vanguard and the University of Indianapolis urged the department to delay implementing the new requirements until the 2027–28 collection cycle and to test them via a pilot with volunteer institutions before rolling them out nationally.
The institutions also proposed an exemption for small colleges, though they suggested different enrollment cut-offs — the University of Indianapolis suggested fewer than 750 full-time students, while Vanguard pitched fewer than 3,000.
The University of Texas System, along with the University of Alabama System and the ACE coalition, raised concerns about student privacy and the feasibility of collecting graduate-level data.
“Graduate admissions are inherently decentralized and vary by program,” Archie Holmes, the Texas system’s executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, wrote in a public comment. “Required data elements such as program-level GPA and test scores are not uniformly collected and may not be directly comparable.”
He recommended that the Education Department focus on undergraduate data until the process has been standardized.
Holmes also flagged that colleges risk inadvertently sharing private student data by disaggregating it so significantly, especially in smaller programs.
The University of Alabama System likewise warned of “significant legal and privacy risks” if the Education Department did not provide “clear federal guidance” on privacy protections.
The presidents of Capella and Strayer universities, two for-profit institutions owned by the same company, asked that the Education Department exclude noncompetitive scholarships from its reporting requirements for colleges that accept all or a “vast majority” of their applicants.
For example, a scholarship “whose only eligibility requirement is student persistence” does not “bear any connection to race” and reporting data on its recipients “would not advance the Department’s goal of detecting or preventing racial discrimination,” they said in a joint comment. But it would add an unnecessary administrative burden for colleges, they said.
With 18 per cent of students reporting mental health difficulties, a figure which has tripled in just seven years, universities are navigating a crisis.
The student experience can compound many of the risk factors for poor mental health – from managing constrained budgets and navigating the cost of learning crisis, to moving away from established support systems, and balancing high-stakes assessment with course workload and part-time work.
In response, universities provide a range of free support services, including counselling and wellbeing provision, alongside specialist mental health advisory services. But if we’re honest, these services are under strain. Despite rising expenditure, they’re still often under-resourced, overstretched, and unable to keep pace with growing demand. With staff-student ratios at impossible levels and wait times for therapeutic support often exceeding ten weeks, some students are turning to alternatives for more immediate care.
And in this void, artificial intelligence is stepping in. While ChatGPT-written essays dominate the sector’s AI discussions, the rise of “pastoral AI” highlights a far more urgent and overlooked AI use case – with consequences more troubling than academic misconduct.
For the uninitiated, the landscape of “affective” or “pastoral” AI is broad. Mainstream tools like Microsoft’s Copilot or OpenAI’s ChatGPT are designed for productivity, not emotional support. Yet research suggests that users increasingly turn to them for exactly that – seeking help with breakups, mental health advice, and other life challenges, as well as essay writing. While affective conversations may account for only a small proportion of overall use (under three per cent in some studies), the full picture is poorly understood.
Then there are AI “companions” such as Replika or Character.AI – chatbots built specifically for affective use. These are optimised to listen, respond with empathy, offer intimacy, and provide virtual friendship, confidants, or even “therapy”.
This is not a fringe phenomenon. Replika claims over 25 million users, while Snapchat’s My AI counts more than 150 million. The numbers are growing fast. As the affective capacity of these tools improves, they are becoming some of the most popular and intensively used forms of generative AI – and increasingly addictive.
A recent report found that users spend an average of 86 minutes a day with AI companions – more than on Instagram or YouTube, and not far behind TikTok. These bots are designed to keep users engaged, often relying on sycophantic feedback loops that affirm worldviews regardless of truth or ethics. Because large language models are trained in part through human feedback, its output is often highly sycophantic – “agreeable” responses which are persuasive and pleasing – but these can become especially risky in emotionally charged conversations, especially with vulnerable users.
For students already experiencing poor mental health, the risks are acute. Evidence is emerging that these engagement-at-all-costs chatbots rarely guide conversations to a natural resolution. Instead, their sycophancy can fuel delusions, amplify mania, or validate psychosis.
Adding to these concerns, legal cases and investigative reporting are surfacing deeply troubling examples: chatbots encouraging violence, sending unsolicited sexual content, reinforcing delusional thinking, or nudging users to buy them virtual gifts. One case alleged a chatbot encouraged a teenager to murder his parents after they restricted his screen time; another saw a chatbot advise a fictional recovering meth addict to take a “small hit” after a bad week. These are not outliers but the predictable by-products of systems optimised for empathy but unbound by ethics.
And it’s young people who are engaging with them most. More than 70 per cent of companion app users are aged 18 to 35, and two-thirds of Character.AI’s users are 18 to 24 – the same demographic that makes up the majority of our student population.
The potential harm here is not speculative. It is real and affecting students right now. Yet “pastoral” AI use remains almost entirely absent from higher education’s AI conversations. That is a mistake. With lawsuits now spotlighting cases of AI “encouraged” suicides among vulnerable young people – many of whom first encountered AI through academic use – the sector cannot afford to ignore this.
Understanding why students turn to AI for pastoral support might help. Reports highlight loneliness and vulnerability as key indicators. One found that 17 per cent of young people valued AI companions because they were “always available,” while 12 per cent said they appreciated being able to share things they could not tell friends or family. Another reported that 12 per cent of young people were using chatbots because they had no one else to talk to – a figure that rose to 23 per cent among vulnerable young people, who were also more likely to use AI for emotional support or therapy.
We talk often about belonging as the cornerstone of student success and wellbeing – with reducing loneliness a key measure of institutional effectiveness. Pastoral AI use suggests policymakers may have much to learn from this agenda. More thinking is needed to understand why the lure of an always-available, non-judgemental digital “companion” feels so powerful to our students – and what that tells us about our existing support.
Yet AI discussions in higher education remain narrowly focused, on academic integrity and essay writing. Our evidence base reflects this: the Student Generative AI Survey – arguably the best sector-wide tool we have – gives little attention to pastoral or wellbeing-related uses. The result is, however, that data remains fragmented and anecdotal on this area of significant risk. Without a fuller sector-specific understanding of student pastoral AI use, we risk stalling progress on developing effective, sector-wide strategies.
This means institutions need to start a different kind of AI conversation – one grounded in ethics, wellbeing, and emotional care. It will require drawing on different expertise: not just academics and technologists, but also counsellors, student services staff, pastoral advisers, and mental health professionals. These are the people best placed to understand how AI is reshaping the emotional lives of our students.
Any serious AI strategy must recognise that students are turning to these tools not just for essays, but for comfort and belonging too, and we must offer something better in return.
If some of our students find it easier to confide in chatbots than in people, we need to confront what that says about the accessibility and design of our existing support systems, and how we might improve and resource them. Building a pastoral AI strategy is less about finding a perfect solution, but more about treating pastoral AI seriously, as a mirror which reflects back at us student loneliness, vulnerabilities, and institutional support gaps. These reflections should push us to re-centre these experiences, to reimagine our pastoral support provision, into an image that’s genuinely and unapologetically human.
Members of the public have until Sept. 15 to weigh in on the National Institutes of Health’s plan to curb how much taxpayer money goes to journals to publish some federally funded research.
The agency, which is the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research, wants to do that by capping—or potentially disallowing—the amount of money it gives to NIH-funded researchers who want to make their work publicly accessible by paying publishers article processing charges. A July 30 request for information memo outlined five potential options, which the NIH says are all aimed at balancing the “feasibility of providing research results with maximizing the use of taxpayer funds to support research.”
Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, has said the policy could be a mechanism for ending what he sees as the “perverse incentives” driving the $19 billion for-profit academic publishing industry and making it “much harder for a small number of scientific elite to say what’s true and false.”
But open-information advocates and experts who have reviewed the NIH’s proposed plans for capping the amount it will pay for article processing charges said it likely won’t reform academia’s incentive structure or rein in publishers, including some that charge academic researchers as much as $12,690 per article to make their work freely accessible to the public and more likely to get cited.
“It is important to keep in mind that any cap is a cap on the amount that can be budgeted to be paid from a grant. It is not a cap on what publishers can charge. What publishers charge may be influenced by a budget cap, but many other factors will also impact on that,” said Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a professor and coordinator for research professional development at the University of Illinois library. “It is more likely that a budget cap causes publishers that charge less to raise their fees—the ceiling will become the floor—than it is that publishers charging more will lower their fees.”
The proposal, which if adopted would go into effect Jan. 1, 2026, is aimed at addressing one of the many criticisms the Trump administration has made about federally funded academic research and the journals that publish the results.
In May, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, said he was considering preventing federally funded scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and launching in-house journals instead, claiming without evidence that pharmaceutical companies control the journals.
Then, in July, the NIH sped up the implementation of a Biden-era rule requiring federally funded researchers to immediately make their research findings publicly accessible. And earlier this month, Bhattacharya criticized academia’s “publish or perish culture” in a statement about the NIH’s strategy for advancing its mission.
“It favors the promotion of only favorable results, and replication work is little valued or rewarded,” he wrote. “We are exploring various mechanisms to support scientists focused on replication work, to publish negative findings, and to elevate replication research.”
Given all of that context, the publisher fee cap plan is “more or less a warning shot across the bow that the NIH is serious about scholarly communication reform,” said Chris Marcum, who was assistant director for open science and data policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration. “The administration believes there’s massive market concentration held by just a few scholarly publishers, and they’re no longer going to subsidize the surplus revenues of those journals.”
While the Trump administration is far from alone in its criticism of big academic publishers—just six companies own 53 percent of academic journals—which rely on often-unpaid researchers and peer reviewers, Marcum said that even if the NIH adopted all five of the options it outlined to cap publisher fees, “it’s not comprehensive enough” to meet their stated goals.
“They could eliminate APCs and fix pricing, but the extremely useful tool that they have is influence over the universities,” he added.
For example, one of the options in the NIH’s proposal would increase limits on APCs if the journal paid peer reviewers, but Marcum said he’s concerned that could result in some peer reviewers trying to game the system to enrich themselves. Instead, he said, “if the NIH really wants to move the needle on this, they should think about other ways to compensate reviewers.” Some of those ideas could include giving peer reviewers credit toward their grant applications, including peer review as part of grant work or requiring universities that apply for NIH grants to include considerations for their researchers to engage in peer review.
Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said that though the NIH “can’t single-handedly reform the global system of academic research incentives, they can play a leadership role.”
But capping APCs isn’t the only—or most effective—option to make that happen.
“Rather than just limiting the amount of money that the NIH provides researchers to publish in a journal, it could say, ‘If you choose not to publish in a journal and do something else, we’ll provide money to do that,’ and support other mechanisms that allow researchers to break that incentive cycle,” Joseph said. “The NIH could reward them for communicating their findings early and often, making the global conversation of science dynamic in real time so that people can really benefit from it.”
The publishing industry is also not keen on the NIH’s attempt to control article processing charges.
A “free and competitive scholarly marketplace, including not-for-profit societies and other publishers, remains the most effective means of sustaining this vital sector, and bolstering our nation’s leadership position in the sciences,” Carl Maxwell, senior vice president for public policy for the Association of American Publishers, which has opposed open access expansion, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
“Models are now changing in the face of open access mandates, and AAP is analyzing the options put forth by NIH to identify the plan that will provide authors with maximum freedom to choose how to publish and communicate their work, while at the same time supporting the indispensable publication processes that deliver best-in-class, peer-reviewed articles.”
