This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.
There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation – even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this new American Public Media podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.
Episode 14: The Cuts
Education research is at a turning point in the United States. The Trump administration is slashing government funding for science and dismantling the Department of Education. We look at what the cuts mean for the science of reading — and the effort to get that science into schools.
This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Judge Stephanie Gallagher declared in the Thursday ruling that the Department of Education broke the law when it tried to withhold grant funding from institutions that practiced DEI based on one of the president’s executive orders and a related guidance letter.
In her opinion, Gallagher focused less on the legality of the attempt to ban DEI itself, but rather the process through which the president and secretary of education tried to do so.
“This court takes no view as to whether the policies at issue in this case are good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair. But, at this stage too, it must closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires. Here, it did not,” the judge wrote. “By leapfrogging important procedural requirements, the government has unwittingly run headfirst into serious constitutional problems.”
That said, she did explain the ways Trump’s policy violated the Constitution, saying, “The government cannot proclaim that it ‘will no longer tolerate’ speech it dislikes because of its ‘motivating ideology’—that is a ‘blatant’ and ‘egregious’ violation of the First Amendment.”
Gallagher’s decision followed a motion for summary judgment that was filed by the plaintiffs, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association, after they won a preliminary injunction that blocked parts of Trump’s anti-DEI policy since April. (Gallagher was appointed by Trump during his first presidency in 2018.)
Since the Education Department’s anti-DEI guidance was enjoined, the Trump administration has made other attempts to block the same academic practices. Most recently, the Department of Justice published a nine-page memo that stated that DEI is unlawful and discriminatory.
Still, AFT president Randi Weingarten viewed the ruling as a “huge win” against Trump’s “draconian attacks on the essence of public education.”
“This decision rightly strikes down the government’s attempt to dictate curriculum, and, in so doing, upholds the purpose and promise inherent in our public schools,” Weingarten said in a news release.
In the nearly seven months since President Trump took office again, academic associations, faculty unions, researchers and other groups have used the legal system to push back on the administration’s efforts to reshape higher education and the federal government.
The lawsuits challenged bans on diversity, equity and inclusion programs; the administration’s crackdown on international students; the termination of thousands of grants; and the dismantling of the Department of Education.
“What we’re seeing is that when the administration tries to impose a whole new set of rules and regulations based upon their particular ideology … the courts are saying, ‘Wait’ or ‘No,’ until it gets to the Supreme Court,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a teachers’ union that has filed multiple lawsuits against Trump and notched a few victories.
An Inside Higher Ed analysis of more than 40 lawsuits against the administration that are related to higher ed found that district judges have ruled against the executive branch in nearly two-thirds of the cases. Almost a quarter have yet to be decided. Of those in which a judge has ruled, 18 have been appealed, and only two were overturned. In bothinstances when the district court was overruled, it had to do with reversing injunctions that prevented the Trump administration from canceling grants based in part on the president’s executive order against DEI. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration in a separate but similar case.
Nine cases have yet to receive a decision from an appeals court.
For more updates on litigation against the administration, go to Inside Higher Edrevamped lawsuit tracker. The searchable database will be updated regularly.
Of the cases Inside Higher Ed analyzed, the most frequent issue at hand was grant cuts, at 14 cases, followed by the Education Department’s reduction in force at eight.
“A lot of the actions the administration is taking are very clearly being defined by the courts as patently illegal. They’re outside of the established law and they exceed executive authority,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, which has sued the administration severaltimes to challenge a proposed cap on reimbursements for indirect research expenses that would cost universities millions.
Some worry that rulings from the conservative majority on the Supreme Court could be driven by party alignment more than the law. Fansmith said he was certainly concerned by the court’s rulings so far but was hesitant to call them an “interjection of partisan politics.”
He noted that the rulings have come from the court’s shadow docket. This means they have made their decisions outside of the traditional case procedures with limited briefings, no oral argument and often no detailed explanations.
For example, when it comes to the case challenging the Education Department’s layoffs, Fansmith said that the lawyers he’s talked to are “sort of confounded by the decision.” The justices didn’t offer an opinion on whether the department can legally fire half its employees, but did allow the administration to proceed with the process while the courts work through the case.
“So it’s sort of a split decision in some ways; the merits haven’t yet been resolved finally,” he said.
But the odds of the court making a final judgment that brings back the employees seems unlikely, some legal experts have said. And Weingarten noted that even if they do hear the cases this fall and make a final decision next spring, the damage will have been done.
“The problem is that when you start talking about medical and scientific research, the moment that those things get stopped, there is irreparable damage and it’s hard to recreate them,” she said. “The Trump administration is really hurting what was an anchoring principle of American enterprise and innovation … that research has really been suffocated and used as leverage for the Trump administration to get its ideological whims adopted.”
Still, many different plaintiffs—including Democratic attorneys general—continue to push back against the Trump administration’s agenda.
Massachusetts AG Andrea Joy Campbell, who has challenged the president in multiple suits, believes that Trump and his cabinet have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to use “unlawful abuses of power” to limit academic freedom. And as long as they continue to do so, she added, Democratic leaders will keep taking matters to court.
“State attorneys general have the power to fight back to uphold the rule of law and protect our young people—and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Campbell wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “We’ve achieved significant victories in the vast majority of our cases, and we will continue to hold the line because our children and the future of our democracy depend on it.”
Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal group that has represented plaintiffs in a number of cases, also chimed in, saying the Trump-Vance “assault” on education will continue to be “met with force.”
“These victories show just how essential higher education is to our democracy and why protecting it from political interference will remain a core part of our work,” said Skye Perryman, the group’s president and CEO.
She added that while the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn some cases was “incredibly disappointing,” it’s not the end.
“We win a lot, but if we’re not experiencing some setbacks, we’re not pushing hard enough,” she said.
However, major concerns still loom among many higher education advocates as Trump officials continue to fight back, pushing for lawsuits to reach the Supreme Court and lambasting the district and appellate judges that rule against the executive branch, calling them “activist[s]” for disagreeing with the president.
“There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision-making process,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press conference in May.
Leavitt’s comments were related to court decisions blocking certain immigration policies, but Madi Biedermann, press secretary for the Education Department, has also criticized judges that rule against Trump.
In May, Biedermann called a district court judge who blocked the department’s mass layoffs a “far-left judge,” adding that he “dramatically overstepped his authority” and had “a political ax to grind.”
Weingarten, on the other hand, says it’s Trump and the conservative Supreme Court that are thwarting academic freedom and violating constitutional rights for political power.
What we’ve seen is “more the sign of an autocrat that tries to control as opposed to people who believe in freedom,” she said. “It’s all very, very dangerous for the future of America.”
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April promising to “elevate the value and impact” of the country’s historically Black colleges and universities—in part by selecting an executive director for the White House Initiative on HBCUs and a President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs.
But four months later, eight months into his second term, these roles remain unfilled.
Some HBCU advocates say months-long waits are business as usual for these positions, and they remain confident in Trump’s support for HBCUs. Others worry that HBCUs lack their most direct line of communication to the White House at a time of rapid-fire higher ed policy changes.
Since the 1980s, the executive director of the HBCUs initiative, established by President Jimmy Carter, has been responsible for advocating for HBCUs’ federal policy interests. The President’s Board of Advisors offers guidance to government officials about how to better support and strengthen these institutions.
Appointees serve as HBCUs’ “in-house advocates,” said Ivory A. Toldson, a professor of counseling psychology at Howard University and editor in chief of The Journal of Negro Education. He served as deputy director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs from 2013 to 2015 and as executive director from 2015 to 2016 under former president Barack Obama. The director and board have historically sought out federal funding and partnership opportunities for these institutions and “made sure that executive-level priorities were shaped in a way that understood the needs of HBCUs.”
Toldson said there are likely to be “missed opportunities” for HBCUs during the limbo period before an executive director is chosen. He said it’s easy for federal agencies, like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, to overlook smaller HBCUs for grants when no one is there to champion them.
“By them not having representation within the federal government, it becomes difficult for them to advocate effectively for their needs,” he said.
Robert Palmer, chair of the education department at Howard, said he worries HBCUs don’t have their “earpiece” to the Trump administration at a time when policy shifts, such as upcoming changes to the student loan program, will affect HBCU students.
The unfilled roles are “quite concerning,” Palmer said. “It almost makes you wonder, is it a priority for him? Because that’s what it signals—that it’s not a priority.”
Mixed Views
Other HBCU advocates don’t see a problem. Lodriguez Murray, vice president of public policy and government affairs at the United Negro College Fund, which represents private HBCUs, said he isn’t troubled by the wait because organizations like his have still been able to have “high-power and high-level discussions” with the White House and Department of Education.
“We’ve been able to get every concern addressed. We’ve been able to get every email returned. We’ve been able to get every meeting request handled,” he said. “The house is not burning down for us. And I have seen no lack of continuity and engagement on our issues at the highest levels.”
He said it’s more meaningful to him that Trump issued an executive order reaffirming the White House Initiative on HBCUs within his first 100 days and fully funded HBCUs in his proposed budget. He’d also rather the administration take its time to pick “the right individuals” to fill these roles.
“There have been many individuals who have had the role of executive director of the White House initiative on HBCUs [who] have fallen below what the expectations are of this community,” Murray said. “And so, if the White House is attempting to find the right person to meet a moment and to meet expectations, that’s fine with me.”
Trump’s pick for executive director during his first term, speaker and consultant Johnathan Holifield, was met with mixed reactions by HBCU supporters because of his lack of prior experience with these institutions. Former president Obama also received criticism for some of his executive director choices, including multiple interim appointments between permanent directors.
Murray said he’s hoping for someone “with the president’s confidence” who can help bring Trump’s plans to support HBCUs to fruition and who can simultaneously “speak truth to power and express to the president the concerns of HBCUs.”
For Toldson, “institutional knowledge of HBCUs” and an “apolitical” approach will be critical to a new executive director’s success to avoid HBCUs getting mired in the anti-DEI crusade besieging other higher ed institutions.
“Regardless of who’s in office, we need representation, and I think that the right representation would be able to balance the needs of the HBCU community with the broader direction of the government,” Toldson said.
Mounting Anticipation
Harry Williams, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents public HBCUs, said the amount of time it takes for presidents to fill these roles has varied historically. HBCUs have often waited months for these appointments, so the current timeline isn’t out of the ordinary, he said. Former president Joe Biden didn’t officially name an executive director until February 2022, a little over a year after his inauguration.
Still, a long wait “creates uncertainty, and it creates anxiety,” Williams said.
“We’ve gotten good information that this is something that will happen, but the timing of it has always been the challenge,” he added. TMCF is reassuring campuses that the administration plans to fill these positions, “but we don’t know exactly when.”
David K. Wilson, president of Morgan State University, said he and other HBCU presidents are eager to get started on making the promises in Trump’s executive order a reality. They were glad to see the order call on federal agencies, businesses and foundations to partner with and invest more in HBCUs.
Wilson said he hopes to see these positions filled soon “so that we can begin to express directly to the White House what some of the opportunities are for continued investment in these institutions.”
“All of them will return unbelievable dividends to the nation,” he added.
Wilson noted that Howard University recently regained Research-1 status, the coveted Carnegie Foundation classification for universities with very high research activity. Other HBCUs, including Morgan State, are poised to follow in the coming years. He wants to see appointees in place who can help maintain that momentum.
“We can’t wait to see now what this next era of HBCU investments under the Trump administration will look like,” he said. “We were on a roll, and now the question is, can we roll faster?”
Senate Republicans are planning to protect the Pell Grant program, keeping the maximum grant award at $7,395 for the coming academic year, despite the Trump administration’s proposal to lower it to $5,710.
The rejection of Pell Grant cuts at a key committee markup Thursday is just the latest rebuke from congressional appropriators as lawmakers in both chambers have appeared wary of President Trump’s plans to shutter offices, gut programs and generally reshape the federal government.
In addition to protecting $22.5 billion for Pell, the GOP also spared TRIO, campus childcare subsidies and numerous other programs that Trump had proposed zeroing out. It also set new staffing standards for the recently gutted Department of Education, increased funding for medical research by $400 million and rejected the National Institutes of Health’s attempt to cap indirect research cost reimbursements at 15 percent. The legislation also restricts other efforts at NIH to change how grants are awarded, though Democrats say “more needs to be done to protect NIH research programs.”
Over all, the Department of Education is going to receive $79 billion and the NIH will get $48.7 billion. In comparison, Trump had requested $66.7 billion for ED and $27.5 billion for NIH.
Committee chair Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said she was proud of the legislation that advanced Thursday, calling it a bipartisan effort to fund the health and education of American families. She noted that “the appropriations process is the key way that Congress carries out its constitutional responsibility for the power of the purse.”
But Democrats, while overall supportive, noted that they’ve had to make a number of compromises already and warned that Trump could still attempt to make unilateral changes moving forward.
“These are not the bills I would have written on my own, but nonetheless they represent serious bipartisan work to make some truly critical investments in our country and families’ future,” said Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat and ranking member of the committee. Still, she added, this is only half the battle. “The fact of the matter is we have an administration right now that is intent on ignoring Congress, breaking the law and doing everything it can without transparency to dismantle programs and agencies.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly frozen or cut grant funding, largely declining to spend money that Congress appropriated—moves that Murray and others have decried as illegal. More recently, the administration waited weeks before sending critical funding to states that supports after-school programs, migrant education and adult education. About $7 billion was affected, and colleges had to scramble to find a way to fill the funding gaps before Trump’s Office of Management and Budget finally released the money last week. Meanwhile, colleges are still waiting for the Education Department to open up grant applications for millions in funds.
At NIH, grant cancellations and other changes have slowed the flow of research funding to colleges. Earlier this week the administration briefly paused all new grant awards, infuriating congressional Democrats. Over all, since Trump took office, the biomedical research agency has cut more than 4,000 grants at 600 institutions totaling somewhere between $6.9 billion and $8.2 billion.
Beyond the grant cuts, the Trump administration recently clawed back money that had been allocated to public broadcasting, using a legislative process called rescission. The president is expected to propose a second rescission package in the months to come, this time targeting education dollars. Democrats have warned that using rescissions to change the budget could endanger talks on fiscal year 2026 spending.
So while higher ed lobbyists typically look to the Senate’s spending plan as the framework for what to expect in the final bill, Trump’s willingness to test the limits of executive power complicates the picture.
Still, the Senate’s proposals for the NIH as well as the Education Department, which funds a number of programs at the previous year’s level, is a victory for advocates who spent months warning that Trump’s budget cuts would be devastating for students and research.
“We are not surprised by what we’ve seen. The Senate often works more bipartisanly together, and that was reflected in the markup today,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “In this political environment, flat funding is a win. It’s not ideal, but it is us being mindful of the current realities that we’re in and the financial constraints that we’re in, especially with the upcoming rescissions package that’s supposed to include education.”
That said, Guillory noted that he’s bracing for deeper cuts from the House, which has yet to release its education and health spending proposals.
“I could see the House having a bit more influence [than most years past], as they have had more influence so far this Congress,” he said.
Seeking Guardrails
Democrats did try to amend the bill in order to establish guardrails that would retroactively address Trump’s funding cuts and protect the fiscal year 2026 appropriations from a similar ambush.
Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, proposed reinstating all college grants frozen or retracted since Jan. 28, with the exception of those pulled due to financial malfeasance. He highlighted how, in Chicago, the cuts have halted infant heart defect research and then ran through a lengthy list of other medical projects affected in other senators’ districts.
“This could happen to any of your states’ research centers. It could hurt any of your families,” he argued.
Later, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the few Democrats who did not support the bill, sought an inspector general report into whether the Department of Education’s civil rights office is properly following statutes when investigating discrimination complaints and issuing discipline.
Murphy proposed withholding OCR funding until the appropriations committee received the IG’s report.
“My worry is simply that the president is going to ignore the will of Congress that is present in this legislation,” he said. “If this does become normalized—if the president of the United States gets to deny funds to universities because they don’t like political viewpoints of the student body or of the faculty—that is a Pandora’s box that is hard to ever again close.”
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the West Virginia Republican who leads the education and health subcommittee, shot down both proposals, calling Murphy’s amendment “contrary to the point of the [OCR] office” and Durbin’s “too broad.”
“I think every administration has the prerogative to implement new goals and priorities,” she said.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Since President Donald Trump retook office, the U.S. Department of Education has launched investigations into several high-profile colleges over their compliance with Section 117,a decades-old law that was largely ignored until 2018.
The law — part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Actin 1986 — requires colleges that receive federal financial assistance to disclose contracts and gifts from foreign sources worth $250,000 or more in a year to the U.S. Department of Education.
In late April, Trump signed an executive order charging U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to work with other executive agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, to open investigations and enforce Section 117.The order also explicitly ties compliance with Section 117 to eligibility for federal grant funding and directs McMahon to require colleges to disclose more specific details about their foreign gifts and contracts.
However, complying with the law is difficult and time-consuming for colleges given the challenges they face collecting the needed data and uploading it to the Education Department’s system, according to higher education experts. That means universities must take steps to ensure they are complying, such as dedicating a staff member to meet the law’s requirements, they said.
Failing to properly do so could put colleges in the crosshairs of the Trump administration and potentially cause them to miss out on federal grants, as higher education experts speculate the executive order will be used as another tool to target institutions’ funding.
“The Trump administration has it out for American higher education, particularly those they have branded elite institutions,” said Jeremy Bauer-Wolf,investigations manager on the higher education program at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “Section 117 is another cudgel for them.”
The history of Section 117
After Section 117 was enacted nearly 40 years ago over concerns about foreign donations to colleges, it was never really implemented by the Education Department and went largely ignored, said Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education. People just stopped thinking about the issue and didn’t pay attention to it, she said.
However, concerns in Congress grew in 2018 when then-Federal Bureau of Investigations Director Christopher Wray testifiedbefore a Senate panel that China was exploiting the open research and development environment in the U.S. and universities were naive to the threat.
Proactively monitoring Section 117 and investigating disclosures was seen at the time as a way to “mitigate malign and undue foreign influence,” a Congressional Research Service report released this past February stated.
Following the hearing, the first Trump administration “really started making a show of Section 117,” said Bauer-Wolf.
Between 2019 and2021, the Trump administration opened investigations into prominent institutions such as Harvard University, Georgetown University,Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. The administration was more focused on enforcing compliance through investigations than working with colleges to help them understand what the law required, said Spreitzer.
That had a “chilling impact on our institutions,” said Spreitzer. Colleges had a lot of questions about Section 117 reporting that went unanswered because they “were worried that if they called the Department of Education, they would be hit with an investigation.”
The investigations led colleges to report $6.5 billion in “previously undisclosed foreign funds,” according to Trump’s executive order.
When the Biden administration took over, Education Department officials moved enforcement of Section 117 from the Office of the General Counsel to Federal Student Aid. The Biden Education Department also closed several investigations launched under the Trump administration, and it did not open any new ones.
Trump, in his executive order, alleged the Biden administration “undid” the investigatory work completed during his first term. But those investigations had been going on for several years, so it’s unclear whether those probes should or should not have been closed, said Spreitzer.
Today’s enforcement landscape
Since retaking office, the Trump administration has opened Section 117 investigations into several colleges, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley, and it has reopened a probe into Harvard University. The Education Department said it needed to verify whether Harvard was complying with the law and with a December 2024 agreement that ended an investigation launched in February 2020 during Trump’s first term.
In the agreement, Harvard said it would submit amended disclosure reports for gifts and contracts received between 2014-2019. But when reopening the investigation, the Education Department said it believed Harvard made inaccurate disclosures, including for the amended reports.
“Unfortunately, our review indicated that Harvard has not been fully transparent or complete in its disclosures, which is both unacceptable and unlawful,” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said when announcing the latest probe in April.
As part of its new investigation, the administration asked Harvard for information regarding foreign students who were expelled, including the research they conducted, and “all temporary researchers, scholars, students and faculty who are from or affiliated with foreign governments.”
It also asked Penn, among a host of other things, for all tax records since 2017. In addition, the department requested the names of contractors or staff who assisted international students or were involved in the university’s regulatory compliance with the federal Foreign Government Talent Recruitment Program — referring to foreign governments’ initiatives to recruit science and technology students and professionals.
“They are asking broader questions that go beyond the scope of Section 117,” said Spreitzer.
The threat of penalties, meanwhile, is all too real for universities on various fronts. The Trump administration has tried to compel universities to roll back their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and has paused or terminated federal grants to universities such as Harvard,Princeton University, Northwestern University and Cornell University as it investigates antisemitism and civil rights allegations on their campuses.
Bauer-Wolf said he fears the Section 117 executive order will be used as another “political tool, almost as a shortcut to yanking colleges’ funding.”
“It will be another avenue that the administration can claim that colleges are not following the law, when in fact, this is a law I don’t think anyone had any recognition or compliance with,” he said.
“I really think there are legitimate uses for Section 117,” said Bauer-Wolf, adding that it’s unfortunate the Trump administration and Republicans have “chosen to politicize it — instead of actually trying to find policy that could protect American interests and campuses.”
The new executive order also ties compliance with Section 117 to the False Claims Act — a federal law that penalizes people who knowingly submit false claims to the government.
It’s not clear how the Education Department will use the False Claims Act to enforce Section 117 against individual college officials or professors, said Matthew Kennison, a partner at Kelley Drye, a law firm that represents clients in government Investigations and enforcement proceedings.
But the prospect that the False Claims Act liability could be tied to Section 117 reporting “creates risks to institutions due to its ambiguity and potential broad reach,” said Anne Pifer, managing director of research at consulting firm Huron, which provides risk management and compliance services to higher ed institutions.
“While there is a high degree of uncertainty on the details of enforcement, institutions should expect increased oversight and scrutiny,” Pifer said.
Navigating the landscape
To comply with Section 117 requirements, colleges should follow the Education Department’s published guidance and other resources and, when necessary, seek more specific advice from the department, said Kennison.
But reporting foreign gifts and contracts to the federal government is difficult and time-consuming, said Spreitzer.
An FSA reporting portal allows institutions to upload their Section 117 disclosures. Yet, according to Spreitzer, there’s no way for an institution to upload a spreadsheet listing all of their gifts and contracts.
“They have to go in and enter each gift or contract individually,” said Spreitzer. “For a large institution, it can take several days.”
Then, if an institution makes a mistake, there’s no phone number to call at the Education Department, said Spreitzer. The Biden administration set up an email address, but it’s unclear if it is being closely monitored or responded to in a timely manner, she said.
“It will be another avenue that the administration can claim that colleges are not following the law.”
Jeremy Bauer-Wolf
Investigations manager, New America
An Education Department official disputed Spreitzer’s characterization. Several full-time career staffers continuously monitor the email and respond to institutions’ questions regarding Section 117 reports and reporting issues, the department official said.
Julie Hartman, an Education Department spokesperson, added in an email that the first Trump administration created the reporting portal in 2020 after years of “inadequate disclosures.” The Biden administration did not open any new Section 117 investigations, nor did it update the reporting website’s capabilities, she said.
“The Trump-McMahon Education Department is committed to reinvigorating Section 117 enforcement, including by improving the reporting portal in the coming months,” Hartman said.
A lot of large research institutions have carefully considered how to conduct their Section 117 reporting, Spreitzer said. But it requires “a whole campus effort to be aware of this requirement and to make sure you’re reporting that information twice per year,” Spreitzer said. She worries about the smaller, under-resourced institutions.
Those smaller institutions should designate a single point of contact to conduct the needed due diligence and make decisions on foreign sources that should be reported, Pifer said. And someone should be responsible for consolidating data sources and preparing and verifying the institution’s report, she said.
“Identifying a single point of conduct can minimize the need to train multiple offices on conducting complex reviews and help ensure data integrity,” Pifer said.
Such gifts or contracts are often found in university offices overseeing advancement and alumni relations, research, administration, procurement, bursars, and global affairs, Pifer added. Colleges should create a standard operating procedure or policy to identify and validate the sources of such gifts and contracts, and they should regularly review their gift acceptance and naming policies, she said.
But that work requires buy-in from the key stakeholders involved in collecting that data, she said.
“It is essential for institutions to establish sound practices and methodologies that will be robust and defensible in audits or investigations,” Pifer said.
Compliance through investigations?
The landscape for Section 117 compliance may only get tougher for colleges. The House recently passed a bill, called the Deterrent Act, that would add new reporting requirements to Section 117 and reduce the reporting threshold for foreign gifts and contracts from $250,000 to $50,000.
The bill would also require institutions to get a waiver before entering into a contract with a country “of concern,” which includes China and Russia.They would also have to report all gifts from countries of concern.
Currently before the Senate’s education committee, the bill would also introduce penalties for noncompliance, ranging from fines of $50,000 to losing federal financial aid.
Numerous higher education organizations have opposed the measure. including ACE, arguing it would significantly impede critical research activities and duplicate interagency efforts. The organizations, in a March 25 letter to House leaders, added the Education Department’s expanded data collection was “problematic” and wouldn’t ensure that “actual national security or foreign malign influence threats” are addressed.
“It is essential for institutions to establish sound practices and methodologies that will be robust and defensible in audits or investigations.”
Anne Pifer
Managing director of research, Huron
Brandy Shufutinsky, director of the education and national security program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative research institute, suggested that nonmonetary penalties be considered for colleges that don’t comply with Section 117.
For instance, they could be blocked from granting degrees, have their accreditation reviewed or see their nonprofit status be rolled back. Shufutinsky also recommended implementing a lower reporting threshold and being specific on which departments, professors or centers receive foreign funds and for what purpose.
Trump’s executive order on Section 117 is needed because “foreign funding in the US education system can contribute to foreign influence at those universities,” Shufutinsky said.
Still, the Trump administration’s focus on launching Section 117 investigations, instead of helping institutions with compliance, will make it harder for institutions to ask the Education Department whether they are actually reporting something correctly, said Spreitzer.
“The Trump administration seems to be again, trying to drive compliance through investigations,” said Spreitzer. “I think that chills our campuses from actually asking questions.”
Disclosure: Jeremy Bauer-Wolf was a reporter on Higher Ed Dive from 2019 to 2023.
Researchers and the academic community may have reason to be hopeful about the future of federal funding. Early indications from the appropriations process suggest that both the House and Senate will diverge significantly from the president’s federal budget proposal for science and technology for the next fiscal year.
In May, the White House released its budget proposal that aims to reduce federal research and development funding by nearly a quarter, according to an analysis from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It also proposed eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Congress still has months of negotiations before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1 but, so far, funding for science has received bipartisan support in appropriations meetings—though the House appears more willing to make significant cuts than the Senate.
In a July 10 Senate Appropriations Committee meeting, legislators put forth a cut to the National Science Foundation (NSF) of only $16 million compared to the more than $5 billion proposed by Trump. Four days later, a House Appropriations Committee subcommittee suggested slashing $2 billion—less than half of Trump’s proposal.
Alessandra Zimmermann, budget analyst and senior manager for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s R&D Budget and Policy Program, highlighted in a statement the Senate’s proposal and noted that the House’s over 20 percent proposed cut to NSF is still “a much smaller decrease than the Administration’s initial request.”
“This shows that there is bipartisan support for investing in basic research, and putting the U.S. on track for FY26,” Zimmermann said. “The story of the future of science is still being written, and we appreciate the strong support from Congress.”
The House has also suggested increasing by $160 million funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science—rejecting the White House’s planned 14 percent cut. The House has floated cutting NASA’s Science Mission Directorate by $1.3 billion, or 18 percent, but that’s still better than Trump’s proposal to nearly halve that budget. The House also proposed $288 million for the Fulbright scholarship, a highly selective cultural exchange program that Trump had recommended eliminating.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday.
Bipartisan Support for R&D
Congressional Republicans have remained in lock step with the second Trump administration. Early grumbles about the One Big Beautiful Bill were silent when the House passed it into law July 3, cutting nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, eliminating a loan program for graduate students and much more.
Still, observers say there is reason for science and research communities to have some optimism that Republicans will step out of line on budget proposals.
“Neither bill goes to the extreme of the president’s budget,” said Debbie Altenburg, vice president of research policy and advocacy at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. “We are pleased that both the House and the Senate have marked up bills that are above what the president called for.”
She noted that Republicans, who want the federal government to have a smaller footprint, control Congress and the White House.
“We will be lucky if we get that flat funding” that senators have proposed, she said.
The House and Senate have to agree on a dozen appropriations bills to pass the federal budget by Sept. 30 or risk a government shutdown.
“It’s a very tense political situation,” she said. “It will be hard for Congress to complete all of these bills by the end of September.”
Roger Pielke, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, noted that “this is not the first time that Congress, on science-technology policy issues, has pushed back on the Trump administration.” It happened during Trump’s first term. And, going back to the 1970s and ’80s, research and development “has been a strong bipartisan area of agreement.”
“R&D money goes all over the country,” Pielke said. “… It does kind of have a built-in support structure.”
He said the NSF, which focuses on basic research, may be more insulated from political fights than agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which deals with climate science, and the National Institutes of Health, which deals with vaccines. The congressional appropriations committees haven’t yet indicated what they plan to do with Trump’s proposed 38 percent cut to the NIH.
But, Pielke noted, “in this day and age, everything can be politicized.”
‘Scientific Supremacy’
While House Republicans appear more willing to protect spending for science than the president, Democratic members of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee have criticized the bill. Representative Grace Meng, a New York Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member, said a proposed cut to the NSF and NASA “disinvests in the scientific research that drives American innovation, technological leadership and economic competitiveness.”
“As other countries are racing forward in space exploration and climate science, this bill would cause the U.S. to fall behind by cutting NASA’s science account by over $1.3 billion,” Meng said.
Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat and ranking member of the full House Appropriations Committee, said the bill “continues Republicans’ senseless attacks on America’s scientific supremacy.”
“They have fired hundreds of scientists, including scientists who monitor extreme weather and who advance our scientific goals in space,” DeLauro said, referencing the mass layoffs at federal research agencies. “Why on Earth are we forfeiting America’s scientific supremacy? What would you do differently if you were America’s adversary and wanted to undermine everything that made us a superpower?”
In the Senate, where Republicans need Democratic support to get to 60 votes to pass their bill, proposed spending cuts have been more modest.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said during its July 10 meeting that the NSF and NASA appropriations bill “funds research in critical scientific and technological fields.” She said another appropriations bill “supports much-needed investments in agricultural research in animal and plant health that were requested by nearly every member in this room.”
Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington state Democrat and ranking member of the Senate committee, said “these compromise bills offer a far better outcome for families back home than the alternatives of either the House or another disastrous CR [continuing resolution].”
She cautioned, though, that rescissions legislation—like the bill passed by Congress last week that claws back $9 billion in foreign aid and public broadcasting funding–could undermine consensus on a budget.
“We cannot allow bipartisan bills with partisan rescission packages,” she said, asking, “if we start passing partisan cuts to bipartisan deals, how are we ever supposed to work together?”
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Dive Brief:
The Trump administration’s restrictive policies for international students present a financial risk for many U.S. colleges by potentially deterring them from enrolling, Moody’s analysts said in a recent report.
Analysts pointed to visa disruptions, increased scrutiny of social media accounts, changes to deportation rules,and recent travel bans and restrictions to the U.S. from 19 countries. The Trump administration has also created confusion around visas for Chinese students, who account for nearly a quarter of international students.
While the impact on upcoming academic terms remains unclear, the changing policies are “diminishing the perception of the US as a prime destination for higher education,” the analysts said.
When the administration moved to bar Harvard University from enrolling international students, the private institution sought and won a court order temporarily blocking the move the next day.
The ongoing legal spat underscores just how critical international enrollment is for the Ivy League university. In the 2024-25 academic year, Harvard’s roughly 6,800 foreign students made up 27.2% of the university’s total student body.
And just this week, George Washington University cited, among other federal moves, a slowdown in visa processing and President Donald Trump’s travel bans when explaining the need for painful budget measures, including possible layoffs.
International students make up over 20% of enrollment at 11% of the colleges rated by Moody’s. But that figure may understate the financial impact of lower international enrollment.
Foreign students typically pay full tuition and fees at colleges, noted Moody’s analysts Debra Roane, vice president and senior credit officer, and Emily Raimes, associate managing director.And they do so at a time when the ranks of traditional-age college students are projected to decline significantly in the coming years.
“Universities intending to fill the gap with more international students may fall short,” Roane and Raimes said in the report.
The analysts ran a stress test on colleges rated by Moody’s to look at the financial impact of international student enrollment declines. Given a 10% drop in international enrollment, 54 out 392 institutions would suffer a hit to a measure of their operating performance of at least half a percentage point. Seven of those colleges would see those margins decrease by two to eight percentage points.
With a 20% drop in international enrollment, 130 colleges would lose at least half a percentage point from their margins, and 18 among them would lose two to eight points. Those with already low margins could face “significant financial stress,” Roane and Raimes said.
The analysts noted, however, that highly selective colleges or those with considerable financial reserves might “better absorb the impacts by adjusting operations or increasing domestic enrollment.” Other prominent colleges might be able to mitigate international student declines through alternative revenue sources like fundraising and endowment spending.
But others could have a much tougher time. Roane and Raimes pointed to specialty institutions, such as arts colleges — which are already facing a tough environment — whose student bodies can be over 30% international.
Sen. Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, proposed sending $9 billion to the National Science Foundation.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Signs that Congress intends to push back on the Trump administration’s wholesale slashing of federal budgets emerged during a Senate meeting Thursday that kicked off the annual appropriations process.
Since January, the Trump administration has sought to significantly downsize the federal government via mass layoffs and spending cuts. Additionally, the administration has canceled grants and withheld funding despite laws that require agencies to spend money as directed by Congress.
However, on Thursday a subcommittee that oversees the budgets for the Justice and Commerce Departments as well as related science agencies proposed only a small cut to the National Science Foundation budget next fiscal year—a far cry from the $5 billion reduction that President Donald Trump wants to see.
Instead, NSF will get just over $9 billion, a $16 million cut, said Sen. Jerry Moran, the Kansas Republican who chairs the subcommittee. The bill also sends about $10 million more to the National Weather Service and boosts funding for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Although the science funding received bipartisan support, a fight over funding for the new Federal Bureau of Investigations headquarters could tank the legislation. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and vice chair of the subcommittee, objected to the Trump administration’s decision to move the headquarters to another building in Washington, D.C., rather than moving forward with a plan approved during the Biden administration to build a facility in Maryland. (Congress previously appropriated money for a new headquarters and set the criteria for the site selection.)
After the Senate appropriations committee approved an amendment on Thursday from Van Hollen related to the headquarters, some Republicans on the committee changed their vote on the legislation and the panel recessed instead of making a final decision on whether to advance it.
“I think it’s sad that one issue is sinking a bill that was bipartisan,” said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican and chair of the full appropriations committee.
Still, Van Hollen said earlier in the meeting that there was “a lot of good news” in the legislation.
“We were able to make smart and targeted investments to help keep our community safe, keep our country safe, to advance U.S. leadership in science and innovation and to support growth and prosperity of the American economy. We were able to protect agencies and programs like NASA science and STEM, [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and] NSF.”
Higher education groups and research advocacy organizations had warned that slashing NSF’s budget by more than half would be catastrophic and set U.S. research back by decades. The Trump administration sought to end funding for STEM training and NSF’s education programs and significantly reduce the money available for scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships.
The committee didn’t release any other information about the budget bill such as the text or a summary, so it’s not clear what the line-item budget for NSF looks like. The available details come from what lawmakers said at Thursday’s meeting.
Van Hollen and Moran said that NASA would get about $24.5 billion to boost space exploration, whereas the administration has requested $18.8 billion.
The additional $10 million for the National Weather Service would go toward restaffing an agency that’s lost about 17 percent of its head count—or 600 employees—due to buyouts and layoffs. NWS’s parent agency, NOAA, lost about 11 percent of its staff. The Trump administration requested about $91 million more for NWS and to cut NOAA’s budget by about $1.8 billion.
After the government imposed significant reductions in force across federal agencies, lawmakers wrangled over details in the proposal that ensure NWS has enough personnel to continue functioning. The bill requires the agency to be fully staffed, but it doesn’t specify what that means aside from requiring the agency have enough employees to fulfill its statutorily required mission. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, didn’t think that language was strong enough to protect NWS and wanted to set the minimum staffing levels at the number of employees as of Sept. 30, 2024.
“My judgment and the judgment of a lot of people who work at the National Weather Service is that ‘to fulfill the statutory mandate’ gives a fair amount of room to assert that the current staffing levels and the current layoff process fulfills the statutory mandate,” he said. “It’s clear to me that this administration has already made the judgment that the National Weather Service has too many human beings.”
Moran said he and Schatz shared the “same desire,” but he didn’t want to specify a number. Other Republicans pointed out that NWS staff has fluctuated over the years. In fiscal year 2024, the agency had about 4,300 full-time employees, according to budget documents. Republicans voted down Schatz’s amendment.
Moran noted earlier in the meeting that the language in the budget bill should protect NWS employees from furloughs or future reductions in force and end a hiring freeze.
“This bill protects key science missions that are fundamental to furthering our understanding of the Earth and better stewards of our natural resources, and supports critical programs, not only to drive discovery, but to safeguard the Earth from natural disasters,” Moran said.
Congress has until Sept. 30 to pass the 12 appropriations bills that make up the federal budget or else the government could shut down. Democrats and some Republicans also want to use this process to reassert Congress’s authority in spending decisions.
“The challenges we face and the threats to this very process are greater than ever before with the president and administration intent on ignoring the laws that we write and seizing more power for themselves,” said Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington and vice chair of the appropriations committee.
“But at the end of the day, I do believe these bills are all a good compromise starting point, delivering critical resources to continue key programs and make targeted new investments—rejecting some of the truly harmful proposed cuts by the president and steering clear of the extreme partisan policies he’s requested.”
The United States is witnessing an alarming shift in the balance of power. Recent actions by the Supreme Court and Congress have effectively cleared the way for President Donald Trump to exercise authority in ways critics say resemble authoritarian rule.
Central to this shift is the Supreme Court’s decision on July 8, 2025, to allow Trump’s mass federal layoffs to proceed. This ruling overturned a lower court’s injunction that had temporarily blocked the president’s executive order to slash tens of thousands of federal jobs. The layoffs target agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services, critical players in addressing climate change, public health, and education.
The court’s decision was unsigned and passed 8–1, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. Her dissent warned that the ruling emboldens the president to exceed constitutional limits without proper checks.
Just weeks earlier, Congress passed what supporters called the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a sweeping budget package that enshrined Trump-era tax cuts, eliminated taxes on tips and Social Security income, and drastically reduced funding for social safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP. The bill also increased Pentagon spending by $125 billion. The legislation passed strictly along party lines, with no Democratic votes.
The atmosphere of intensifying executive authority was underscored on June 14, 2025, when Trump staged a large-scale military parade in Washington, D.C., reminiscent of displays typically seen in authoritarian regimes. The parade featured tanks, fighter jets, and thousands of troops marching through the capital, a spectacle widely criticized as an exercise in pageantry and a troubling signal of militarism. In response, spontaneous “No Kings” protests erupted nationwide, with demonstrators rejecting what they saw as the cultivation of a personality cult and warning against the erosion of democratic norms.
These domestic developments unfold against a backdrop of escalating global crises and geopolitical realignments. The Trump administration has maintained a confrontational stance toward China, imposing new tariffs that have intensified a growing economic cold war. This friction comes as the BRICS coalition — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — gains strength, seeking alternatives to the U.S.-dominated financial and diplomatic order.
Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to supply arms and financial support to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, while simultaneously imposing inconsistent policies that weaken its international credibility, especially regarding the unresolved Palestinian conflict.
At home, the Trump administration’s deregulation of the cryptocurrency market has raised alarms. With minimal oversight, the growing crypto economy faces increased risks of fraud and instability, a symptom of the broader laissez-faire approach that favors corporate interests over public protections.
Adding to domestic turmoil, Trump has controversially pardoned dozens of individuals convicted for their roles in the January 6 Capitol insurrection, framing them as “political prisoners.” Many have ties to extremist groups, and Trump has proposed hiring preferences for them within the federal government’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency, which is leading the controversial federal workforce layoffs.
Legal experts and civil rights organizations argue these actions collectively undermine the constitutional principle of separation of powers. They say the administration’s use of executive orders and politically motivated pardons bypasses Congress and the courts, weakening democratic oversight.
Congress’s role has also been questioned. By passing the partisan budget bill without bipartisan support, critics argue lawmakers have effectively rubber-stamped an agenda that dismantles government functions, cuts vital social programs, and expands military spending.
The Supreme Court’s emergency ruling to lift the injunction against the layoffs further signals the judiciary’s retreat from its role as a check on executive power. By acting swiftly and without a full hearing, the court has allowed a significant reshaping of the federal workforce without thorough judicial review.
Together, these developments mark a troubling trend toward the concentration of power in the executive branch. Observers warn that if left unchecked, these actions could erode the foundations of American democracy and weaken its position in an increasingly multipolar world.
Sources
San Francisco Chronicle, “Supreme Court clears way for Trump to resume mass federal layoffs” (July 8, 2025)
