Jon Fansmith: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon, or good morning, depending on where you are tuning in for. Welcome to this recording of dotEDU Live: What the Education Department Layoffs Mean for Colleges and Universities. I’m your host, Jon Fansmith, ACE senior vice president for Government Relations and National Engagement, and I’m joined by my usual co-hosts, Sarah Spreitzer and Mushtaq Gunja.
Sarah Spreitzer: Hello.
Mushtaq Gunja: Hey, Jon. Hey, Sarah.
Jon Fansmith: We are joined by an especially welcome guest, ACE’s president, Ted Mitchell, a regular visitor to our dotEDU Lives these days, because one or two things happening these days, right?
Ted Mitchell: Yeah, I think I’m going to need to get credits on the show. I don’t think I’m a special guest anymore.
Jon Fansmith: Glad you’re here.
Ted Mitchell: But thanks for letting me join.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, we’ll make sure to have your picture added to the webpage for it so you’re part of the crew now. Mushtaq, you’re going to kind of run us down on what we’re going to talk about, which I don’t even think we can cover everything there is to talk about, but there’s a lot on tap.
Mushtaq Gunja: So, here’s what I’m thinking. We have a whole set of questions. Feel free, as always, to put more questions in the Q&A for us. I’ll try to monitor those as best we can.
I was hoping that we might talk about four main topics today. First, continuing resolution, the budget that was passed, what that all means for our institutions. Second, as the title of this podcast webinar sort of implies, talk about the Education Department, those staff cuts, what they mean for our campuses. Third, my goodness, there are a whole set of investigations that the Trump administration has embarked on. What do those mean? We’ll spend a little time there. And then if we have time, there’s a whole range of things that are happening on the international student front as well. Travel bans, actual students, professors, what’s happening there. So, that’s what I’m hoping that we will accomplish. Feel free to throw in questions whenever you’d like.
But Ted, special guest, especially guest, as Jon says, nice to see you. And you’re probably not a stranger to many of the folks in this webinar because they’re seeing you on TV all the time these days. You’re quoted in the press all the time. You’ve been out there in the media talking to reporters, advocating on behalf of higher ed. What are you hearing? What are you saying? And thanks for all you’ve been doing, Ted.
Ted Mitchell: Thanks, guys and thanks everyone for joining. This is the home team and I know that Sarah and Jon and Mushtaq also feel like this is a place where we can really get to the issues. So I’m especially grateful to be here.
A couple quick things. One is that in the array of issues that the Trump administration has tried to address in the executive orders, education seems to be one that is finally starting to ring the bell for people that there are actual consequences. And so I get tons of questions about, well, what does this mean for me? And that’s kind of new in the onslaught that lots of our agencies are facing, but, and we’ll talk about it with the department, but what are the implications for student financial aid? What are the implications for communities in which tons of research money fuels all kinds of local businesses?
So I’m encouraged that I think we’ve got education and higher education in particular has the nation’s interest, in a way that I hope we can keep pushing on. So, we’re going to do it. That’s where ACE I think is focused, is we’re gathering information from you, and please keep us informed about things that are being cut, things that are being restored. And we’re just going to keep pushing and we’re going to keep reminding people that there are real consequences of these actions.
The other thing that I guess I’ll say, oddly positive as well, is that I think that it’s always dangerous, and I heard Mushtaq go through it. When the agenda is about as long as the whole program, you know that things are splattering and everything is going in wild different directions. But in the last week, I’m heartened that some of these things have become clearer. So the investigations, while there are now more of them, they’re more specific. So we’re not dealing with this cloud of Dementors hovering over us, that they’re actual things that we’re able to respond to, and I think that’s good.
And then I’m very encouraged by the willingness of the courts to step in and really help our institutions, but really the public in general, draw lines around what’s possible, what’s legal, what’s not. And we’ll talk about that later too.
So again, I’m especially grateful for all of your work and all of your time that you’re spending with us and with your colleagues, and we’re going to keep it up. We’re here for the long run.
Sarah Spreitzer: I like that positive note, Ted, because we’ve all been out there talking to the community about everything that’s happening with this administration and it is really difficult to find the silver lining. So thank you for that.
Ted Mitchell: Yeah, thanks. And I think the silver lining is that we’re getting attention, and I think that that’s right now is a very narrow opening, but boy, let’s lean into that.
Mushtaq Gunja: All right, Jon, walk us through the drama of last week that saw some continuing resolution, the possibility of a government shutdown, and a version of that shutdown. Where are we? What happened to the budget? What does this mean for our institutions?
Jon Fansmith: Well, skipping to the end, the government was funded, so there was no shutdown. There wasn’t even a short-term shutdown. The pathway there, as always was expected, kind of bumpy. The House of Representatives on Tuesday, Republicans passed a continuing resolution, which is basically just a funding bill that pushes the deadline further back, in this case what’s called a year-long CR, continuing resolution. Essentially says they’re just going to keep funding at previous year’s levels out through the end of the year. So instead of doing the actual work of appropriations, setting a topline level, deciding how much each program gets funded, raising, lowering levels, they basically just punted the ball forward and said, “The year’s a wash; we’re going to cover what it was.”
There were some big differences, though, from a normal continuing resolution. Biggest among them is that some money was shifted between defense spending and non-defense spending. $13 billion in non-defense spending was cut overall, and $6 billion was added to defense.
The other big thing for colleges and universities: earmarks were completely removed. They don’t call them earmarks anymore. Community-funded projects, congressionally directed spending, whatever the term, they’re still earmarks, and they were stripped out of all of the provisions of the funding bills. It’s worth just pointing out, colleges and universities historically and pretty consistently have been the biggest beneficiaries of that kind of funding. So this is a loss in funding for a lot of our campuses. Not every campus and it’s not universal certainly, but there’s hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks that usually find their way to campuses. So, that is a loss.
I think probably the bigger thing, and what Republicans were trying to do with this bill, and I’ll get to the Senate and what happened there in a second because that’s where the drama was, is they are setting the table not so much for finishing this year as trying to set up fiscal year 26, the next fiscal year, which is the work Congress should be doing right now. On schedule they would be working on 26, it’s just we’ve had such a hard time dealing with 25.
And one of the ways they wrote this bill both reflects what we’re seeing happening at agencies like the Department of Education but also the intention of setting up next year’s funding, which is instead of doing what they normally do, which is issue reports where each program gets a specific amount of money assigned to it, in many, many areas, what they did was they simply lumped a pool of funding into an account. So instead of saying, “Pell Grants will be given this much of an appropriation, Work-Study will be given this much, SEOG will be given this much,” they said, “Student financial aid gets this pool of money.”
The reason why that’s important—and budgetary rules and things probably don’t seem that exciting—the reason that it’s important is if you don’t actually say you have to spend this much on each program, the administration now has the authority to say, “We have a pot of money we can spend where we want to.” And that means if we choose not to fund work study and SEOG and instead use the $2 billion plus in those programs on Pell, they have that authority.
And as you think about what we’ve seen with the DOGE efforts, what we’ve seen at the Department of Education, this idea that the administration is actually moving funding around in ways Congress has previously never allowed them to do, it’s pretty striking because this is Congress’s big authority. Over the last few years when Congress has had a hard time passing bills, they’ve always had the power of the purse. You have to do funding every year, and that is the big club they can use to make an administration do it. And Republicans, Democrats, it doesn’t matter, Congress has always very jealously guarded that power of the purse because it is incredibly powerful. It’s how they can stop an administration from doing things. It’s how they can put their foot on the scale for things they want done. And so to see them willingly give up that authority—again only for half a year. Who knows if they’ll do the same thing for FY 26? Sarah’s shaking her head, I think understandably. But it’s a huge shift. It is Congress willingly surrendering power to the executive branch.
And so you had all these things, very problematic from the Democrats’ side. If you looked at this, a lot of concern, a lot of public opposition to what this continuing resolution would look like. So there was some thought as we went into the end of the week, Senate Democrats would hold out and force a shutdown. There’s a 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate. Republicans have 53 seats. We’ve talked about this before. Sarah, I’m not going to go into this again about who was right and who was wrong.
Sarah Spreitzer: I did change my vote.
Jon Fansmith: I’d say by raising the issue, yeah.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, I did change my vote last week. But the reason that we had the discussion, Jon, and this discussion was whether or not the Senate Democrats would cave, was I argued this was their only tool in their toolbox to push back on some of the cuts taking place across the federal government. And because Congress does hold the purse strings, it made sense that they wouldn’t accept the very first proposal of the House CR, especially given that it wasn’t “clean.”
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and I think your opinion is shared by a lot of people , and we’ve got a lot to cover, so we don’t need to get into a postmortem on this. Ultimately, Democrats agreed to allow a vote. One Democrat actually voted in favor of the CR, so it passed 54 to 46, I believe, or 45 possibly. Forget what the final total was. But there was a lot, I think justifiably, where you look back at how especially Senator Schumer handled this, where even if ultimately preventing a shutdown was a goal of Democrats, there may have been ways to shape the outcome that were more favorable that just weren’t taken advantage of. And so there’s a lot of frustration. You’ve certainly seen that with especially Senate Democrats as a result. But again, I think the bigger thing when you think about for colleges and universities, it’s less the impact this year. There will be some money lost. But really, it’s what we will see in 26, and those are going to be big, existential fights for some pretty key programs from us. So that battle has started out.
Ted Mitchell: And Jon, we see that as a pattern, that a lot of the things going back even to the NIH overhead reduction and a lot of things that are trial balloons for the long term. And so once again, the good news for us is that they’re setting out the line of battle and we can figure out how to approach it.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, it’s a great point. And the other thing they’re doing, and I know we’re going to talk about this, but by making those cuts now, they’re also setting up a justification for next year’s funding to say, “Look, if we eliminate half the people at the Department of Education, the Department of Education doesn’t need to be funded nearly as much as it’s been funded in the past.” So this really is a setup for an appropriations season that started Saturday morning and is going to be a really critical one.
Mushtaq Gunja: I want to dive into the Department of Education cuts in just a second, but just a couple of quick follow-up questions, Jon, that may be right for this section, may be right more for the Department of Education section. But on this pooled funding, are we going to get more details there? And there are a couple of questions in the Q&A. I mean, does this mean that now there are no restrictions on how much money might be able to be spent on a given area? It seems like there’s some guardrails, but some of the reins have been loosened. Does that seem right?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I wish I could provide greater clarity because, again, what they gave was not necessarily clear guidance; they gave a lot of flexibility there. It is within the boundaries of the different pools of federal funding, so you can’t move money across those groups. And those groups are, using very general terms, I’m sure some of my budget and approps colleagues are wincing as I do this. But you can’t move them money across the groupings within the Department of Education funding, but within those sort of areas you will have greater flexibility to move them across programs. And what this administration intends to do with it, if I were great at predicting what this administration intended to do, my last two months would’ve looked very different.
Mushtaq Gunja: Also, you and Sarah then would not be fighting all the time with me trying to moderate this sort of... Ted, you now get to see what happens on a weekly basis on this podcast.
Ted Mitchell: I’m terrified. This is... I don’t want to be involved.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, PSLF. I don’t know if this is a Department of Education ramifications question or if this is about funding, but we heard some concerns. There’s some thoughts from the administration that they might administer the PSLF program differently. Is that a budget question? Is that a Department of Education question? Is it not either of those questions?
Jon Fansmith: It crosses a bunch of lines. The thing that’s important about what the administration did in the executive order isn’t budgetary at all. They’re not talking about the idea necessarily that Public Service Loan Forgiveness shouldn’t be eligible. I think there’s a lot of people, and we’ve seen it from members, especially Republican members of Congress, who have concerns about the concept of Public Service Loan Forgiveness. That’s not really what the executive order was about.
The executive order is a very political document. It essentially says that we should not be providing the benefit of loan forgiveness to people who work at nonprofit organizations that, the administration’s phrasing, essentially are pursuing actions that are contrary to America’s interests and our laws. And I want to be as neutral in discussing this as possible. Their intent is to essentially say if you work for a group that supports undocumented immigrants, well, we have policies that say that they are not legally allowed to be in this country. So therefore, you’re suborning US law through the work you do to support those communities, and therefore you shouldn’t, even if it’s a nonprofit, be eligible for loan forgiveness.
It very clearly to me, and Mushtaq, I’ll defer to you on this whether I’m right, but it very clearly seems to me to be illegal to try to classify organizations, especially based on political disagreements, as to the merits of their work. I think it’s a messaging executive order. I think it’s meant to signal to people that groups that they have highlighted, nonprofit groups they’ve tended to criticize, shouldn’t get a benefit that’s being made available. I don’t know that a court would support that. I don’t know that they have to go through the regulatory process because it impacts Title IV programs. I don’t know how you do a negotiated rulemaking that produces a legal definition of what those organizations look like that would survive any scrutiny whatsoever. So who knows where this will go. This is why I think it’s probably just messaging.
The other thing about PSLF, though, that’s worth touching on is there is a lot of concern with PSLF on the administration side, of congressional Republicans. The Biden administration’s efforts both through regulations and through an emergency executive order to expand the eligibility of people to get PSLF, it was very unpopular with a lot of Republicans. Certainly, I think we would expect to see rollbacks of what the Biden administration did that made more borrowers eligible to get that benefit.
And if you remember, and Ted, I know that you do, the first iteration of Public Service Loan Forgiveness, very few people qualified because the law was written in a way that actually made it really, really hard to even live up to the intent of the authors. In a lot of ways, it was just not a well-done bill, and about 99%+ of people who applied were denied in the initial round. So the administration, if they don’t like Public Service Loan Forgiveness, they think that benefit is too widely used, if they think it’s going to the wrong places, don’t have to do a whole lot. They simply have to revoke, which they can administratively, the expansions the Biden administration put in place. And all of a sudden the program is far less effective and far less open to borrowers
Ted Mitchell: Yeah, if they were just to go back to the Obama-era guidelines, they would effectively turn the tap off on Public Service Loan Forgiveness.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: One thing to note, I think you’re exactly right, the executive order restricting PSLF to certain organizations seems clearly illegal. A problem from a process point of view, certainly runs into significant First Amendment viewpoint discrimination claims, and I think it’s just something that we should watch out for. If in the administration of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program over the course of the next few years it seems like only certain loans are being forgiven from certain organizations, we’ve got a First Amendment problem, on top of probably some other problems, process and statutory requirements. So just something for the community to keep an eye out for because I’m worried that that might happen.
Ted Mitchell: And if I could add, I think this is another chapter in the book of break it now and then the probabilities of fixing it later go way down. So let’s think about a young person who wants to get a public service loan forgiven, and they’ve got a ten-year run that they have to do a bunch of things. They have to jump through a bunch of hoops with no guarantee that there’s even going to be a program. That’s going to change a lot of behavior, and I’m really worried that even a delay of a year or two is going to take the heart out of the program because people won’t trust it.
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, if you look at some of the things that they’re proposing to do in reconciliation in Congress and basically doing away with PSLF, but also making it more difficult for students to borrow money. We’re talking about a very different environment for students considering postsecondary education.
Mushtaq Gunja: Let’s talk about these cuts at the Department of Education and what it means for our students, what it means for data reporting, and all the rest. I’ve seen a lot of questions in the chat about IES, about IPEDS. I too am very worried about all of those. Let’s do this first. Jon, tell us what happened. And then Ted, Sarah, I’d love some big picture reflections about what we think the cuts might mean.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and we were talking about this a little bit before we actually came on. It’s a little bit complicated because there’s multiple layers of what these reductions have been, and it’s worth just really quickly walking through what has happened.
Initially, the administration put about 60 or 70 employees on leave for having participated in DEI programming or having DEI groups. Those were ultimately people targeted for termination. They followed that up with terminating any employees, and this was across the executive branch, not just at the Department of Education. But at the Department of Education about 100 employees or so who were what were called probationary employees, meaning in most cases they were within their first year on the job. And certainly a concept familiar to lots of organizations; a new employee in a probationary period has fewer protections against termination. A court recently just restored, overturned the probationary firings, and so we’ve been told about 65 or so Department of Ed employees have now been returned to positions from their probationary status termination.
While all of that was going on, the department did a couple different things. They used some existing federal procedures for early retirement and to offer buyouts to identify another pool, two pools of employees who may be willing to voluntarily leave the federal government. All of this while the fork process, which was a still to be determined the legality of, offer was made to all federal employees to retire early and be paid out through the end of the fiscal year, which ends in September.
And then finally, once they’d compiled all these lists and they’d looked at where the staffing reductions that they had through essentially mostly voluntary actions, they proposed something called a reduction in force. It’s been done very sparingly in executive branch history. These are mass terminations that are tied to specific functional explanations. We’re eliminating an office; we are reorganizing; we are realigning. And what we saw was the department, when you combine all of those other categories of employees who had left, about 1,400 other employees were proposed for reduction in force last week were notified. It was done in a pretty unfortunate, pretty heartless way, where employees were told on Tuesday that they had to leave the building by 6:00 PM, that they would not be allowed to return to the building on Wednesday. By the time all the employees had left, they were then given a notice that they’d been terminated, and arrangements were made for them to get their belongings at some other point.
You saw, and we can talk about this too, huge reductions in certain areas, and we’ll talk about the Institute for Education Sciences, they’re really the research arm at the Department of Ed, has one person left, and that is a statutorily required position of the director of that office. We saw losses in the Federal Student Aid office, in the Office for Civil Rights, lots of regional OCR offices being permanently closed. They are massive reductions, about, all told, 50% of the Department of Education’s workforce if all of these go through.
And certainly, while the department and the administration and congressional allies have said they are attentive to the statutorily required functions of the Department of Education, the things the law tells them they have to do, and that they believe they have the capacity to do that. I mean, I’ll just say, within a day of the announcements, we were having FAFSA issues; the student loan portals were going up and down; there were problems.
It’s very hard for me to understand how you could arbitrarily, not arbitrarily, fine, very quickly reduce staffing at those levels given the complexity of the functions the Department of Education oversees and not see real interruptions, real concerns about service. But we’re going to talk about all that. That’s kind of where we stand right now.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, I mean the secretary, just on that last point, the secretary had only been confirmed for-
Sarah Spreitzer: A week.
Mushtaq Gunja: ... three days, four days?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: And was somehow able to, as she announced, ascertain exactly who was doing a good job and not a good job, and that led to the choices in who was let go and who was not, and I find that hard to believe. But that’s me editorializing. Ted, Sarah, big picture reflections, then let’s dive into what this really means for our schools and what this means for our students.
Ted Mitchell: Yeah, Sarah, you first.
Sarah Spreitzer: Okay, well, my comment’s going to be very broad, Ted. We had been waiting to see the White House issue an executive order around dismantling the Department of Education, and they seemed to have backed away from that because basically by halving the staff, they’re already kind of moving towards dismantling the department. And they had said that they were going to take this action. They’ve very clearly messaged that they want to do away with the U.S. Department of Education, and I think that this was a big step in that direction.
Ted Mitchell: Yeah, I think that that’s right. I think that they’ve clearly moved to a hollow out the department strategy, so that at the end of some period of time they sort of look over their shoulder and say, “Well, there’s nothing left. We might as well close it.” And so I think that this is how they’re doing it.
I worry a lot about, if you read the Project 2025, the notes that we got that suggested what was going to happen. When you think about that, and there are a couple of people who made this point in the chat, if you look at moving boxes, this looks very simple. Let’s move all the data collection to Census. Let’s move FSA into the Treasury, somehow. Well, it doesn’t work that way. And any of us who have tried to do something like merge a department understand that that’s not moving boxes; that’s a whole bunch of stuff.
Example is, you know, FSA moving into Treasury. That’s like merging Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Capital One all at once. And they just seem to think that this kind of thing can happen with the click of the fingers, but there are going to be massive, massive disruptions in service. Not for ill will, not even because there aren’t a lot of people there, but the systems are different, the operational style is different, and we’re going to see this again and again and again in each of these supposedly simple reallocations. And I think that that’s where our institutions and our students are going to be hurt.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I would just add to that too. It’s not just the size and scope and complexity of the functions being moved, but Treasury is really good at what Treasury does. What Treasury does is not administer student loans and collect on student loans. Could they do that? Sure, functionally, but that will not be their area of...
The one I really focus on is the Office for Civil Rights. There is an Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Justice that is charged with enforcing civil rights, but their entire approach, their understanding of the landscape, they are very prosecutorial and focused because that is what they do. The whole process we have with the Department of Education, which is directed towards resolution, which is focused on improvement, addressing problems, is not the mindset or focus or practice of the Department of Justice. They operate in very different ways and they don’t have the same level of familiarity with college campuses.
Moving these things over, it’s not just that the transitions themselves are fraught with errors and complexity and problems. It’s that you’re changing the entire focus of people who have worked in a very specific way and have a great understanding that they bring to it that solves a lot of problems before they occur that you lose in these kinds of moves.
Ted Mitchell: And Jon, we’re starting to see that in the way this new round of investigations of institutions is being spread from the Department of Education into organizations, Justice being only one of them, Homeland Security, et cetera, who also have no experience in this resolution-based approach to inquiry. And we’re seeing the ham-handed results of that.
Jon Fansmith: Exactly right, yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: We’ve seen some disruptions in some FSA service. I think we’re undoubtedly going to see a difference in the way that some of these civil rights investigations will come about. And then there’s this hollowing out of IES, the part of the department that was in charge of research. NAEP on our K-12 side, the College Scorecard, IPEDS, some of these things are statutorily required or have some basis in the law. These things have to be administered, so... I think they have to be administered, right? Jon, Sarah, Ted? These functions need to be carried out. So will they be done? Will it just be done more slowly? Can they just get rid of some of these programs in this hollowing out, or are things that are statutorily required still statutorily required?
Jon Fansmith: There are some things the department does that are not statutorily required that can be abandoned. That said, most of the things that the department does are statutorily required, which is why the department does them. Congress put in a law, “We want you to do this. We are providing money for this purpose. We feel this is valuable.” They’ve remained in law and remain funded because they continue to be seen as valuable to citizens and the functioning of our government. They can’t simply not do those. Now, usual caveat we have in these conversations, legally, they simply cannot do so. We’ve certainly seen a lot of areas where their interpretation of the law doesn’t seem consistent with what I think most people see it as.
How will they do that then? I mean, we talked about IES having one employee. That is not functionally capable office for doing the work that it is required to do. We continue to hear these rumors, not just within the Department of Education but other federal agencies, that, oh, this is all a prelude to a restaffing effort that will take place early summer, midsummer, where new, more qualified people targeted to the statutory functions will be brought in, and so there won’t be a loss of functionality.
There was a letter from the, I forget his name, I believe he’s the acting undersecretary at this time, James Bergeron, to stakeholders where essentially they said, “We are very aware of our statutory obligations. We are aware of the requirements to do that, and nothing in the staffing reductions will impact the functionality or our ability to carry those out.” Very clearly saying, “We know we have statutory requirements and we will meet them.”
Again, I think we are skeptical of their ability to do that, given what we’ve seen. And even, again, if the plan is some of these things can be delayed while new staff is brought on board. Everyone’s worked in a place where you’ve brought new staff on board. Rarely are they immediately able to step in and flawlessly manage something, especially something, again, as enormously complex and with such massive consequences as things like student aid programs and large longitudinal data sets, and all of these other things that require a level of skills and expertise and especially familiarity to properly administer. So to be determined, but the signs are not good.
Ted Mitchell: No, the signs are really not good. And I think, going back to a theme that I brought up earlier, there are a number of these things, and I think that data collection is the biggest of them, that once you stop, not only is it hard to restart, but you’ve kind of lost the whole message, which is careful collection of longitudinal data over time that can show us the effectiveness of one program over another, one organization over another. We’re blinding ourselves and we’re doing it at an incredible rate, and a rate that I think will compromise the ability of all of our institutions to learn from each other and to carry out programs that best advantage our students.
Sarah Spreitzer: I think Congress has demonstrated that they’re unwilling to speak up for these programs that they’ve put statutory requirements in place. These are programs and requirements that were created by Congress. They seem to be giving the administration a lot of rope, a lot of flexibility, because the messaging is, give us a chance. Even when it comes to some of these grant programs where we’ve seen the funding stopped, they’ve claimed that they’re pausing it and reviewing it.
And I have started to think about FY26 and congressional appropriations, to bring it back to our conversation at the beginning. If those programs are still authorized, is Congress going to seek funding for them? Are they going to put language in an appropriations bills that says, “Provide a report on how you’re collecting the data or how the restructuring is going”? That’s the one thing that I’m looking to in the next couple months. I don’t know if that appetite will be there for next year, but they do seem to be okay with giving this administration a lot of flexibility in carrying out these big plans.
Jon Fansmith: I think you’re right. One thing I want to say and I want to go back to what Ted said early on, that maybe a positive in this moment is people are beginning to understand the implications of these actions now because they are filtering to individuals. And the administration has been relatively clever so far, trying to hide cuts to things that go to individual benefits as much as possible, but it’s beginning to resonate. And we’re hearing it more from not just our members, but from members of Congress and their staff, that they’re hearing from constituents. This is having an impact on our communities.
These are the kinds of things, yep, maybe... We’re in for a real fight. I want to be really clear. Funding is going to be an area for a massive fight, and there will be efforts to eliminate things we have understood to be bedrocks for decades. But it’s also the opportunity for people to start articulating why these matter in a way that I think people are finally maybe seeing the threat that’s been on the wall for a few years now and pushing on that. So I think there’s both fear but also optimism that this is a moment to rally, and I think people are beginning to do that.
Mushtaq Gunja: I wonder if this is a moment where we should take this vacuum that Sarah noted of, you’re not sure whether Congress is actually going to allocate the funds in these broad buckets, as an opportunity for us to be able to make the positive case that these programs are valuable, they’re impactful, they’re useful. And collecting some of that data I think is really, really important for us to do.
And we have a couple of questions in the chat and the Q&A about, okay, so what can we do? What can we do collectively? What is ACE doing in particular in the higher ed community? So maybe I can ask you guys, first, what is ACE doing about this? And what can the broader community do and how can they help in these efforts?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, so we’re doing a lot, and I think maybe the biggest thing we’re doing and it ties to what people in this chat and on your campuses and in your communities can do is, we are as much as possible coordinating and communicating, especially to members of Congress, the impact of what these decisions means, and in a way that is not national but is very much local.
And we have seen, it doesn’t feel like that, I understand that, but multiple times already with this administration where people speaking up from Congress, Republicans speaking up from Congress, because they see an impact in their district. Talk about the University of Maine’s USDA funding. Susan Collins very proudly talked about the fact that she called the administration up and that funding was restored. We saw it with the OMB freeze.
We’ve seen it time and time again, where the impetus is not that this administration feels they’ve done the wrong thing or that they’ve changed their mind; it’s been brought to their attention that it’s causing harm for allies they need in Congress to pass their agenda. And if they want a reconciliation bill, when you only have two vote-margin in the House and a three-vote margin in the Senate, alienating two or three or five members of the House or four or five members of the Senate is a really bad way to start your year off. So there are real opportunities to leverage the concerns you as individuals have.
We’ve been collecting examples. We want you to keep sharing those examples with us. Share them with your representatives. You don’t have to go through us; you can share them directly. Talk to your campus GR team about ways to maximize the message and do that. But really, this is a moment where higher education needs to make it clear that it is not just because we are protecting some sort of privilege we have. We are deeply intertwined into our communities. We provide health services in our communities. We provide basic needs support. We serve our communities in a million different ways that these cuts and these actions are hurting, and members of Congress will be responsive to that. We need to make that message as loud and clear as possible.
Ted Mitchell: Yeah, and if I can just add a little bit to that. I think we’re doing the congressional moves that Jon is suggesting. We are also working as hard as we can to create some common ground with the administration so that we can move a couple of things that they care about and we care about. That’s not going to solve the problem, but we’re going to continue to keep an open mind there. We would do that with any administration.
The other thing is that I think that members of Congress are starting to feel a little bit vulnerable. We read the press reports of very uncomfortable town halls that Republican members of Congress are holding. It says something when the speaker of the House tells his party members to stop talking to their constituents. Okay, that might work for a week, but it’s not going to work through the midterms. And make no mistake about it, every member of Congress has already started to focus on their prospects in the midterms, and so they are more vulnerable than they have been in a while, and we need to take advantage of that.
I’ll point out the other thing that we’re really working hard to do, which is to broaden the base of allies that we have. So, not just higher education people talking to Congress about what we think is lost, but biotechnology companies, really worried about what happens if biomedical research takes a hit. Chambers of commerce, who are quite concerned about the rollback of community engagement of institutions. So we have plenty of allies inside, and we’re working to develop allyship outside as well to put a full-court press on our members of Congress.
Mushtaq Gunja: To a separate topic of interaction with the federal government, these investigations especially around antisemitism, potentially some around all things DEI. But just one quick last question. A few questions in the chat about specific funding. Funding for HSIs, for HBCUs, MSIs more broadly, Pell Grants. Are the dollars going to continue to flow, maybe not as smoothly, but Jon, Sarah, what are we hearing about federal funding?
Sarah Spreitzer: It’s interesting, Mushtaq, because there was an executive order that was issued last month on implementing the DOGE actions, and part of that asked secretaries and administrators to really embed DOGE activities within their agencies. And one of the things it also asks for is that for every grant or every contract, it be justified, as well as creating a system where you’re going to have to justify any drawdown. So your grant’s funded for three years; you’re drawing down once a year for a three-year period. Each one of those drawdowns is going to have to be justified by the program officer or somebody within that agency.
The Department of Health and Human Services is the first agency that seems to have implemented that. So they did send out instructions to their grant community saying, “We’re going to be starting this system.” I think that there’s a real concern that that can be used to stop grants from being funded but also to really slow down the process of getting those dollars out. We’re still seeing some agencies ,like the U.S. Department of State, for instance, has paused funding for the Fulbright program and other educational programs at the U.S. Department of State. They haven’t stopped those grants, but that pause has now been going on for over a month, and so it’s causing a lot of chaos.
Jon Fansmith: And I do think it’s also important to distinguish at this point too. There are, as Sarah’s identified, a large number of concerns with how grants and contracts and other forms of federal funding, through partnership with institutions are being handled. On things like Pell Grants and financial aid, student loans, at least to this point we have not heard any reports of or any intentions from the administration to try to suspend or modify the terms of those disbursements. We have not heard from campuses that they’re having issues with disbursements of funds. Again, the letter from the Department of Ed specifically said that they were intending to maintain full and smooth operations. And we know from our conversations with folks at the Department of Education that the ability to step in and manage these processes efficiently and effectively is a priority. So again, everything comes with a caveat these days, but we have seen no signs, at least on the basic financial aid distributions and other things that so many students rely on, to be worried at this moment.
Ted Mitchell: And Mushtaq-
Sarah Spreitzer: And-
Ted Mitchell: Sorry, go ahead, Sarah.
Sarah Spreitzer: I was just going to say, Jon, that could be because that’s to the individuals, right? And we have seen this emphasis on, they’re not going to cause issues with funding going to individuals. It is these grant programs that they seem to be very focused on.
Ted Mitchell: But there too, I think, Sarah, it’s really important for all of us to draw the through line, because cutting a grant program isn’t a punishment to an institution; it’s a punishment to the people who are supported by the grant and the purpose of the grant. Rural healthcare: the people being held hostage by that are the American citizens who receive their rural healthcare from a consortium of colleges and universities. And so getting rid of that grant is only punishing individuals. So we need to continue to push through the rhetoric that the administration is using to remind them where the real cost is.
Hey, Mushtaq, I know that you want to move to investigations, but as we do, maybe this is a bridge, is that a couple of people in the chat wondered about legal activity. We were a part of the group that sued to freeze the NIH reductions. And to be really clear again, we are open to being the plaintiff or join plaintiffs in cases that we believe we can win and make a point that restore some of the independence and autonomy of institutions of higher education. So we’re going to continue to play that card and one of the places that we are looking most avidly is in this, really, rat’s nest of investigations that seem to be A, never-ending, B, very general, and C, directed in very bizarre ways. But in there somewhere, there will be a case that we will likely participate in that will help define the limits of federal authority in reaching in and demanding changes in how institutions conduct their core business.
Mushtaq Gunja: Government Relations team at ACE and the broader higher ed community are trying to decide how to, I don’t want to quite say divide and conquer, but divide up the work so that we have the right plaintiffs at the right time to attack the right issues. There’s no shortage, putting my law professor hat on just for a quick second. There’s no shortage of things that are questionable legally, and there’s just a question of when does standing occur and who’s the right person to be bringing these lawsuits? And I know that we’re trying to divide up that work now.
And speaking of which, Ted, do you need to... I know we only have you for a couple more minutes, if at all. Are you about to leave us?
Ted Mitchell: I was about to say that I was about to leave, and I’m extraordinarily, or is it exceedingly, exceedingly unhappy that I have to leave, but I want to thank everybody for being on. I want to thank everybody for the comments and the questions. And I do once again want to say that we’re in this fight for the long run, and we really want to be of service to you. And so please let us know what more we can be doing.
Jon mentioned it a moment ago, the best thing that helps us in our conversations is being able to enumerate real pain. And so please don’t be shy in letting us know when grant programs are eliminated or when you have to make layoffs at your institutions. These are the kinds of things that we need to be able to take to Congress and show them that this is really dangerous work. Thank you all very much.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, thank you Ted. And for those of you in the chat, I think we’re going to hang out for another 10 minutes or so, because I do want to ask a couple of questions about these investigations. And maybe we can start with the situation at Columbia. And maybe more broadly, there’s a letter from the Office of Civil Rights to 60 institutions warning of potential enforcement actions over alleged Title VI violations as it relates to antisemitism on campus. Jon, Sarah, what do we know, and what’s the state of those investigations?
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, there’s a couple actual investigations, Mushtaq. We do have that letter to the 60 institutions. We’ve had a lot of focus on what’s been going on at Columbia University. They were caught up in I think the five investigations that were announced by Health and Human Services on medical schools, and then some additional investigations being carried out by the Department of Education, along with the Department of Justice. The GSA, the General Services Administration also got involved. They announced that they were reviewing federal grants to Columbia. And then suddenly we had notice two Fridays ago that they were ending $400 million in federal funding to Columbia based on Title VI violations, but no word on whether a full investigation had been carried out or anything regarding why they chose the $400 million number or those amount of grants.
And then I think in follow-up, Columbia has been trying to engage with the administration to address their concerns. And there was a letter sent, I believe Jon, from HHS, DOJ, and Ed to Columbia, outlining about eight activities, several of which I don’t think Columbia is actually able to do to address the administration’s concern around antisemitism.
Jon Fansmith: And it’s worth saying with that letter... I find myself biting my tongue a lot. There were some things where if you saw those requests from the administration as part of an effort to find a resolution agreement through the normal process, you would say okay, that’s sort of an understandable response. There were many things in that letter that are just far beyond the pale of what the federal government should ever be trying to dictate to an institution, like putting an entire academic department into receivership. There’s a certain irony in this Department of Education having said in their FAQs on the Dear Colleague Letter around diversity and SFFA that they were very aware of the legal bars on them interfering in curriculum and then going forward and making demands as to changes in curriculum that an institution must administer or else they’ll withhold funding.
And I really want to also hit this point. There is a clear process in law and in regulation for how you address allegations of discrimination on a college campus. It’s well understood. It can ultimately lead to an institution having all of their federal funding removed. It is not an insignificant process or effort. This administration simply skipped all of that. They told Columbia on a Monday they were investigating them; they’d review them. They told them on a Friday they’re withholding $400 million in funding. They haven’t identified the category of funding. Most of the announcements seem to be related to research, which seems to have no direct relationship to the allegations of antisemitic behavior or creating a hostile environment. This is really very much like saying, “I’ve just accused you of a crime; now I’m putting you in prison. We’re going to skip the investigation. We’re going to skip the trial. We just believe you’re wrong, so we’re going to punish you.” It is a truly upsetting and frankly illegal approach to take with an institution.
And again, there’s a lot of viewpoints about what has happened on Columbia’s campus, to what extent Columbia’s administration should have done more or where they have not done enough. And I think those are valid conversations. They’re also the valid subject for an investigation that can look at what the responsibility of the institution is and how you resolve that, which is what the process requires, and this is not what is going on. So in some ways, seeing these other investigations announced that we’re going to talk about that are actually following the appropriate procedure is encouraging, because what we’ve seen at Columbia is a complete dereliction of their responsibilities under the law.
Mushtaq Gunja: Do we know about the next version of these investigations? Are they, you said, Jon, that they seem to be following some sort of procedure. What is that procedure and what should the institutions that are on this call, what should they take away from this? What should they expect? What can they do in the meantime?
Jon Fansmith: There’s a couple. It’s important to keep in mind there are a lot of investigations right now. There are five OCR investigations into antisemitism that were launched right after the executive order was issued on January 29th. Four at Health and Human Services. The Columbia effort is its own thing, but it’s part of one of 10 institutions. A joint task force on combating antisemitism led by the Department of Justice, has announced they’ll be visiting college campuses. The details of that are still very unclear what those visits will look like, other than the head of that task force saying, “We’re going to bring armies of lawyers to the campuses. We’re going to talk to the administration and the faculty and the students and local law enforcement.” How exactly that will look, what it will be, also unclear.
Then we had the new investigations announced last week. Most of these were not related to antisemitism; they were related to issues around diversity and their interpretation of SFFA. The letter Sarah mentioned that went out to 60 colleges and universities, those are 60 institutions that were already being investigated by the Office for Civil Rights based on allegations of discrimination on shared ancestry. Essentially, looking at either antisemitism or Islamophobia, anti-Muslim discrimination. Those letters simply said to institutions, “We are reminding you of your obligations under Title VI, and the fact that you may be subject to potential enforcement actions.” I think different interpretations certainly, but my interpretation is these are kind of shots across the bow. “You’ve seen what we’ve pursued with Columbia. You’re already in our sights. You should be very attentive.”
It all fits part and parcel with what we’ve seen from this administration, which is a very aggressive... They take I think a very exaggerated viewpoint of what the law both allows to them in terms of their authority for enforcement and investigation and then a very expansive view of what the law itself says, and try to push that forward in a way that will compel institutions to be scared and to take actions in response. Maybe I’ll leave it there, because I’ve been talking for a while on this and we can talk about the DEI investigations in more detail, but that’s kind of where we stand as of today.
Mushtaq Gunja: And the DEI investigations? I mean, Dear Colleague Letter was put out. The frequently asked questions document that sort of in our view, I think the three of our views, narrowed that initial Dear Colleague Letter to something that was a little bit more manageable, something that was a little bit more reasonable. What do we know? What have we heard in the wake of that frequently asked questions? What’s the department doing? Do we know?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, so they announced investigations into a total of 51 or 52 institutions. 45 of those institutions are being investigated apparently because they were participating institutions with a nonprofit organization called the PhD Program, that looked to help underrepresented minority populations access especially PhD programs in business. And, people might be familiar with this, there was a little bit of a social media storm about a month ago where Christopher Rufo had noticed that, I believe, Texas A&M was sending representatives to a PhD Project conference, and he made comments about that on social media. The governor of Texas noticed that, said that he would fire the president of the institution if they continued their involvement, and soon after that, a number of Texas institutions withdrew from their participation in the PhD Project.
It’s a little bit confusing because the 45 schools that are getting investigated, they are not all of the institutions that work with the PhD Project. It’s also some of the institutions that are on that list had previously participated and have since stopped their participation with the PhD Project. So the department’s criteria for why those 45, again, a little bit unclear.
The other institutions they made the announcement about, six of them they identified for providing race-based scholarships. And again, I don’t know the details of the policies or programs at those institutions, but that’s the area they’re looking to investigate.
And then the final one was they were very... Very minimal description, but essentially said they’re investing the institution over allegations of segregation. And I don’t, again, know the details. I think the assumption widely is that the institution may have had affinity housing or affinity graduation ceremonies, things along those lines, that this administration, as they talked about in the Dear Colleague Letter, as they talked about in the frequently asked questions document, they are taking a view that those are discriminatory. Again, I don’t think the law supports that, but that is the view they’re taking. And these all seem to be efforts by them to push their expanded definition of what SFFA means by launching these investigations, and especially to maybe chill other institutions from doing this kind of work.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, we’re going to have to monitor all that. I think we’re going to learn more in the weeks to come. We’ll keep everybody updated.
Here are things we didn’t get to talk about, but I know we should in future episodes. Travel bans. What’s happening with Fulbright, what’s happening with our international students more broadly. We haven’t talked about accreditation, but we keep getting accreditation questions. I want to just actually carve out five minutes in one of these sessions, because I think it’s really important, really interesting.
So much we didn’t get to. I apologize to everybody who’s asked such great questions; we couldn’t get to everything. Do you have any final thoughts of what the community can do, how they can be helpful to you? How can we be helpful to them? Jon, Sarah, you’re pounding the pavement every day. What can we do?
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, we’re trying. We keep pushing resources out on acenet.edu. There is some material for folks to follow the executive actions being taken by the Trump administration. We’re going to start putting up some advocacy materials that folks can use when they’re reaching out to their members of Congress, and we’ll continue to update on these webinars, podcasts. When is our next one? Tomorrow? In an hour?
Mushtaq Gunja: We’ll do one quickly, I’m sure.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, I mean, you’re right, Mushtaq. Next week we’ll likely be talking about travel bans, whatever’s going to be happening with our international students, because it’s not going to be a quiet week.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and I’ll be real quick. I think there’s two things, and they’re two things I say every time. The first is that you have powerful voices. It doesn’t always feel like that, especially in moments like this, but it is really important and it really makes a difference if you share your perspective. Not just in the harms that are being caused to your institution and the students you work with and the communities you serve but to the greater good that you’re doing in those areas. And believe it or not, members of Congress care. So share your message with your friends, encourage them to speak up, the people you work with. The more they hear about the impact of this, the more real possibility of change for the better we will see.
And then the other thing we always say, which is it’s easy to be scared right now. It’s easy to be frustrated right now. It’s easy to start making changes because you’re worried about what might happen. Stick true to your mission; stick true to your values. Defend the things that you believe in. Defend the things that you got into this work to do. The work you do is valued and it’s important; don’t step away from it.
Mushtaq Gunja: Okay, friends, thank you so much for joining, and we will be back with you maybe not tomorrow, but soon, for sure. Thanks, all.
Jon Fansmith: Thank you for joining us on dotEDU. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback is important to us, and it helps other policy wonks discover our show. Don’t forget to follow ACE on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes and other higher education content. You can find us on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And of course if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, please feel free to reach out to us at podcast@acenet.edu. We love hearing from our listeners, and who knows, your input might inspire a future episode.