Jon Fansmith: Welcome everyone to the April 15th, 2025, edition of dotEDU Live. We are, as always, very happy to have you here with us. We have a very special episode. If you're picking up on my confusion here, it's because you would not believe the chaos leading into the launch of this episode. We have people participating from all over, technical issues. Our producers are currently reminding me I still haven't said that my name is Jon Fansmith. It's going to be a wild one today, folks. We have Steven Bloom on as a special guest. We might have a drop in from ACE President Ted Mitchell. I don't know, there's a vibe today. There's Ted. Look at this.
Sarah Spreitzer: Oh, look, Ted's there. Yay.
Jon Fansmith: As if by calling him out, I brought him into being. You can already sense it's going to be a fun one. So, Sarah, Mushtaq, Steven, and somewhere out there, Ted, welcome. How are all of you guys doing today?
Sarah Spreitzer: Good.
Mushtaq Gunja: When there is chaos in the world, we need something to be able smile about. So happy to do that. We do have Ted here.
Ted Mitchell: Hi, everybody. Glad to see you all. Thank you for joining. I'm going to get it out of the way because we have real business to do, but I do want to recognize the fact that it's been a great and very interesting 24 hours in higher education. We thought we were going to be in the news cycle yesterday when we filed a case in district court in Massachusetts seeking to reverse the Department of Energy's freeze on indirect cost. We did that, and so that's in process.
But we were scooped by Harvard's decision to reject the Trump administration's outrageous demands that they meet a whole series of requirements that dove right into the heart of how we do our work, who we teach, who teaches, what we teach, and the conditions under which the institution could operate its research funding.
So, look, it was a blatantly illegal set of requirements put on the institution. Harvard did absolutely the right thing and came up with a very courageous decision. More importantly, I think, they made great arguments for why this kind of federal overreach is really beyond the pale.
Needless to say, they're paying the price. First we had the declaration of $2 billion worth of frozen research funding, and just now we hear that the administration is looking to see if they can revoke Harvard's not-for-profit status.
So this will go on for some time, but kudos to Harvard. I think that Harvard's statement creates a path for many of us who want to be sure to be avoiding the worst repercussions, but advancing higher education's interests as well. So I'm going to leave it at that, Jon, and let you guys get back to business, and we'll see what else we have to say as this goes on. I may drop back in with even later breaking news, so I'm not sure whether you hope to see me again or don't hope to see me again.
Jon Fansmith: We always enjoy seeing you, Ted. I like this live man in the field Ted Mitchell aspect. This is a new element. We can go [inaudible 00:03:55].
Ted Mitchell: I need a microphone and I need a lot of [inaudible 00:03:58].
Jon Fansmith: We'll get you one of those fedoras that says press in the hat brim or something like that.
Sarah Spreitzer: Maybe president.
Jon Fansmith: President. That would be perfect, yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: This thing has gone off the rails. Thanks, Ted. He is leaving. I also know that my camera's obscured and-
Ted Mitchell: [inaudible 00:04:16] proud about it.
Mushtaq Gunja: I have no idea what's going on. We're going to persevere anyway. Let's start where Ted just left us, which is the news in the last 24 hours around Harvard. Let me just set this up, Jon. What happened and where are we now?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I think in some ways what happened seems small, but obviously it is not. Harvard essentially said, We have been given this list, an additional list of demands, by the administration and that we will not comply with them.
I think Ted put it pretty succinctly. These are demands that are not just contrary to Harvard's mission or to the operations of an independent institution, but illegal, contrary to what the Supreme Court has ruled are the boundaries of the federal government in terms of interfering with an institution's operations and, frankly, so far beyond the pale as to what could reasonably be asked in an institution, that ...
I want to give Harvard all the credit in the world for being incredibly brave in a tough moment. But also these demands were so ridiculous, so beyond reason that they almost forced Harvard's hand. There's no real choice other than to resist.
To Harvard President Garber's immense credit, he shared the letter from the administration. He shared the letter their attorney sent to the administration, to the task force in response. Harvard's being abundantly clear about what are the factors that went into it, how they made their decisions. They've provided all of the transparency and clarity that the administration so far has not provided. So kudos.
I think one other thing, while I have the microphone here, Mushtaq, that I think is worth noting, we are in a moment where there's been a lot of questions about what will different institutions do. Again, tremendous respect to Harvard for being the first to speak out publicly and oppose what the administration's doing. But I think the other thing is as you look at similarly situated institutions, I would expect to see more of this in large part not just because Harvard has taken a step, but because the administration has shown that they are not acting in good faith. We have Columbia as a very clear case study. They tried to negotiate, they tried to find some accommodations.
I know there's lots of differences of opinions about whether they should have done that in the first place and what were reasonable negotiations, but the administration's response was to further cut off additional funding. Additional NIH funding was cut off. New demands were piled on top of old ones. We've seen reports last week that the administration might try to seek to put Columbia as an institution into receivership with a consent decree, where the federal government and the judge would oversee decisions being made on Columbia's campus.
What's become really clear is you can't negotiate with somebody who's not negotiating in good faith, and this administration is not negotiating in good faith. There is no way forward working with them because they don't want to work with campuses. They want to attack campuses, they want to be seen as attacking campuses. They want the media to know that they're attacking campuses. What they don't want to do is solve any problems.
I think if there was any uncertainty as to whether this was actually about anti-Semitism on college campuses or not, you just have to run down that list of demands to see how few of them actually relate in any way to preserving the rights and safety of Jewish students on a college campus.
Sarah Spreitzer: You know, Jon-
Steven Bloom: I'll just pick up on that point. Really sorry, Sarah. I mean we partnered with the American Jewish Committee, AJC, a couple of times on two summits on anti-Semitism. One this past September. They came out with a very strong statement a week or so ago really questioning what the administration was doing... They recognized, and the statement states this, that using anti-Semitism as a basis for the action to undermine these federal research grants is really inappropriate. That's what AJC said in their statement. And so, the Jewish groups, at least AJC, recognize it's not really doing anything to protect Jewish students.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sarah?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. I would just add to Jon's very good points. This is about all of higher education, and I would note that in Harvard's statement, which our producers just put into the chat, it's titled The Promise of American Higher Education. And so, this is much broader than just Harvard. This is really an attack on all of higher education, and I think that's a really important point to remember.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. I mean I think all of that is well said and I think ... It's interesting. In some ways, it clarifies for us, I think, what the next steps are. I mean, Jon, to your point, I mean it would be very difficult, I think, for ... Let's just use Harvard here because I think that's where we are, for Harvard to do anything other than try to tackle this soon in the courts, I would assume, because there isn't negotiation here.
I don't even know which game ... What the set of rules are that we're operating in. I mean, theoretically, it's around anti-Semitism. Harvard has noted the several steps that it has taken over the course of the last 15 months to think about that. But I mean the demands in responses don't seem to have anything to do with it. This seems like it is ... It clarifies what the next steps are likely to be like.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I can't speak for Harvard, nor would I attempt to speak for Harvard. I know that they have fantastic counsel and talented leaders and key positions there and that they are in constant communication with their community and students or faculty, their trustees, and others to inform the path forward.
It is a really ... I mean our chat is evidence of it, our conversations with presidents are evidence of it, is a really hard time. I don't want to ever forget the fact that college presidents and senior leaders are responsible for the jobs and livelihoods of hundreds or thousands of people who are ... They're responsible for literally life-saving, ongoing research that, in many cases, involves live patients, that they're responsible not just for their campuses, but for institutions, hospitals, health centers, clinics, other things within their communities, and taking stands like this isn't without cost. Federal funding is important not because it sustains an institution, but because of all the things it allows an institution to do and risking that is a real risk.
But I keep coming back to this. I don't know how any higher education institution can look at what the administration has done in this area and say, I can expect a reasonable, fair negotiation, a good faith effort to resolve legitimate concerns, when this administration's refused to identify those concerns. They've refused to document where they may be occurring. They've refused to come to an approach that says, We want a resolution. They've refused to follow the law that tells them how to manage these situations.
The case seems pretty clear. Every institution will need to decide what that looks like for them. But certainly your point, clarity. I think we have a lot greater clarity now than we did two months ago about what the administration's actual goals are.
Mushtaq Gunja: I'm not sure if our audience fully appreciates that you are ACE's expert on all things tax. I have two questions as it relates to tax and Harvard. First, I think, as Ted alluded to, we just heard some late breaking news that President Trump on a Truth Social post seemed to have threatened Harvard's tax-exempt status. I wonder if you have any comment on that. Then, second ... Actually answer that one first, and then I want to ask you a question about endowments, endowment taxes, and whether there's some way out of this that Harvard can just tap their endowment. But do the tax status question first.
Steven Bloom: Sure. I mean obviously the tax-exempt status of Harvard, or all of our institutions, is really important. It really sustains them, allows them to do. The challenge is ... I mean I think it's unlikely that ... There are a number of criteria that you'd have to tick off to justify, that the IRS would have to justify, and go through a process of revoking somebody's tax status.
So, for instance, if you engage in private benefit, you basically take advantage of the tax-exempt organization. President Trump knows something about this because he did that with his foundation, and that's the reason that the foundation was dissolved and he was subject to sanctions. They lost their tax-exempt status because he used it for his own personal benefit.
You have to engage in excess lobbying. You'd have to endorse a candidate. You'd have to engage in too much unrelated business income or fail to file your Form 990. Then last of all is if you're not advancing the mission of the organization. I think it would be hard for the federal government to take the position that Harvard has failed any of those pieces as a basis for revoking their tax-exempt status.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. I mean if they were to do so, again, there's some clarity around the lines of litigation, which I think could be helpful. But this is just a Truth Social post. We'll see what ends up happening in regard to tax-exempt status.
One of the things, Steven, that we sometimes hear, especially on the conservative side, the administration side here, is Harvard's got a huge endowment. Why don't they just use their billions of dollars in their endowment to be able to sustain the work here? Why do they need the federal government? There's a whole series of things that one can say about that.
Steven, I wonder if you ... I know you think a lot about endowments. What do you make of those arguments?
Steven Bloom: Well, it's a great question. I mean Harvard's endowment is somewhere around $52 or $53 billion. And so, if you think of an endowment, if people think of it as a checking account, well, that's really not what they are.
Let's take recent crises. During COVID, institutions, and even during the Great Recession, before that, institutions did lean on their endowments during major emergencies like those for a short term, but it's really not sustainable over the longer term. I mean really what we're talking about the size of research funding cuts, that they really have dwarfed anything that we've seen and confronted previously.
Just to give you an example, in 2023, the feds spent about $60 billion on research funding. Now total endowment spending, that's financial aid, research, student services, academics, operations, et cetera, was about $35 billion. So already you see this disconnect between amount spent on funding and amount available for endowment spending.
The other thing is that, as I was saying, endowments, they're not checking accounts. You can't take your debit card and go to the bank and pull out money for whatever you want. They really are more like thousands of individual accounts, more like a mutual fund, and each of those individual accounts often are restricted by the donors in legally binding ways. Sometimes those restrictions are 80 to 90 percent of the thousands of funds are to be spent on a particular purpose, and an institution can get into trouble. It can be legally liable if they spend the money in ways that violate the donors' express instructions. Already two-thirds of endowments spending right now, about almost 50 percent goes to financial aid and ... Total spending on academic programs and financial aid is two-thirds.
The last piece, and it's also very important, is that this could really violate state laws. All state laws have laws restricting endowment spending based on a prudent standard. You're trying to balance the needs of the present while preserving the claims of the future because, remember, endowments are supposed to be for eternity.
Some states actually limit the amount of spending you can do per year. For instance, Ohio limits it to no more than 5 percent and others it's no more than 7 percent, like New York and California. So if you spend more than that, you're presumed to have engaged in prudent behavior and, therefore, can be legally liable.
Mushtaq Gunja: That's really helpful, Steven. Thank you. If we have time, we'll come back to a couple of questions about finances and the long-term budget outlook. But I wanted to turn us to another topic, one I see is very active in the chat right now. We certainly were planning on talking about what is happening with our international students and just generally what's happening with all things visas and what we see coming from the administration in this regard. Sarah, we did a dotEDU a couple of weeks ago. What's happened since?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, Mushtaq, it's funny. When we did the last dotEDU, I think where we talked about our international students, we talked about what we suspected was a travel ban that was likely in the process. That still has not happened, but we've seen a lot of activity around international students.
I think about three weeks ago, we saw Secretary Rubio announce that they were going to be using AI to scour public-facing documents and things for perhaps international students who had participated in pro-Palestinian protests or perhaps had expressed views that were anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and we started to see some student visas being revoked.
There were a couple things really odd about this. First, Secretary Rubio was revoking it based on his authority as Secretary of State, to revoke a visa because he was concerned about the visa holders working against US foreign policy. And so, he personally was revoking the visas.
He later said that he had personally revoked around 300 visas, and that's when we saw the very public cases of the students or the graduate students from Columbia and from Tufts being taken by ICE and being detained. Those are being considered right now in the courts.
The 300 visas that were revoked were not just student visas. I think there were some visitor visas also in there. But the other thing that they did for the students was they were going into the SEVIS, or the Student Exchange Visitor Information System, and actually deleting the students' records without giving our institutions of higher education any heads up or any explanation.
And so, students were receiving these messages that their student visas had been revoked, perhaps turning to their institution of higher education, and then again finding out that their SEVIS status had been deleted. And so, therefore, being encouraged by the U.S. government to self-deport.
After that, likely about a week later, we started to see or hear from institutions about a large number of students seeing their student visas revoked for criminal activity or criminal charges. Again, we believe that this is the U.S. government comparing student visas to perhaps some sort of national criminal database. But some of these revocations we know are happening for minor offenses such as a speeding ticket that perhaps is 10 miles over the speeding limit, or perhaps in a case where charges were later dropped. Again, without any clarification about where to go for additional information.
So on April 4, on a Friday, we actually sent a letter to the State Department and to the Department of Homeland Security along with 15 other higher education organizations asking for a briefing from State and from DHS, first because we want to know how many students are being impacted. We don't have that information. Our colleagues at NAFSA, the Association of International Educators, are doing a very good job of trying to track how many students are seeing their visas revoked. We don't have any information about where to go with questions or perhaps if a student believes that their student visa was revoked by mistake. Obviously they could go to immigration court, but that could cost money and take some time for the student.
We would like to have information from the administration about how are institutions of higher education being informed when the student's record is being deleted in SEVIS. Many of our institutions are finding this because they're just running the SEVIS records to see how many terminations are there.
So it's a very confusing time, I think, for our senior international officers and our international student administrators. I think it's also causing a lot of chaos for international students who are very worried that they're going to wake up to have one of these messages that their student visa is being revoked without a lot of information about why is it being revoked or any information about what next steps to take.
I would just say our letter has been acknowledged by the Department of Homeland Security, but we have not had a response yet.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, that's what I was going to say, Sarah. So I mean what do we ... Do we expect that we will get a response? I know in other administrations, we might've sent a letter and might've been able to hear something, but…
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, yeah, even under the first Trump administration, we had a good working relationship with the Department of State, and there were actions that were taken against our international students that we didn't always agree with. But there was always an open communication where we could receive a briefing from the Department of State about how many students was this impacting, some transparency around what were they citing for the revocations or the denials. And so, I would expect that we'll get some sort of response, but again it would be ... I think the sooner we get a response the better because, again, not knowing what is happening, I think, is causing a lot of panic.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sure. Jon, I think Sarah did an excellent job of laying out what's happened and what's happening. What should our institutions of higher education do in response ... All three of you. I mean it's a scary time, no question. I mean students are obviously being impacted and ... Both the students who've had their visas revoked or terminated, but also every international student who might be in fear that this could happen to them. I mean how should we be thinking about this?
Jon Fansmith: I'll certainly start by saying I've been reading the chat as we've been having this conversation, and you find those moments that reaffirm your faith in higher ed, people talking about meeting with international students, providing counsel, providing information, the resources they've been able to identify, the bringing in general counsels to get advice, outside support.
It is really a challenging time in part because while I think we could say that what the State Department, DHS, ICE are doing are things that certainly to my mind are an abusive exercise of their authority, they're acting within their authority, and it is to the detriment of our country. It is to the detriment of our institutions. It is harmful and damaging to how we are perceived abroad by people who would otherwise be ambassadors for the United States and our values in their home countries.
But right now the best we can do is support those students, counsel those students, provide the resources they might not otherwise be able to provide for themselves, keep each other informed. I know that's what we're trying to do here at ACE and partner with our colleagues who are tracking this, and getting the public aware of what this is.
I saw some questions about is it targeted at certain countries. We've seen the reports that Sarah highlighted about efforts specifically about those students who may have been involved in protests. But most of these deportations have nothing to do with policy concerns with China or other countries. They are indiscriminate attacks on international students where the law's being enforced in a way that, again, is really contrary to our national interests.
And so, the best we can do is just doing what I'm seeing our members are doing, and that is providing support going above and beyond again and again and again to help these students to the best of their abilities.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, I think having some contact with perhaps the institution's general counsel on how best to advise these students, working with immigration attorneys. Someone in the chat noted that usually when a student's visa is revoked, that doesn't mean that they have to suddenly leave the country. Usually that doesn't impact them unless they leave the United States and they try and reenter. But again because those SEVIS records are being terminated, I think that's part of the push to leave as soon as possible.
Obviously we are in late spring. What do you do with an international student who's seen his student visa revoked being told to self-deport as soon as possible and perhaps they have two weeks left of classes?
I think an immigration attorney could probably be most helpful in advising that student, because then obviously our international students don't want to overstay on their visa or perhaps be in trouble with the U.S. government where they're not going to be able to travel back to the United States on a different visa later on.
Mushtaq Gunja: Have you guys figured out what the point of all of this is? Is it just to rain chaos down? I mean why are we looking to deport students that have a traffic ticket? I just don't think I understand what we're doing here. I'm not sure if that's a helpful observation or if I'm just noting what I think is maybe a lot of folks' frustration. But I mean if I had some sense of what they were doing and why they were doing it, then it would help us, I think, in some ways be able to figure out how we might be able to respond. Do you have some sense?
Sarah Spreitzer: No, I think-
Jon Fansmith: I mean I will-
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: Go ahead.
Sarah Spreitzer: Go ahead, Jon.
Jon Fansmith: I've said this many times. I think we sometimes do ourselves a disservice trying to look at these individual instances of abuses and efforts by this administration and focus on them as individualized actions.
I think there is a very clear ... Very overt assault on higher education that this administration is pushing forward, and it's not a secret. The administration officials have talked about this on the campaign trail and since in office that they see the federal government as having a huge variety of levers of power over colleges and universities, and that's federal funding in the sciences. That's efforts around civil rights enforcement. That's efforts around international students. It is all part of a broader effort to weaken institutions.
When you look at it, I mean to tie it into where we were at the top, what are the demands that follow these threats? It's demands to let the federal government dictate the curriculum, to dictate admissions decisions, to dictate hiring practices, to dictate disciplinary practices. Those are the kinds of things they do in authoritarian states. Those are the kinds of things Americans have rejected for 250 years. It is contrary to American values and it is all part of a piece.
That's me. I want to be really clear. That's me, not ACE. But it's very hard for me to see a pattern where these individual actions fit in any sort of rational pattern that's seen as advancing the national interest.
Sarah Spreitzer: Jon goes a little further than me. I think chaos is definitely the goal here. I think we saw this in the first Trump administration where there are a lot of immigration activities that weren't solely focused on international students, like the travel ban caused a lot of chaos and confusion and ultimately ended up being overturned by the federal courts.
I think our students are somewhat being caught up in this larger deport-everyone conversation, seal the borders, America First conversation. But I think they are definitely being targeted for whatever reason. It is this idea of spread chaos as much as possible.
I think, Jon, you spoke before about how is this going to impact our international and student enrollments next year? I can say I've been doing a lot of panels with international partners where they are talking about that they expect to see their international student enrollments grow next year because international students are not going to want to make that huge financial commitment to come to the United States when there's so much uncertainty.
Other countries, especially our big competitors like Canada, the UK, Australia, when it comes to international students, they're likely going to be trying to take advantage of the uncertainty in the U.S. system.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, we'll definitely keep watching this. I mean I think there's no question that the administration seems like they're going to continue to go down this road. And so, we'll need to keep a close eye on this. One of the topics we've been tracking over the last month is the partial closure of the Department of Education, the shrinking of the department. Jon, Steven, Sarah, what's happening on that front over the last couple of weeks?
Jon Fansmith: So there haven't been a lot of new actions by the department or the administration in that area. We had the massive reductions in staffing, about 49 percent of overall staff terminated, and then with early retirement, other things, more than 50 percent of the department's overall staff having been moved out, and then the executive order.
What we're beginning to see is the results of that, which is, sadly, pretty predictable. There was a great Washington Post story, I think our producers might drop that in the chat, I saw yesterday about problems campuses are experiencing with FAFSA processing, with getting aid awards, being even able to access the systems.
That's, like I said, sadly, pretty predictable. You lay off the people who administer these in incredibly complicated multi-faceted processes, a lot of them legacy systems administering dozens, hundreds of programs impacting tens of millions of individuals, current students, borrowers, all sorts of other people. It is not especially shocking that when you eliminate your most experienced staff and a large portion of your overall staff, you're going to have these problems.
This is a really bad time for these problems to be popping up, as any financial aid director will tell you. This is the packaging time of year. Decisions are being made that will fundamentally impact students' choices to go to school.
That's maybe the canary in the mine right here because that's the one that is most being drawn upon right now. A lot of the other areas, program funding, program administration, civil rights enforcement. The administration has announced well over a hundred new investigations through the Office for Civil Rights while at the same time gutting regional civil rights OCR offices, gutting departmental OCR staff. What does this look like? I think we are going to start seeing the problems piling up in very public ways as a result of these cuts.
But that said, we have not seen substantive pieces of legislation in Congress introduced to actually abolish the Department of Education. We've seen no moves forward on that. Congress is on recess this week and next week. But we haven't seen a lot of steps in that regard.
In terms of what they are doing, this has been the holding pattern since the executive order came out. We're now just beginning to feel the impact of it.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, Sarah, Steven, have we heard additional hiccups outside of the federal aid and OCR context? Have we seen other things, other pauses in funding, federal aid going out, TRIO grants, other ways in which the department has traditionally operated in working with our institutions, or have things generally been on track over the last couple of weeks?
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean I think, Mushtaq, we are seeing it across agencies. It's not just at the Department of Ed, but it's all the other agencies that have seen the reductions in forces. At the National Institutes of Health, basically they have completely stalled pushing out any federal funding, even the grants that have been decided on. I think part of that is because program officers are gone. There is still currently a travel restriction on anyone from the federal government going out to visit a campus or perhaps participate in a conference where they may be talking about funding opportunities.
Back in February, when we were all worried about the OMB funding freeze, it feels like through the actions of RIF and some of the DOGE actions, they've basically been able to accomplish the funding freeze or really stalling any of the actions with our institutions of higher education because there's a lot of people that just aren't there anymore.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, I think one thing that's really important for everybody on this call, to the extent that you are seeing any sort of problems in your dealings with the federal government cataloging those I think will be really helpful. Sending them over to us will be useful, because I think that's really necessary for us to be able to understand the ways in which things are not operating smoothly. I.
Know we only have a few more minutes and I've noticed that there have been some comments in the chat about the Department of Energy F&A IDC flash pauses. That's the 15 percent. Ted mentioned up top that we were plaintiffs in a lawsuit yesterday on this issue. Jon, do you want to just give us a couple minutes on what we did, what the issue is, and what's next year?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I probably don't have to spend a whole lot of time on it because they'll be familiar to people who have been checking in on these webinars. We're going down the same rabbit hole we went with National Institutes of Health, what, six, seven weeks ago, where the agency, in this case Department of Energy, arbitrarily announced, in this case, about 5:00 on a Friday night that they were going to change the indirect cost cap to 15 percent for all grants awarded by the Department of Energy specifically to institutions of higher education.
It's worth noticing a couple differences between what NIH did and what Department of Energy did here. One of them is that the Department of Energy announcement was specific to colleges, universities, not other grantees.
The other thing they did, which was a little bit unusual, and I saw some of the comments in the chat about letters that have been received, Department of Energy said as part of their memorandum that any grants that were not at a 15 percent F&A rate or below currently would be terminated. The NIH announcement was more about negotiating them going forward and other things.
It's worth knowing those letters that campuses were going to receive, they were going out prior to ... This was always planned. We stepped forward, as Ted mentioned, and filed a lawsuit in partnership with AAU and APLU and eight institutions, as well as the support of a number of other institutions, first thing basically Monday morning to block this.
I think I will leave it to the lawyers to talk about the merits of the suit. I'm not the best person to raise those arguments. But certainly the courts acted very quickly in the NIH case. That would be our hope. They would understand the impact of what functionally is a $2.4, $2.5 billion cut to research funding that is being proposed or trying to be implemented by the Department of Energy in this case, and similarly act quickly to stave off what could be really disastrous implications across a range of areas.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, and I won't comment on the strength of the legal argument except to say I think it's pretty strong. I think that the ramifications that you're mentioning here, the cuts to the research that our institutions do, but benefits all of society are enormous. I mean we know that the ... I mean the work that's happening on nuclear energy, on space, certainly all of the work that's funded through the NIH on preventing cancer, all those things are just incredibly important.
I mean this feels so much like we're cutting off our nose to spite our face. I mean both on the research side and also on the international student side. I mean if we don't have the best and brightest from the world come here and help our institutions, help our country. I just don't know what we're doing.
So I feel like the strength of the argument is both strong from a legal basis, and we'll leave that for another day. But just from a moral and policy case, I mean it just seems like we're just making a big mistake here.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I do ... And that's been heartening to see. There's, I think, a growing public realization that as much as the administration wants to frame this as we're attacking institution X, people realize that the people who lose in this are the American citizens, who benefit from this research and the support, the advancements it takes, whether that's medical health, whether that's the kinds of innovations that have built our economy into a global juggernaut, whether it's the kinds of technologies that promote our national security. It is not just self-defeating, it's actively harmful to the interests of all Americans regardless of their political viewpoints. It's far more harmful to Americans in many ways than it will be to the institutions in the long run.
Mushtaq Gunja: I know that we only have a couple of minutes left. Steven, do you mind if I call on you just to give us the latest on what is happening in Congress and funding and reconciliation? I know that this is very important because it could have a lot of effects on our colleges and universities. What do we know? Where are we now?
Steven Bloom: Well, first I'd say this will have to be an appetizer on Tax Day on the tax reconciliation bill. We'll probably have to leave it for another podcast for a more fulsome discussion.
But just very briefly, the House and Senate passed their budget resolution last week. Now all that with instructions on the cut side. The relevant committees have been instructed to come up with, in some cases, billions of dollars of cuts. The tax committees have been instructed to come up with trillions of dollars of tax cuts.
And so, the committees, the authorizers, and the tax writers, they're going to be working now, they are working now, and I think we're going to start to see those committees come out with their components of the reconciliation bill. Remember, this is a bill that is really important in the Senate because it means that it can passed with only 51 votes. It's protected against a filibuster. It's a process that's been used by both parties for major legislation over the last 30 years.
And so, this is going to play out over the course of the remainder of this year. There are enormous risks for higher ed, whether that's on the traditional higher ed space, like potential risk sharing and cuts to some of the student loan programs, and then on Medicaid cuts that could impact academic medicine and then have a spillover effect on state budgets that would impact the institutions.
Then in the tax space directly, whether that's provisions that are important to students and families, charitable giving, philanthropy, other things that are really important to institutions like the endowment tax, those are things that we're going to see soon and we're working very hard.
We have for all of you a tax webpage that's already up on our website. It has a very rich content and lots of grassroots advocacy components which are going to be added to that functionality very soon. So that's there now. You can go to look at that right now, and we will certainly give you the main course maybe in a future podcast as the reconciliation process rolls out.
Mushtaq Gunja: Do you have some sense of timing, Steven? When might this all come to pass?
Steven Bloom: Well, the Republicans have been talking about trying to get something done by Memorial Day. That seems like a very ambitious schedule. I mean here we are mid-April. They're not going to be marking up the bills until the end of ... Or the components of a larger bill until the end of April.
Let's just take as passed as prologue in 2017 when the tax bill was passed, the tax reform bill, that the Ways and Means Committee introduced that bill in the end of October of 2017. It passed in mid-December of 2017, so six weeks. It can be very fast. But remember that was only a tax bill. This bill, this big beautiful bill, is going to have a major tax component, as well as enormous cuts that are going to be controversial, and stakeholders like us, we're going to be pushing back.
And so, that's just going to make it difficult, especially when you look at the margins, particularly in the House, to thread that needle. So I think most people expect this summer, certainly maybe by the August 1 recess, that we would get that wrapped up. But we're going to have to see, and we're certainly vigilant and working hard at it. We hope to give you all the tools to be able to engage in advocacy, if you want to.
Mushtaq Gunja: Okay. Thank you, Steven. We are just slightly past time, and I know that we have not gotten to all of the wonderful questions in the Q&A in some of the chat. Thank you so much in advance for sending questions in advance. It really helps us denote the topics that we're going to talk about.
Before we go, I'm going to ask a quick step-back question. Jon, Sarah, Steven, we're in a moment of crisis, I think it is fair to say. I think there's been quite a bit of chatter about how should we handle this? What should we be doing? Is there some collective action that we can take?
I just wonder if you might spend a second talking about what ACE is doing, and then again, as I ask every time, if you have advice for our institutions, practical advice, now on what they might be able to do to help from the site.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I feel like a broken record, because I will say the same things I've always said. But I think the reason I always say them is I truly believe they make a difference and are making a difference. It can be really hard in this moment to feel like things are going in the direction we want them to go in.
But part of the reason I think everyone was so energized by Harvard's response yesterday was in many ways it's a culmination of a lot of individual things we've seen, that there's an understanding of where this administration is and what they want and what we can reasonably do and where we need to start drawing lines.
That is the work that ACE is doing on behalf of institutions. We are in those discussions. We are advancing the viewpoints. We are coordinating among the institutions. We're sharing the information. We're talking with all of you and learning from all of you about what's going on in your campuses so you're all better informed. That's a big part of our role.
But the other big part of our role is speaking that truth to power and talking about what's really happening here in DC and sharing that in ways and galvanizing people who we're seeing, standing up and speaking out and talking to their elected representatives who are talking to their neighbors, who are in their communities and saying, This is what my institution does. This is what I do at that institution. This is how it actually benefits all of us in this area.
It's shaping viewpoints about this. The administration, I think, to my mind is overplaying their hand badly. They're losing the argument by the way they've been acting. That's because, in contrast to what they say, lots of people are reading to see what exactly it is a college university does to not just support life-changing research, but to build community support neighbors, to improve economies, and that is really big and substantive, and that's the day-to-day thing that really shapes people's opinions.
So just thanks to everyone who participates in this chat. Thanks to all of our members who are carrying that message so clearly and so strongly and helping shape the narrative in a way that this administration doesn't want to see happen.
Sarah Spreitzer: I think our institutions, even in these times of chaos, they're always going to stay true to their missions, and it always gives me a lot of hope when I see them speaking up for their students and serving their students even during this time of chaos.
There was a comment made in the chat about the Fulbright program being a complete mess, where they're not pushing out funding. Our institutions who have students on the Fulbright programs, they're working to support those students even without those federal funds. When an international student says, I have this confusing message from the U.S. government about my student visa, we are there to try and provide support. And so, that's what keeps me going is that we're always going to continue to do our work, even with all of this chaos going on.
Steven Bloom: So, I would say, echo what Jon and Sarah said, keep doing the work you're doing to really change the lives of our students, whether they're traditional students or non-traditional students. We really do have an incredibly important role, both for them as well as for the larger society and helping to build a more robust and vital and vibrant society, and we need to keep doing that.
The second thing I would say is that courage is contagious. I mean we've seen Harvard stepping forward and other institutions, and I think individually we can find ways to exercise our First Amendment rights and affect those that are standing next to us and give us the power to stand for the principles we believe in.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, I think that's a great place to end. Thank you all for joining us on this episode of dotEDU Live. I think, unfortunately, we will be back sooner rather than later with another one of these special episodes. So thank you so much for all that you do. Thank you for joining. Thank you for the questions in advance, and we will see you next time.