Colleges will now be required to report additional admissions data to the National Center for Education Statistics, including data on the race and sex of their applicants, their admitted students and those who chose to enroll, per a memo from Trump to the U.S. Department of Education.Previously, institutions were only required to provide racial data for enrolled students.
Institutions must provide the data for undergraduate students and for certain graduate and professional programs, the Education Department said.
Separately, Trump signed an executive order directing his political appointees to review both grant awards and funding opportunity announcements. These appointees, along with subject matter experts, will evaluate grant decisions to align with the Trump administration’s policy priorities, according to a White House fact sheet.
Together, the two orders take aim at areas the Trump administration is attempting to tightly control — who colleges and universities enroll, and which research projects get federal funding.
In an announcement Thursday, theEducation Departmentsaid the additional admissions data is needed “to ensure race-based preferences are not used in university admissions processes.”
Along with data on applicants’ race and gender, colleges must also include the prospective students’ standardized test scores, GPAs and other academic qualifications. This data will also be collected about admitted and enrolled students.
At the same time, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon is ordering the National Center for Education Statisticsto develop a process to audit the data to ensure its accuracy.
“We will not allow institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin color matters more than their hard work and accomplishments,” McMahon said. “The Trump Administration will ensure that meritocracy and excellence once again characterize American higher education.”
The order comes two years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions in a landmark case involving Harvard Universityand the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Since then, colleges have overhauled their admissions practices, and many selective institutions enrolled lower shares of Black and Hispanic students in the aftermath, according to an analysis from The New York Times.
A new landscape for grants
Trump’s executive order on grant funding castigated much of the current research landscape, decrying awards that went to projects such as developing transgender sexual education programs and training graduate students in critical race theory.
The directive accused other grants of promoting “Marxism, class warfare propaganda, and other anti-American ideologies in the classroom, masked as rigorous and thoughtful investigation.”
Researchers and other groups have sued over past Trump administration attempts to control grant funding,including the cancellation of vast swaths of National Institutes of Health awards to comply with the president’s orders against diversity, equity and inclusion.A federal judge has ruled against the NIH’s grant cancellations, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office has likewise determined they were illegal.
Still, Thursday’s order directs agency heads to revise the terms of existing discretionary grants, “to the maximum extent permitted by law,”to allow them to be immediately terminated, including if an award “no longer advances agency priorities or the national interest.”
When assessing grant applications, senior appointees should weigh if they advance Trump’s policy priorities, according to the directive.
The order says grants should not be used to deny that sex is binary — a view at odds with scientific understanding — or promote “anti-American values.”They also should not be used to promote racial discrimination by awardees, including by using race or proxies to select employees or program participants, the order stated.
In addition, the order says preference for discretionary grants should be given to institutions “with lower indirect cost rates” — all things being equal.
Under the Trump administration, several major agencies have attempted to impose a flat 15% reimbursement rate for colleges’ indirect research costs — which cover expenses like laboratory maintenance and information technology —though courts have either permanently or temporarily blocked those moves.
The White House’s fact sheet suggests the Trump administration may look beyond the research heavyweights in the higher education sector when awarding new grants.
The executive order “directs agencies to award grants to a wide array of meritorious grantees, not just the universities and nonprofits that have received awards year after year,” it said.
President Donald Trump issued an executive action Thursday directing colleges to prove they are not considering race in admissions.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
President Donald Trump issued an executive action Thursday afternoon mandating colleges and universities submit data to verify that they are not unlawfully considering race in admissions decisions.
The order also requires the Department of Education to update the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System to make its data more legible to students and parents and to “increase accuracy checks for data submitted by institutions through IPEDS,” penalizing them for late, incomplete or inaccurate data.
Opponents of race-conscious admissions have hailed the mandate as a victory for transparency in college admissions, but others in the sector have criticized its vague language and question who at the department is left to collect and analyze the data.
“American students and taxpayers deserve confidence in the fairness and integrity of our Nation’s institutions of higher education, including confidence that they are recruiting and training capable future doctors, engineers, scientists, and other critical workers vital to the next generations of American prosperity,” the order reads. “Race-based admissions practices are not only unfair, but also threaten our national security and well-being.”
It’s now up to the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, to determine what new admissions data institutions will be required to report. The administration’s demands of Columbia and Brown Universities in their negotiations to reinstate federal funding could indicate what the requirements will be. In its agreement with Brown, the government ordered the university to submit annual data “showing applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students broken down by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.” Colleges will be expected to submit their admissions data for the 2025–26 academic year, according to the order.
What resources are in place to enforce the new requirements remains to be seen. Earlier this year the administration razed the staff at the Department of Education who historically collected and analyzed institutional data. Only three staff members remain in the National Center for Education Statistics, which operates IPEDS.
‘It’s Not Just as Easy as Collecting Data’
Since taking office, the Trump administration has launched a crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education, often using the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions as a weapon in the attacks.
Students for Fair Admissions, the anti–affirmative action advocacy group that was the plaintiff in the 2023 cases, called the action a “landmark step” toward transparency and accountability for students, parents and taxpayers.
“For too long, American colleges and universities have hidden behind opaque admissions practices that often rely on racial preferences to shape their incoming classes,” Edward Blum, SFFA president and longtime opponent of race-conscious admissions, said in a press release.
But college-equity advocates sounded the alarm, arguing that the order—which also claims that colleges have been using diversity and other “overt and hidden racial proxies” to continue race-conscious admissions post-SFFA—aims to intimidate colleges into recruiting fewer students of color.
“I will say something that my members in the higher education community cannot say. What the Trump administration is really saying is that you will be punished if you do not admit enough white students to your institution,” Angel B. Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, told Inside Higher Ed.
Like many of Trump’s other orders targeting DEI, that mandate relies on unclear terms and instructions. It does not define “racial proxies”—although a memo by the Department of Justice released last week provides examples—nor does it outline what data would prove an institution is or is not considering race in its admissions process.
In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Paul Schroeder, the executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, questioned the government’s capacity to carry out the president’s order.
“Without NCES, who’s going to actually look at this data? Who’s going to understand this data? Are we going to have uniform reporting or is it going to be just a mess coming in from all these different colleges?” Schroeder said.
“It’s not just as easy as collecting data. It’s not just asking a couple questions about the race and ethnicity of those who were admitted versus those who applied. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of hours. It’s not going to be fast.”
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Dive Brief:
The Trump administration acted illegally when it delayed and canceled billions of dollars of biomedical research grants, despite Congress appropriating funds to the National Institutes of Health, the Government Accountability Office said on Tuesday.
Between February and June, the watchdog agency estimates the NIH awarded about $8 billion less in funds for research grants and awards compared to the prior year and cut more than 1,800 active grants as it attempted to follow President DonaldTrump’s directive to weed out “equity-related” projects.
The GAO’s report concludes the administration violated the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the president to provide notice before delaying or blocking congressionally directed spending. GAO can file a lawsuit in an attempt to restore the grants. However, the watchdog agency has not yetopted to do so in its dealings with Trump.
Dive Insight:
NIH grants came under scrutiny this winter following a series of executive orders directing federal agencies to terminate “equity-related” grants or contracts, federal funding of projects supporting “gender ideology” and DEI programs.
The NIH began carrying out these directives in February. In addition to the grant cuts, the agency also dragged its feet on approving new projects, GAO found. From late January to early March, the NIH paused grant reviews entirely, delaying funds from being allocated to hospitals and universities.
When contacted for comment, a spokesperson for the HHS referred Healthcare Dive to the agency’s testimony to GAO. The testimony states that NIH has since “moved rapidly to reschedule and hold meetings impacted by the short pause, and to process grant applications.”
The HHS said between March 24 and June 30, NIH scheduled or held 837 peer review meetings — 186 more than for the same period the year prior.
Still, GAO said that the department hadn’tadequately explained its decision to pause the review process in the first place, despite its resumption of grant review.
“If the executive branch wishes to make changes to the appropriation provided to NIH, it must propose funds for rescission or otherwise propose legislation to make changes to the law for consideration by Congress,” the watchdog group wrote in its report. The HHS had done neither, the GAO said, adding: “In short, HHS has offered no evidence that it did not withhold amounts from obligation or expenditure, and it has not shown that the delay was a permissible programmatic one.”
The report also suggests the Trump administration may be continuing efforts to block NIH funds from flowing to medical research.
The office said the Office of Management and Budget asked NIH to “pause the issuing of grants, research contracts and training” in late July. There are reports that decision was later reversed, but GAO said it could not confirm whether the pause was lifted.
Following the release of the report, Democratic lawmakers called for the Trump administration to resume funding NIH grants as Congress specified, warning that medical research progress is at stake.
“Cutting off investments Congress has made into research that saves millions of lives is as backward and as inexcusable as it gets,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., in a statement. “It is critical President Trump reverse course, stop decimating the NIH, and get every last bit of this funding out.”
This report is not the first time Trump’s funding cuts have been challenged.
Researchers, unions and a coalition of 16 states sued over the NIHcuts, with academics saying they needed the funds to perform critical medical research, including learning about alcohol’s impact on Alzheimer’s risk and suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness. In June, a U.S. district judge ordered the NIH to reinstate the plaintiffs’ canceled funds. However, litigation remains ongoing after the Trump administration appealed that ruling.
GAO has the potential to bring its own suit against the NIH, but it will likely be a last resort, according to reporting by the New York Times. The watchdog group has previously found the administration violated the ICA on a range of topics and opted not to sue.
Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump has forced changes at many of the nation’s wealthiest universities, some of which have shed hundreds of jobs amid federal funding issues and investigations.
While sector layoffs are so frequent that Inside Higher Ed has dedicated monthly coverage to rounding up such reductions, those actions are more common at small, cash-strapped colleges or state institutions reeling from budget cuts. But universities with multibillion-dollar endowments have been among those making the deepest cuts in the first half of 2025, often driven by freezes on federal funding that the Trump administration imposed with minimal notice.
Some universities have also cited the recently passed endowment tax increase as a factor in layoffs.
Altogether the layoffs show a sector bracing for a new reality where research funding can be suddenly yanked away with little to no explanation and international and graduate student enrollment, once considered a cash cow, is under threat—prompting institutions in even the highest financial stratosphere to cut costs as they navigate changing policies and a president sharply critical of the sector.
Here’s a look at how the nation’s wealthiest universities are adjusting staffing levels due to an uncertain federal policy environment, research funding issues and a flurry of legal actions from the Trump administration that have forced concessions from multiple well-resourced institutions.
Thousands Out at Johns Hopkins
The Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development hit Johns Hopkins University with $800 million in canceled funding, prompting the Baltimore-based institution to shut down numerous international programs and lay off 2,222 employees earlier this year.
The 2,222 job cuts are the deepest announced at any institution this year.
The layoffs, announced in March, span more than 40 countries. Of the jobs cut, 1,975 were located internationally, while another 247 were in the U.S., with the majority in Baltimore. JHU announced at the time that another 107 employees would be furloughed.
Duke University, which has an endowment recently valued at nearly $12 billion, made some of the deepest cuts of the year so far when officials announced in July that 599 employees had accepted buyouts. Another 250 faculty members are reportedly weighing buyout offers as well.
Following the first round of buyouts, university officials said layoffs will begin this month.
Duke officials announced the buyouts before the Trump administration froze $108 million in federal grants and contracts and opened investigations into alleged racial discrimination, accusing the university of emphasizing diversity over merit in hiring, admissions and other practices.
Deep Cuts at Northwestern
Earlier this year, the Trump administration abruptly froze $790 million in research funding for Northwestern University, reportedly with no explanation. That action occurred at about the same time that the federal government opened an investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus.
Northwestern, which has an endowment valued at more than $14 billion, responded by eliminating 425 jobs last month in an effort to shave 5 percent off of its staff budget. The move was preceded by a hiring freeze and other cost-cutting measures announced earlier this year.
President Michael Schill and other administrators wrote in a message to campus that the cuts were “in response to more than just the federal research funding freeze.” They also pointed to “rapidly rising healthcare expenses, litigation, labor contracts, employee benefits, compliance requirements and a suite of federal changes” that may harm international student enrollment.
The Ax Falls at Stanford
Stanford University plans to cut 363 jobs beginning this fall as part of an effort to shave $140 million off the general funds budget due to financial issues connected to federal policy changes.
Those cuts come after the university announced a hiring freeze in February.
Stanford has the fourth-largest endowment among U.S. universities, recently valued at $37.6 billion. But despite its deep pockets, the private research university is feeling the squeeze from the Trump administration, with officials writing in a state regulatory filing that the university anticipates “reductions in federal research funding” and an increase in endowment taxes.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into admissions practices at Stanford earlier this year, accusing the university of sidestepping a ban on affirmative action.
Nearly 180 Layoffs at Columbia
Few institutions have faced as much scrutiny from the federal government in recent years as Columbia University, which agreed to sweeping changes and yielded to demands from the Trump administration to overhaul admissions, disciplinary processes and academic programs. The university will also share admissions data and reduce the number of international students it accepts in an unprecedented agreement with the Trump administration that culminated in a $221 million settlement over allegations of antisemitism tied to pro-Palestinian campus protests.
Although the Trump administration will release some frozen research funds as a condition of the settlement, choking off federal dollars has already prompted cuts. Columbia announced in May that the university had laid off nearly 180 researchers amid its standoff with the federal government.
Columbia’s endowment was recently valued at $14.7 billion.
‘A Day of Loss’ at Boston U
Boston University announced plans last month to lay off 120 workers and eliminate another 120 vacant jobs.
Officials wrote in a letter to campus that “recent and ongoing federal actions and funding cuts are affecting our research enterprise as well as day-to-day operations” and creating “uncertainty” as BU grapples with inflation, declining graduate enrollment and other challenges.
“This is a day of loss for all of us,” officials wrote. “There is no way around this. We know our community may need time to adjust to these difficult changes. Yet, it is also a necessary step in ensuring our future.”
The University of Southern California cut 55 jobs last month, according to a state regulatory filing.
Officials announced in mid-July that layoffs were underway, though they did not specify the number of employees affected. USC also implemented a hiring freeze, halted merit-based pay raises, ended some vendor contracts and pulled back on discretionary spending and travel.
Interim president Beong-Soo Kim called the layoffs “painful” in a message to campus. He cited various financial concerns, including “significant shifts in federal support for our research, hospitals, and student financial aid” as well as potential declines in international enrollment.
“The ultimate impact of these changes is difficult to predict, but for a university of our scale, the potential annual revenue loss in federally sponsored research funding alone could be $300 million or more,” Kim wrote, adding these changes came on top of a pre-existing budget deficit.
USC’s endowment was recently valued at $8.1 billion.
Unspecified Cuts at Harvard
Harvard University, which is currently locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration over alleged antisemitism and other accusations, has also laid off employees this year. Harvard Magazine reports that multiple schools have reduced staff as a result of having federal research funds frozen.
However, Harvard has not released numbers and declined to provide an estimate to Inside Higher Ed. Union officials have said that layoffs could add up to hundreds of workers.
Harvard is the nation’s wealthiest university, with an endowment valued at nearly $52 billion.
Likely Layoffs at Brown
Following Columbia, Brown University struck a deal with the Trump administration last month, agreeing to certain changes in order to restore around $510 million in frozen research funding.
The federal government closed investigations into alleged antisemitism as part of the settlement. Brown also agreed to put $50 million over the course of a decade into workforce development in Rhode Island. Less than a week after the settlement, Brown officials announced that “some layoffs will be necessary” due to the “persisting financial impact of federal actions.”
Brown also enacted a hiring freeze in March, and nearly 350 jobs remain unfilled.
University officials wrote that they expected a $30 million hit to the 2026 fiscal year budget from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump’s far-reaching legislation that affected the sector in various ways, including increases to endowment taxes and limiting or eliminating some loan programs.
The Trump administration announced last week it was freezing federal grants for another prestigious research university. But this time, it wasn’t a private institution.
It was the University of California, Los Angeles, and if the UC system doesn’t make a deal with the federal government, campuses across one of the nation’s largest public higher education systems might incur the administration’s further punishment. State leaders condemned the funding freeze, and faculty at UCLA are urging university administrators to fight. But the university has said little about how it plans to respond to the administration.
The Department of Justice has been investigating the University of California system for months—looking into alleged antisemitism, alleged use of race in admissions and “potential race- and sex-based discrimination in university employment practices.” The agency’s investigations into the broader UC system are still ongoing, but last week, the DOJ told system officials it had made a finding regarding one campus and demanded a quick response.
“The Department has concluded that UCLA’s response to the protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024 was deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI,” the letter said. (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits universities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism.)
The letter didn’t specifically say what the Trump administration wants UC to do now about its alleged failure to handle a pro-Palestine encampment that ended more than a year ago, and that UCLA itself dismantled a week after its creation. The DOJ didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed further information Monday, but U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi’s news release accompanying the DOJ letter suggests the Trump administration wants significant concessions.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic anti-Semitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Bondi said. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
Just hours before the DOJ’s announcement, UCLA had announced that it was paying $6.45 million to settle a lawsuit from Jewish students over reported antisemitism associated with the encampment. But that wasn’t enough to assuage the federal government.
The DOJ letter said the department “seeks to enter into a voluntary resolution agreement with the university to ensure that the hostile environment is eliminated and reasonable steps are taken to prevent its recurrence.” It asked the UC officials to contact a special counsel by today if they were “interested in resolving this matter along these lines,” providing an email address and a nonfunctional nine-digit phone number for them to contact. The agency is prepared to sue by Sept. 2 “unless there is reasonable certainty that we can reach an agreement.”
That July 29 letter wasn’t the end of it. In the week between then and today’s deadline for UC to contact the DOJ, multiple federal agencies said they’re cutting off grants to UCLA. The total amount is unclear—other media have reported numbers exceeding $300 million.
It’s reminiscent of what happened at Columbia and Harvard Universities. But unlike with those private institutions, the Trump administration hasn’t published an overarching demand letter for how it wants UCLA to change its ways, whether in admissions, student discipline or otherwise.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health, responded to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for information on how much in NIH grant funding has been canceled and why with a two-line response attributed to an unnamed HHS official: “We will not fund institutions that promote antisemitism. We will use every tool we have to ensure institutions follow the law.”
A National Science Foundation spokesperson wrote in an email that the NSF “informed the University of California, Los Angeles that the agency is suspending awards to UCLA because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals.” The spokesperson didn’t specify which priorities or which goals, and his email didn’t mention antisemitism.
The Department of Energy went beyond allegations of antisemitism in its letter to UCLA, saying that “UCLA engages in racism, in the form of illegal affirmative action” and UCLA “endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces.”
Mia McIver, executive director of the national American Association of University Professors, said what’s happening is the “Trump administration is extending its pattern of attacking higher education faculty, staff and students more broadly outward from the Ivy League universities into the public sector.” McIver, who taught at UCLA for a decade, said the administration intends to “exercise pervasive control over colleges and universities in every region of every different sort of institution.”
“It is the federal government using levers of power that are completely unrelated to the underlying allegations,” McIver said. “Cutting off research for diabetes, cancer, heart disease will not improve the safety of Jewish faculty and students on campus and will not address antisemitism.”
‘Enough Is Enough’
What does the UC system plan to do? A spokesperson deferred comment to UCLA, which also didn’t provide interviews Monday or answer written questions. The UC system spokesperson did forward a statement Friday from system president James B. Milliken, who started in his new job Aug. 1—just after the grant freezes.
Milliken called “the suspension this week of a large number of research grants and contracts” at UCLA “deeply troubling,” though “not unexpected.”
“The research at UCLA and across UC more broadly saves lives, improves national security, helps feed the world, and drives the innovation economy in California and the nation,” he said. “It is central to who we are as a teaching and learning community. UC and campus leadership have been anticipating and preparing for the kind of federal action we saw this week, and that preparation helps support our decisions now.”
He didn’t, however, say what the decisions would be.
Also Friday, California governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate and an ex officio member of the UC Board of Regents, released a statement calling it “a cruel manipulation to use Jewish students’ real concerns about antisemitism on campus as an excuse to cut millions of dollars in grants that were being used to make all Americans safer and healthier.”
“This is the action of a president who doesn’t care about students, Californians, or Americans who don’t comply with his MAGA ways,” Newsom said.
UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk said in a video on X Friday that “we share the goal of eradicating antisemitism. It has no place on our campus or in our society.” He said his wife is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and his paternal grandparents left Germany in the 1930s after being “driven out of their home by an intolerable climate of antisemitism and hate.”
“These experiences inform my own commitment to combating bigotry in all its forms, but a sweeping penalty on lifesaving research doesn’t address any alleged discrimination,” Frenk said. He said, “We have contingency plans in place,” though he didn’t elaborate.
In a petition, the UCLA Faculty Association’s Executive Board criticized UCLA administrators for their past “anticipatory obedience” to the federal government, which it said “has not prevented Trump administration attacks.”
“UCLA’s anticipatory obedience has put itself in a place of weakness and we must instead choose to stand up,” the association wrote. “We do not have to bend to the Trump administration’s illegitimate and bad-faith demands. UCLA is a state university, with the financial backing and moral support of the fourth-largest economy in the world.”
The association demanded that UC “demonstrate our strength as the world’s largest university system and reject the malicious demands of the Trump administration,” adding that “each university that falters legitimates the Trump administration’s attacks on all of our institutions.”
It called for UC to fight the administration in court, to use unrestricted endowment funds to “help keep our university’s mission intact” and to work with Newsom and state lawmakers to get financial support. The petition ended with a call for university administrators to not “sacrifice our strengths and our community, deeply nurtured and protected for over 100 years, to a deeply callous and unfair federal administration that will only ask for more.”
Meanwhile, Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA said in a statement that “Israel continues to tighten its US-enabled siege of Gaza, where the calculated denial of humanitarian assistance is causing mass starvation amid ongoing aerial bombing. The theatrics of the Trump administration, echoed by UCLA, are part of a larger attempt to cover up this genocidal catastrophe in which all of us, and our university, are complicit.”
McIver urged the UC system not to cut deals like Columbia and Brown Universities have.
“There are always alternatives,” she said, “and every deal that is cut makes it harder for those who are downstream of the deal to continue resisting these attacks.”
“The Trump administration is aiming to control colleges and universities at all levels in all states, and every settlement that is reached basically contributes to that goal,” she said. “And so there has to be a point at which everyone across the country stands up and says, ‘Enough is enough, we’re not going to tolerate this extortion, you can’t hold our campuses hostage and we’re not going to take it anymore.’”
Alexandre de Moraes, the polarizing Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, is no friend to free speech. Though he is a popular figure within Brazil among those who see him as a protector of democracy, he has aggressively wielded his authority to censor, especially on the internet, with little transparency.
From his position in Brazil’s Supreme Court, de Moraes has doggedly pursued wide swaths of speech and speakers off and on the internet, as well as the tech companies hosting them. In a highly public incident last year, Brazil blocked X — and even threatened VPN users accessing it with massive fines — over the company’s noncompliance with de Moraes’ orders.
The actions of de Moraes, and Brazil’s Supreme Court more broadly, have repeatedly drawn the ire of the Trump administration. But chief among President Trump’s grievances is the prosecution of his political ally, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is accused of attempting a coup to overturn his 2022 election loss to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
How has the Trump administration responded?
Last month, the administration enacted a series of punishments against Brazil’s leadership and de Moraes specifically. In a July 30 executive order, Trump announced tariffs and other sanctions due to Brazil’s prosecution of Bolsonaro and other actions that “conflict with and threaten the policy of the United States to promote free speech and free and fair elections at home and abroad.” The order follows Trump’s weeks-earlier threat of tariffs over the “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also revoked the visas of de Moraes “and his allies on the court” and their families. And under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, usually reserved for the most serious human rights abuses, the Department of the Treasury announced sanctions targeting any of de Moraes’s U.S. assets.
Unprincipled, partisan free speech advocacy is no free speech advocacy at all
There is plenty to debate about how to best protect free speech on the global internet, and around the world more generally, and what actions the United States can take in its defense. But, even though Brazil’s adversarial relationship with free expression is deeply alarming, it’s impossible to ignore the incongruity of the Trump administration putting itself in the position of diagnosing and treating government censorship.
Physician, heal thyself.
The opening months of Trump’s second term in office have offered a nonstop, headspinning bonanza of violations, threatened and enacted, against Americans’ First Amendment rights.
I write regularly in the Free Speech Dispatch about the myriad threats to freedom of expression, from Russia to the UK to India to Hong Kong. It’s painfully, brutally clear we need leadership to push back against the wave of global repression that threatens all of our rights. But that leadership must practice what it preaches and avoid simply using concerns about free speech as a pretext to fight partisan political battles. On both counts, this administration has failed.
You will make no converts to the free speech cause by proving right the critics who suspect its advocates are guided by partisan aims, not principled ones. Instead, you will breed cynicism and harm the very cause you claim to support.
This same posturing marred Vice President JD Vance’s objections to European censorship, an ugly trend that’s in dire need of principled critiques. Instead, Vance claimed that under Trump, the “new sheriff in town,” the administration “may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square.”
The ugly reality is that the U.S. is rapidly ceding its moral authority to criticize foreign governments’ censorship, like that emanating from Brazil’s Supreme Court, when its own president and agencies are gleefully flouting the First Amendment and free speech principles day in and day out.
Perhaps most baffling was the administration’s objection to the Brazilian government’s targeting of Paulo Figueiredo, a Brazilian journalist, and “U.S. resident, for speech he made on U.S. soil.” Readers may also be able to think of some more government officials targetingimmigrants legally residing in the U.S. for protected speech made on U.S. soil — and they’re doing so from our White House and State Department, not thousands of miles away.
Global censorship is a real challenge, and it’s only getting worse. But until the U.S. removes the censorial beam from its own eye, we may find that other nations are unmoved by our criticisms and cures. Or, they may perhaps even be interested in doling them out to us.
The $221 million settlement with the Trump administration by Columbia University (and a similar $50 million deal by Brown University) represent a terrible capitulation by these campus leaders. AAUP president Todd Wolfson called the settlement “a disaster for Columbia students, faculty, and staff, as well as for academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the independence of colleges and universities nationwide. Never in the history of our nation has an educational institution so thoroughly bent to the will of an autocrat.”
Columbia and Brown had slam-dunk legal cases against the Trump administration, which clearly violated the processes required under Title VI when they suspended funding. (Brown was never notified of any reasons for the funding to be cut off, and there wasn’t even the pretense of a finding of antisemitic discrimination.) By making a settlement, universities give up their legal rights to challenge this repression, agree to impose massive censorship and pay a huge sum for the privilege of sacrificing their values.
It’s possible that the leaders of Columbia and Brown made this agreement because they concluded that Trump is a pathological liar, a petty dictator, a petulant lawbreaker intent on taking revenge against any perceived enemy and a president who will simply ignore any adverse judicial rulings. That analysis is accurate. But if you think Trump will ignore the law and violate any rules, then trusting his regime to obey a legal settlement is just as crazy.
The settlements include a bizarre amount of federal micromanagement of private universities, requiring Brown to provide single-sex floors in student housing, ban admissions decisions using personal statements that mention race and conduct a survey about antisemitism by the end of the year and take “appropriate action” in response. Even the smallest violation of the numerous requirements could be used to justify a future cutoff in federal funds.
The same officials who made ludicrous accusations of antisemitic discrimination to punish these universities will get to decide if the colleges are violating the agreement and deserve to be punished. While the agreements settle the old baseless charges, nothing prevents new baseless charges from being filed and leading to the same illegal funding cuts. Colleges that settle with the Trump administration have no guarantee of safety from further retaliation, and Trump officials will actually use these settlements to demand a tighter reign of censorship.
The New York Timesreported about those praising the Columbia agreement, “Many have focused on a provision that said no part of the settlement ‘shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admissions decisions or the content of academic speech.’” Far from being a positive protection for intellectual liberty, this language is actually a terrible threat to free expression on campus.
By only protecting academic speech, this provision leaves the door wide open for government-imposed repression. Most expression on college campuses is not academic speech. The extramural utterances of faculty, along with virtually all student speech, is not academic speech and therefore is open to any suppression by the government under this agreement. But protecting extramural utterances is an essential part of academic freedom and has been a fundamental aspect of its definition since the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles.
While the provision says that the government can’t “dictate faculty hiring,” there’s nothing about dictating faculty firings. By solely protecting hiring decisions, Columbia leaves the door wide-open for purging faculty, staff and students who are deemed undesirable by the Trump administration.
In an email to the campus, Brown president Christina H. Paxson wrote that the first key aspect of the settlement was that “no provision of this Agreement, individually or taken together, shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate Brown’s curriculum or the content of academic speech.” (Brown apparently didn’t bother to follow Columbia and get a ban on federal control over its hiring decisions, which is an alarming omission.)
Some people might think that paying $221 million to get $400 million in research grants is a good bargain. Federal grants aren’t free money for colleges. All of the funding goes to research expenses. Now that the Trump administration has arbitrarily lowered the indirect cost rate to 15 percent, government-sponsored research is much less profitable for colleges—and possibly an expense they must subsidize. Certainly, Columbia will be losing money by paying $221 million to get access to $400 million in grants.
Paramount bribed Donald Trump a mere $16 million (and purged a few critics) in order to get approved an $8 billion merger that can’t be undone. As terrible as Paramount’s submission to Trump was, Columbia purged far more students and spent 13 times as much to get a deal worth 1/20th the value that increases ongoing federal control over Columbia. Paramount and Columbia executives may share a moral gutter, but at least Paramount’s bribe made financial sense.
Worse yet, by making a settlement, Columbia loses that $221 million forever, with no opportunity to prevail in court and receive the full funding their researchers are entitled to. By agreeing to obey the government, Columbia hurts its legal options to challenge future funding cutoffs, because the government can claim that Columbia failed to live up to the terms of the settlement. If the courts rule against the Trump administration’s illegal actions, Columbia and Brown will still be forced to pay these millions, impose repressive censorship and face retaliation without legal recourse.
The Columbia capitulation sets a precedent for Harvard to pay an even bigger settlement, estimated at up to $500 million. Unfortunately, hapless apologists for repression such as former Harvard president Larry Summers are urging Harvard to follow Columbia’s model, and Summers praised the Columbia capitulation as “the best day higher education has had in the last year.” Summers claimed, “The prestige of the university is not to be arrogated by faculty members in support of any set of political convictions, particularly those in leadership positions of academic units.”
Let me translate this: Professors should not be allowed to express political views. For believers in censorship such as Summers, the desire to suppress academic freedom finds a convenient partner in the Trump administration.
Universities are making these deals with the Trump regime not in spite of the requirements for censorship, but because of those restrictions. The provisions in these settlements enhance administrative power to suppress dissent, and that’s precisely what makes them so appealing to some campus administrators.
Columbia and other colleges are trapped in a no-win situation, but even difficult moral dilemmas have wrong answers, and that’s what Columbia’s leadership has chosen. Let’s hope Harvard is not the next lemming to throw itself over the cliff and sacrifice its core values, its donor money and its common sense in the vain hope that fawning obedience and bribery can satisfy the vengeance of a mad leader.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Liz Clark would have lost a bet on the massive Republican tax and spending bill passed and signed into law earlier this month.
Clark, the vice president for policy and researchat the National Association of College and University Business Officers, said she didn’t expect the bill to be finalized until early fall. While only off by a few months, Clark’s missed guess illustrates just one of many unexpected developments for higher education — and the world — since President Donald Trump retook office in January.
Speaking at NACUBO’s annual conference near Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Clark pointed to more than a decade of divided governments, intraparty policy squabbles and political gridlock as Democrats and Republicans have traded thin majorities in Congress.
Based on that history, it might have seemed improbable that Republicans could swiftly move a massive policy package through two houses of Congress where they held razor-thin leads. But Republicans did, and Congress got a bill to Trump’s desk by the date he demanded.
“This is a quintessential moment in seeing that past performance is no indication of future results,” Clark said.
The bill has plenty of implications for college finance departments, not to mention students and all other stakeholders in higher education. And it’s just one of many policy sea changes the sector has seen since Trump and a Republican-led Congress came to office six short months ago.
From new taxes to new legal liabilities, below is a look at how politics and policy are impacting college finance offices.
A blitz of executive orders
So far in his roughly six months in office, Trump has already issued more executive orders than Joe Biden did during his entire four-year term. According to data from the American Presidency Project, Trump is on pace to issue more orders per year than any other president in history, except potentially Franklin Rooseveltin his first term at the height of the Great Depression.
“Every president has tested the limits of executive power. This is not new,” Clark said. “What is new, at least for us, especially when it comes to issues impacting higher education, is the scope, the number of executive orders, the number of changes in law that are impacting your campuses.” She added, “We have, this year, been dealing with everything, everywhere, all at once.”
Trump’s order on diversity, equity and inclusion programs has drawn rebukes, including through litigation, for being vague and potentially stifling to free speech and intellectual activity.
“DEI is not illegal,” Clark said, pointing specifically to the administration’s executive order on the topic.
College researchers, meanwhile, are being asked to certify their compliance with executive orders, including those related to DEI, when applying for grants. That can present a dicey situation when directives are vaguely worded.
In some cases, federal agencies have even asked researchers to certify compliance with all future executive orders that may be issued someday, noted Jen Gartner, deputy general counsel for University of Maryland, College Park, at a NACUBO conference panel Monday.
“Obviously, we don’t know what we would be certifying compliance with,” Gartner said.
Certification requirements for grants can vary by agency, but Gartner noted the one commonality is that they “now all mention that our certification is material for the False Claims Act.”
The False Claims Act bars fraud in government contracting. Trump’s Department of Justice in May launched an initiative that threatens universities with investigations under the law over their DEI programs and policies for transgender students and athletes.
Speaking from firsthand experience, Gartner said such investigations can take years to settle and cost colleges time, money and reputational damage — all of which adds financial and legal stakes to what might seem like bureaucratic formalities in certifications.
Big changes to higher ed under the big bill
The spending law enacted in July contains several policies set to shake up higher ed both directly and indirectly. “I would go so far as to say that the issues we saw in this bill were akin to a Higher Education Act reauthorization,” Clark said, referring to the primary federal law governing higher education and student aid — which was last reauthorized in 2008.
New policies include higher taxes on the wealthiest college endowments, with the top rate jumping to 8%, up from 1.4% currently.
It also opens up Pell Grants to short-term workforce-focused programs at accredited institutions that last eight to 15 weeks, while adding borrowing limits, and making other changes to student aid.
Bryan Dickson, NACUBO’s director of student financial services and educational programs, described the short-term Pell Grants as a “great win” for community colleges at this week’s conference. He added, however, that there are still questions about how the program will work, including about conflicting statute language on whether students already holding bachelor’s degrees will be eligible for the short-term grants.
The bill additionally creates a new accountability system for college programs that’s meant to ensure most students get an earnings boost from their credentials.
College programs that fail the earnings test in two out of three consecutive years can lose their eligibility for the federal student loan program.Dickson emphasized that the policy applies only to direct loans, not other Title IV programs such as Pell Grants.
Aside from the specific higher ed policies, colleges could see indirect effects from the law.
One of the largest could be the massive cuts Republicans made to Medicaid and food stamp programs. Those cuts could put pressure on states to fill in the gaps to reduce the harms to their lower-income residents — which in turn could mean less money available for public institutions in state budgets.
“If you thought your current battles with your state legislature were bad, just wait for what’s to come in 2026,” Clark said.
Deep cuts to the Education Department
Since taking office, the Trump administration has made deep staff cuts to the U.S. Department of Education — in line with a Trump executive order calling for the department’s dismantling to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” A full elimination of the department would require congressional approval.
Now with a staff roughly half its former size, the Education Department still has plenty to do, including writing regulations for the new short-term Pell Grants and accountability programs created by the spending bill, among other administration priorities and statutory requirements.
Some effects from the cuts are already evident. Dickson pointed to a National Association of Student Financial Aid Administratorssurveyshowing that 47% of institutions confirmed their region’s federal Financial Student Aid office had closed. Another 42% said that their students were “experiencing issues with federal loan servicing, such as delays, misinformation, or unresolved inquiries.”
More challenges could be ahead.
“We haven’t seen yet a major stress test on what the staffing level decreases mean,” Dickson said. “We’re approaching the fall semester. We’re approaching fall drawdowns. We will see what that means.”
And despite Trump’s desire to wind down the Education Department, the agency — and all its regulations — still exist, for now.
“You cannot go forward in your work thinking there’s going to be no Department of Education and not submit your reports to IPEDS [the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System] or close out certain cases or investigations that may be ongoing,” Clark said. “Your work continues. Your compliance requirement continues.”
Brown agreed to donate $50 million to workforce development programs in Rhode Island.
Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Brown University has struck a deal with the Trump administration to restore about $510 million in frozen federal research funds in exchange for various concessions but no payment, officials announced Wednesday.
The federal government will restore millions in frozen research funding and settle investigations over allegations of campus antisemitism, according to the agreement. While Brown will not pay out a settlement to resolve the complaints like its Ivy League counterpart Columbia University did, the university pledged $50 million over the next decade to state workforce development efforts in Rhode Island.
Brown is the second university to cut a deal with the Trump administration since Columbia reached a similar agreement last week. Trump officials said the Columbia settlement would be a template for their talks with other colleges, though other higher ed experts argued the deal was unlawful and represented a threat to the sector at large. (Harvard University, which has also been in the administration’s crosshairs over alleged antisemitism, has reportedly considered a settlement of up to $500 million to resolve its ongoing dispute.)
Still, Brown agreed to multiple other changes. They include adopting the Trump administration’s definitions of male and female, not performing gender-affirming surgeries on minors or prescribing them puberty blockers, providing admissions data to the federal government, and conducting a campus climate survey and sharing the results with the federal government. Brown also agreed to codify prior changes officials announced to combat discrimination on campus.
The deal does not include restrictions on campus curriculum or programs.
“At its core, the agreement preserves the integrity of Brown’s academic foundation, and it enables us as a community to move forward after a period of considerable uncertainty in a way that ensures Brown will continue to be the Brown that our students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and friends have known for generations,” President Christina Paxson said in a statement.
Brown announced the agreement shortly after the university took out a $500 million loan, which could have helped plug research funding holes or fund a protracted legal battle. The university also borrowed $300 million in April after the Trump administration froze research funding over allegations of antisemitism connected to pro-Palestinian protests.
The funding freeze, along with other changes in federal policy, has hit the university hard, and officials warned in June of the potential for “deep financial losses.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon celebrated the deal, asserting in a statement that the agreement would protect Jewish students from antisemitism as well as women’s sports.
“Restoring our nation’s higher education institutions to places dedicated to truth-seeking, academic merit, and civil debate—where all students can learn free from discrimination and harassment—will be a lasting legacy of the Trump administration, one that will benefit students and American society for generations to come,” McMahon wrote in a social media post.
“A cold wind just blew through every newsroom this morning.”
These were the words of my colleague Bob Corn-Revere upon hearing that Paramount Global had agreed to settle President Donald Trump’s 60 Minutes lawsuit — to the tune of $16 million.
Trump filed the lawsuit in November, demanding $10 billion over what he alleged was the “deceptive editing” of a 60 Minutes interview featuring then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The lawsuit claimed CBS’s “substantial news distortion” was calculated to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of last year’s election in her favor. But despite legalexpertswidelylabeling the lawsuit baseless, Paramount opted to settle.
Why?
Well, the lawsuit was a sticking point in the approval of the $8 billion Paramount-Skydance merger — approval which the Trump administration via the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), led by Chairman Brendan Carr, had the power to grant or deny. That approval was finalized last week, just two days after Trump formally dropped the lawsuit.
It’s an extortion regime much bigger than any one-time cash grab, enveloping the media industry in a cloud of weaponized uncertainty.
The timing is hard to ignore. And while the initial details of the dollar amount in the settlement attracted much controversy, it’s also been gradually revealed that the money was paired with other, more alarming agreements from Paramount Global.
First, they acceded to 60 Minutes releasing unedited transcripts of interviews with all future presidential candidates. Second, there was a rumored side deal — confirmed by Trump last week (SkyDance has not confirmed or denied)— that CBS will run advertising and public service announcements to promote Trump’s favored causes.
Finally, we learned that Skydance promised to appoint an ombudsman to review all complaints of “bias” involving CBS programming moving forward.
These components of the settlement stick out because it connects the ostensibly private matter of the 60 Minutes lawsuit to Trump’s presidential agenda. In other words, they are a function of the Trump administration’s policy priorities, blurring the boundary not just between Trump’s role as a private citizen and his role as president, but also between Paramount’s role as a private enterprise and as an arm of the White House.
But it gets worse. In fact, the Paramount settlement provides only a small window into a larger attempt — on the part of the president and his administration — to transform the relationship between the government and America’s media industry, powered by the machinery of the FCC.
It’s an extortion regime much bigger than any one-time cash grab, enveloping the media industry in a cloud of weaponized uncertainty created by lawsuits, selective regulatory investigations, and slow-walked merger approvals.
The ultimate aim? Getting some of America’s largest media companies to bend the knee and do the administration’s bidding.
Call it the extortion-industrial complex, and Paramount has been just one victim of it.
‘A cold wind…’
Let’s start with the implications of the 60 Minutes case.
First, there’s the “deceptive” editing of the 60 Minutes interview segment that was the target of the lawsuit, in which Harris was asked about the Israel-Hamas War. As FIRE explained in a filing to the FCC, the edited segment did not alter the substance of her response in any way. Rather, it was a routine and unremarkable trim — a simple shortening of a news segment to get to the point.
The president’s original complaint alleges the edit made her more “succinct,” and thus more palatable to voters. This is almost by definition true because an edit, by design, makes a candidate’s response briefer. But if an edit like this is legally actionable, then what editorial decision isn’t? The message to newsrooms, reinforced by the president’s litigious history, is that any anodyne decision they make could land them in court.
Then of course there’s the policy agreements in the settlement, including the ombudsman and the transcript requirements. These concessions serve to solidify private lawsuits as a powerful lever for enforcing the president’s agenda in areas that the government doesn’t actually control.
The role of the FCC
That brings us to the Trump-controlled FCC — the institutional machinery of the extortion-industrial complex that made Paramount’s acquiescence to Trump an almost foregone conclusion.
Paramount’s surrender is due in no small part to the FCC’s final authority over Paramount Global’s merger with Skydance Media, which as we saw, just received approval from the body. Reporting indicates it’s all but explicitly understood by CBS executives and Paramount Global controlling shareholder Shari Redstone that bringing the lawsuit to a close was part of clearing the way for the merger.
Further obstructing the merger was a parallel FCC probe into a consumer complaint about the editing of the 60 Minutes interview. The probe and the lawsuit are supposedly separate, but there’s reason to believe otherwise.
For one, the consumer complaint heavily informed the lawsuit. And while Chairman Carr has been careful to avoid linking the lawsuit itself to the merger talks (wink, wink), he said the consumer complaint is “likely to arise in the context of the FCC review” — meaning, essentially, that the probe allows him to connect the subject of the lawsuit to the merger.
These tools are the core of the extortion-industrial complex, and they have their roots in certain powers of the FCC granted by the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934, which birthed the agency itself. Those two laws granted the FCC regulatory power over who can use the radio and broadcast television waves, which sit at the low-frequency end of the electromagnetic spectrum (visible light sits in the middle of the spectrum). But signals at the low-end range often interfered with each other, prompting the government to step in and sort things out.
As a result, they introduced a government-sanctioned licensing regime, in which broadcasters could use part of the airwaves as long as they operated in the service of the “public interest, convenience and necessity.” If they didn’t, their license could be denied or revoked. This requirement became known as the “public interest standard,” which the Supreme Court upheld in the 1943 case NBC. v. United States on the basis that the properties of airwaves rendered it a “scarce” resource. This was a recurrent justification that became known as the “scarcity rationale,” and which the FCC used to set rules regulating broadcast programming.
To enforce these rules, the FCC was given a set of powers. They could deny or revoke licenses, decide the transfer of license ownership, and issue fines. In practice, this gave them power over any mergers and acquisitions when an owner of a broadcast station was involved. In addition to FCC’s direct oversight, members of the public could file complaints about violations that the FCC could investigate.
On the back of these powers and the public interest standard, the FCC issued regulations ranging from those on children’s programming all the way to rules governing balance in political coverage — including the well-known fairness doctrine, which required licensed broadcasters to present both sides of controversial issues of public importance.
As our understanding of the technological landscape changed and a vibrant media ecosystem outside broadcast took shape, content-based rules like the fairness doctrine came under scrutiny. A 1985 report commissioned by the FCC noted that not only was the fairness doctrine a “pervasive and significant impediment to the broadcasting of controversial issues of public importance,” It also found that the scarcity rationale “which ha[d] historically justified content regulation of broadcasting … is no longer valid” in the era of cable and satellite and, shortly thereafter, the internet. Why should broadcast operate underneath a web of restrictions that its competition is free from?
The courts and Congress also cast doubt on the viability of the scarcity rationale in the modern media landscape, culminating in the FCC’s 1987 repeal of the fairness doctrine.
In spite of the scarcity rationale falling into disrepute, the public interest standard and other content-based rules predicated on it stayed on the books. Whether those rules were overlooked or left intact as “symbolic regulation,” the remaining public interest-based regulatory infrastructure was a loaded gun left on the table.
Enter Brendan Carr
Despite having lots of nice things to say about free speech before his current position, Carr took on the FCC chairmanship in January with a bold new approach. He understood that while some seismic changes in the broadcast marketplace had rendered the public interest standard antiquated, others opened up new avenues to exercise government power in its name. Big companies began buying up more and more radio and TV stations, so fewer and fewer people owned the airwaves. At the same time, the corporations operating these stations and producing their content grew much larger and more influential.
The FCC already exercises a certain amount of power over the programming of the broadcast corporations through the stations and affiliates that run their content. But now, Carr has taken this to the next level, implicating the broader decisions of the conglomerates that own those broadcasters, and all the other media properties they control. His previously declared free speech principles took a backseat.
The FCC has authority over the licenses of broadcast stations (left column). In practice, Carr has treated that authority as expanding to their owners (middle column), including their vast portfolio of properties (right column).
One of his earliest moves as chairman was to unleash the FCC’s arsenal of tools in support of a top priority in Trump’s agenda that has little to do with the FCC’s traditional authority: the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
In February, Carr announced in a letter his intention to investigate the DEI programs of NBCUniversal and their parent company, Comcast. He also set his sights on the telecommunications industry, as a probe into Verizon’s diversity practices soon followed. In March, he came for Disney as well.
Around that time, Carr engaged in a strategy meeting with a conservative activist named Robby Starbuck, known for his pressure campaigns against the diversity efforts of Ford, Boeing, Walmart, and McDonald’s. Following the meeting, Starbuck posted, “Good luck with the FCC if you’re a woke company … You’re gonna need it!”
Two days later, Carr made clear that any businesses seeking approval for mergers or acquisitions — including Paramount Global — would be expected to “get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”
Corporations promptly complied with Carr’s demands. Verizon and TMobile sent letters to the FCC notifying Carr they had scrapped their DEI-related policies. Comcast withdrew from Pride march sponsorships and scrubbed their website. Just this week, Skydance confirmed to Carr a sweeping list of actions taken by Paramount to remove anything approaching DEI.
It’s important to understand the scope of Carr’s interventions. Under the FCC’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) rules, the commission can prevent radio and TV broadcasters from discriminating in hiring based on race, religion, or sex. So while he had a limited basis to, say, target affirmative action, Carr’s ambitions went beyond hiring practices and implicated First Amendment-protected speech.
For instance, the letter to Comcast notes the EEO rules, but there’s no direct mention of unlawful hiring practices on their part. What Carr does cite is the values of the company as described on their website, and the existence of employees and initiatives responsible for promoting DEI, including in TV and programming. With his letter to Verizon, this became a pattern.
The theory of authority behind all this is not completely new. After the events of the 2020 election and January 6th, 2021, a progressive watchdog group called the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) filed a petition to deny the broadcast license renewal application for Fox Corp-owned television station FOX 29 Philadelphia. Even though Fox News programming was not aired on the network (with the exception of then-host Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday), the petition cited their 2020 election coverage as grounds for the denial. Former Fox counsel and FCC officials supported it.
The response to these efforts from previous FCC Chairs was markedly different from Carr’s, however. Obama’s (retired) FCC Chair Tom Wheeler said of the broader scrutiny surrounding Fox, “Unfortunately, the FCC does not have jurisdiction over cable networks. In fact, it doesn’t even have jurisdiction over networks like CBS and NBC who use the airwaves.”
In January, outgoing Biden-appointed FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel rejected MAD’s petition, noting in a statement they sought to “weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.” She also rejected three other complaints: against NBC, ABC, and of course the infamous complaint against CBS and 60 Minutes.
Selling out the First Amendment is a debt that always comes due.
Upon assuming the chairmanship in January, however, Carr reopened all three complaints with identical orders, citing an “insufficient investigatory record.” While these orders did not provide specific justifications for the reopenings, in interviews Carr has pointed to enforcing the public interest standard and combating ideological bias in news. In practice, this has played out as combatting disfavorable coverage of Trump — as evidenced by Carr’s curiously leaving the previous petition targeting FOX 29 Philadelphia in the grave.
The three complaints capitalized on the mostly dormant FCC content rules left over from the spectrum scarcity era — including the news distortion rule, which prohibits networks from engaging in deliberate falsification of the news; and the equal opportunities rule, which requires networks to provide the roughly same amount of airtime to competing candidates in federal elections.
However, in both cases the claims fall short of their respective standards. The equal opportunities proceeding against NBC for example — centering around the brief appearance of Harris on NBC’s Saturday Night Live (SNL) — fundamentally misunderstands how the rule works.
As the FCC’s letter dismissing the original complaint points out, Trump came to an agreement with NBC after the SNL airing to give him coveted ad time during a Sunday evening NASCAR race, roughly equivalent in length to that of Harris’s appearance on SNL. The complaint says this is “too little, too late” — ignoring, as the FCC pointed out, “[a]n agreement reached after the use of broadcast facilities is a standard way for broadcasters to adhere to the equal opportunities rule.” FCCs records demonstrate that Carr himself knew that NBC complied with the rule, though that didn’t stop him from claiming otherwise.
This brings us to the news distortion rule, which has historically been understood as having a very high bar, requiring documented evidence that broadcast leadership directed reporters to deliberately mislead the public in order to actually threaten a broadcaster’s license. In fact, there has been only one finding of news distortion since 1982 — involving NBC staging a car explosion in a 1993 Dateline report warning about unsafe gas tanks. Even there, no adverse action was taken against the network beyond a frankly worded letter.
With this in mind, it should follow that the complaint against CBS and 60 Minutes would allege extensive evidence of an elaborate plot to rig then-candidate Kamala Harris’s responses, with orders coming from the very top. But as FIRE’s filing in the FCC’s docket on the matter points out, it did not do that.
The role of the Center for American Rights
Who filed the CBS complaint?
The same organization that filed the complaints against NBC and ABC: the Center for American Rights (CAR). It’s worth parking our car here for a second to get a sense for how rickety and rusty some of the foundation for the extortion-industrial complex is.
The paper-thin CBS complaint leans on speculation from conservative commentators as evidence, appoints CAR as a spokesman for the general public, and fails to actually allege an instance of news distortion, the purported violation CBS is guilty of. Other complaints aren’t much better, from citing Brendan Carr tweets as if they were case law to equating news coverage that mentioned the presence of an autistic child in the back of deported Salvadoran immigrant Abrego Garcia’s car when he was arrested with “villainiz[ing] the police.”
The role of CAR emphasizes how the public input can be abused by a commission with malign intentions. CAR gives the FCC specific public cover to engage in shakedowns of media entities. The chairman gets the benefit of the appearance that he is just looking into the duly filed legal grievances of the faithful public, even if he is granted some agency by the likes of CAR as to when and where those grievances appear.
Take one example from last April: Carr took issue with MSNBC and other outlets’ coverage of Abrego Garcia’s detention and deportation, and went as far as to post allegations of news distortion on the part of Comcast (again, the FCC has zero authority over cable news channels). Within a week of Carr’s social media posts, CAR filed a complaint alleging news distortion on the part of NBC, CBS, and ABC owned properties, citing coverage on their websites in addition to their broadcast channels. It’s like a dog responding to a whistle.
CAR has benefitted from its newfound role in the extortion-industrial complex, as Trump is reportedly considering CAR’s president Daniel Suhr for an appointment on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
The extortion-industrial complex threatens our First Amendment rights, but we can (and should) fight back
The combined effect of these components — the lawsuits, the complaints, and the FCC’s broader content-based regulatory regime — is to strangle America’s broadcast industry with a series of looming threats. That’s the extortion-industrial complex at its heart, and how they harmonize together is simple. Let’s review.
First, there is often a merger, acquisition, or some other needed regulatory approval coming down the pipeline that introduces a point of leverage for the government. The Skydance-Paramount merger is the second time an entity owning CBS News has been involved in a merger under Trump’s presidency, and the lead-up to a merger like that actually taking place can take years.
That’s ample opportunity for the government to make demands.
And if there isn’t a merger or acquisition coming to provide the government with the opportunity to extort? Then CAR or some other political front group can draft a complaint to the FCC and create one. If an FCC probe isn’t threatening enough, Trump’s legal team will bolster it with a lawsuit. And as we saw with Paramount, when the government’s desires are big enough, they’ll combine all three.
Provided Trump sues, the settlement agreement then acts as the depository for the targeted company’s tributes — whether money, policy concessions, or both. Job done.
The uncertainty with which all this places the companies operating under this protection racket’s thumb is what makes the extortion-industrial complex such an effective force. That uncertainty means less commercial investment, both into the company and out of it.
So, taking advantage of the natural corporate aversion to uncertainty, Trump and his extortion apparatus offer an off-ramp: don’t do anything we don’t like, and your business’s future looks a little more predictable and profitable.
That’s an incredible source of soft power.
This is why Skydance’s agreement to bring on an ombudsman to monitor bias in CBS’s news programming paints a worrying picture. It signals what Trump and Carr’s efforts could be building towards: a future where their interventions are no longer required because soft power does all the work.
That’s a five-alarm fire for free speech, and neither Carr nor the Trump administration show any sign of stopping. As Carr sees it, “the media industry across this country needs a course correction.”
We’ve seen Trump use similar extortionary tactics in other contexts — including with universities and law firms — and unfortunately, many of his targets have capitulated. This includes Columbia University, who acceded to a list of demands provided by the Trump administration and was later forced to pay $200 million dollars. It also includes law firms like Paul Weiss and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — targeted for the crime of employing Trump enemies — who settled under the expectation they would be doing pro bono work on behalf of causes like helping veterans, only to see Trump later suggest they’d be negotiating his trade deals.
All of this has provided us with a chilling reminder: extortion is seldom a one-time deal. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated, and too many have caved to the pressure at the expense of free speech in our country’s most important institutions. They’ll discover for themselves that selling out the First Amendment is a debt that always comes due.
Those capitulations are all the more frustrating because we have seen that fighting back can pay off. For example, the law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey all fought Trump’s executive orders — and they won. Enforcement of the orders have been blocked on First Amendment grounds for all four of them.
America’s media conglomerates would be wise to take their example. Also, fighting back isn’t limited to their leadership. The creators of South Park saw Paramount announce a $1.5 billion deal with them to create new episodes for their streaming service, and 10 hours later, they aired an episode featuring a scathing criticism of both Trump’s extortion and Paramount’s appeasement. While resistance will help fend off the immediate crisis, the root of the problem remains with the core machinery of the extortion-industrial complex itself. Thankfully, dismantling that wouldn’t be too tall an order.
For example, the next FCC chair can simply get rid of the news distortion rule, which serves little utility other than misuse. Similarly, the FCC could halt unnecessary investigations, both formal and informal, into the content decisions of those under its regulatory purview. FIRE has detailed both of these recommendations in previous filings to the FCC.
Finally, the FCC can use their discretion over the merger process to eliminate content-related considerations. These moves would align the commission with court and congressional guidance, and also close the government’s pivotal extortionary pressure points. Importantly, destroying these levers wouldn’t weaken legitimate oversight. Rather, it would restore the FCC to its core technical mission and insulate speech from bureaucratic ransom.
It’s a necessity that transcends partisan lines. One could very much imagine a future Democratic chairman taking Carr’s playbook, reviving the petition against FOX 29 Philadelphia, and reorienting the extortion-industrial complex’s machinery towards the conservative media ecosystem. If and when that happens, proponents of Carr’s current behavior may change their tune about how permissible and necessary these crackdowns are. And that will only make it more obvious that this usage of government power is not compatible with an open democratic society.
To preserve free expression and our First Amendment rights, the extortion-industrial complex must be dismantled.
