Jon Fansmith: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this March 4th episode of dotEDU Live on the future of campus diversity and student support. I am Jon Fansmith, ACE senior vice president for Government Relations and National Engagement, and joining me are my amazing colleagues, Mushtaq Gunja and Sarah Spreitzer. Hey, Sarah and Mushtaq.
Sarah Spreitzer: Hey, guys. I thought part of our title for today was something about uncertainty, continuing uncertainty, and I was going to suggest we change that to constant uncertainty.
Jon Fansmith: That might've been why they took it out. It's now the default state, there's no need to reference it.
Sarah Spreitzer: Okay.
Mushtaq Gunja: It is nice to see both of you and I think I am playing the part of MC today and I once saw Conan O'Brien on a college campus and he was wearing a sweater and collared shirt like this, so I thought I would try to emulate Conan without the jokes maybe because this is unfortunately a little bit of a serious set of topics, but I was hoping that maybe I could walk us through all the things that have happened, most of the things that have happened over the last couple of weeks. And so here are the four-ish topics that I was thinking that we might be able to tackle first. The Dear Colleague letter that came out on February 14th around the department's interpretation of the Students for Fair Admissions. Wanted to see what had happened since then, dive into a couple of topics related to that.
Second, all things Department of Education. Secretary McMahon was confirmed last night. I think we have some early indications about what's coming up next. Third, what's happening with Congress funding. And then fourth, I'd love to talk a little bit about the National Institutes of Health IDC cut, all of that. Actually, we might do those last two in the opposite order, if that's okay?
Can we start with the Dear Colleague letter, friends? So just as a reminder for everybody, on Valentine's Day we got that lovely little Valentine with the department's interpretation of Students for Fair Admissions and how they might think about that related to the implementation of enforcement actions potentially on college campuses. We've had lawsuits and then we had a frequently asked questions document that was issued this past Friday night. Jon, let me start with you. Where are we on Dear Colleague letter and implementation interpretation?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and I think we have a little bit better sense of what the Department's thinking and I think, I know we want to talk a little bit about what we think the motivations here are too, but the frequently asked questions document that came out on Friday night. I think there's a couple different ways to read it. I've certainly seen some interpretations by legal scholars and by other folks in the higher ed space. I'll give you my perspective. I think when ACE put out our letter, we had about 70, 71 associations joined us asking the department to rescind the Dear Colleague letter and actually openly engage with us in terms of what compliance looks like for institutions in a collaborative process.
We also advanced some concerns, and some of those concerns we put forward that we highlighted were the ones we were hearing from our members, which is that for instance, the discussion of DEI seemed to imply that all DEI efforts were inherently discriminatory. The fact that there were a lot of things when you think about curriculum that the DCL seemed to imply that there were limits on free speech and academic freedom in these subject areas. Really just a very, very broad interpretation caused a lot of really foundational questions about, one, the department's authority to do this, and two, what that would actually mean for campuses. And what we saw with the FAQ was in many ways I think a response to a lot of those criticisms and concerns. And you can say, and I think people have pointed this out, there was a lawsuit on February 25th filed to block the Dear Colleague letter specifically. A court put a temporary restraining order in place on the two executive orders around DEI.
Certainly, the Department of Education and the Office for Civil Rights is looking at whatever they put out publicly and in an environment where courts are going to scrutinize what they put forward. So you saw an effort versus a three-page Dear Colleague letter with really broad, really strident language, a seven-page, much more restrained, much better supported by understood law, more citations to precedent. It was a much more careful document than the Dear Colleague letter. In a lot of ways rolled back some of the things we saw. As you were talking about right before we jumped on, the fact that they made explicit reference... They spent a couple paragraphs on the idea that there was multiple statutory bars on the Department of Education from doing anything to dictate curriculum. They emphasized that point. Yeah. Sarah, go ahead.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, I think it's great that we have further clarification on some of the questions that we had around the Dear Colleague letter. I'd remind folks that this comes out of the executive order that was issued by President Trump I think on January 20th or January 21st, because it's specifically charged the Department of Education with looking at colleges and universities and Students for Fair Admission and how that was broadly being applied across our campuses. So we knew that this was coming.
I think the big question, even though we do have some clarification now, is that we really need to see how is this going to be implemented. There was also a reporting portal set up for people to submit complaints regarding DEI, or in fact if they thought that there were actions by schools against the executive order or against the Dear Colleague letter, that reporting portal seemed to be focused on K-12 schools, but I've also seen it being referenced for colleges and universities. So while I think the clarification and the FAQs pulled it back a bit, I think we're still going to have to see how this is going to be further implemented.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. No, and I think that's particularly... And I don't know, maybe you were going to make this point too, Mushtaq, I mean, the executive orders were really specific to DEI and sort of their interpretation and they put very expansive... They didn't define what DEI was. The Dear Colleague letter and FAQ is kind of that interesting effort around how they try to implement that by saying, "Look, it's not just that." Some of these things, some things frankly which I identified have always been clearly discriminatory. But taking the Students for Fair Admissions' decision and saying this is actually our legal basis for a much more expanded definition of what discrimination looks like. And so you get into... I think you're right, implementation will be the question, and this is one of the points we made in the letter, this is one of the points we make all the time with this administration, with the last, with every administration. Colleges and universities want to be in compliance with the law. We need clarity on what that means and I think the big problem... There are a lot of problems, but the biggest problem with the DCL was this big vague language about what compliance looked like. You can't, and we caution people against making changes in response to that.
The FAQ I think starts to narrow that down. I think if you're a university general counsel, you can look at this and say, "Well, I have a better sense of certain things that may be permissible or may not be." That said, it is still a very expansive interpretation. I think one we would not agree with or support. I think there is clearly a lot of gray area that when you look at this you say, "What should we be doing? What should we be doing?" That's still not there. The definition of "DEI," quote, unquote, in there doesn't really define specifically the kinds of actions that would be considered discriminatory by them.
There's a lot of uncertainty there and the intent, and we'll talk about this in a number different areas is that they believe institutions are discriminating in ways that we do not feel are discrimination. We do not feel the law supports are discrimination, and they're trying to give them this idea that implementation will look like investigations, implementation will look like publicly naming and shaming institutions for where they disagree. They haven't taken those actions yet around race, but I know we'll talk a little bit about antisemitism in other areas where I think those efforts kind of align with this approach.
Mushtaq Gunja: That sort of struck me when I was reading the document first. The FAQ document, if you're looking for it, is in the Q&A I think under the answer tab. I think a few people have posted it in the chat as well and I think it's worth reading. These FAQ documents are always a little bit funny because the Dear Colleague letter was clear and here's a nine-page document that actually helps explain what the thing is because it wasn't clear. I think your point about the narrowing down is right. I might call everybody's attention to a couple of the questions and then answers, because I think that they are in the vein of many questions that all of us have had when we thought about the ways in which they might interpret this document.
So question eight. Are diversity, equity and inclusion programs unlawful under SFFA? And then I'm just going to read a little bit of the second paragraph there. “Schools may not operate policies or programs under any name that treat students differently based on race, engaging racial stereotyping or create hostile environments for students of particular races. For example, schools with programs focused on interests in particular cultures, heritages and areas of the world would not in and of themselves violate Title VI, assuming they're open to all students regardless of race, nor would educational, cultural or historical observations, such as Black History Month, International Holocaust Remembrance Day or similar events that celebrate or recognize historical events and contributions and promote awareness so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination."
Now, there's a lot of legal room for the department to come in, and say, "No, no, no, not withstanding the language here, we're going to find that some event on campus was discriminatory in some way," but the specific call out of events that are related to Black History Month or International Holocaust Remembrance, these are helpful for us as we think about what is permissible and what is not permissible. There's this question that Jon, you alluded to, question nine, about does the Dear Colleague letter prevent our institutions from mentioning race in anything in the classroom? And their answer, again, the first sentence of the second paragraph in answer nine notes that the department's prohibited from exercising control over the content of school curricula. I think that's useful for us to know and it's useful I think for everybody on this call probably to read this nine-page document and then make sure that you're in good touch with your general counsel about it, just my little lawyer hat on just for a quick second. You were about to say something, Jon?
Jon Fansmith: No, I was just really wanting to acknowledge that point and re-emphasize something else that we've been saying from the beginning, right? I love your point about the nine pages to clarify what was apparently abundantly clear. I would also say for institutions, your programs and policies, and I say this again and again and again, if they were legally compliant and had undergone review and you were comfortable with where you were with the law on January 19th or on February 13th or on February 27th, you should still feel comfortable in that space. This is helpful in a lot of ways. It moves back from the uncertainty surrounding these really broad, vague kind of threatening approaches that the DCL employed, but it doesn't actually even further change the underlying... Even the examples you're reading out that they cite to, I think a lot of those are going to be very contextually important. Detail-specific.
They will vary from campus to campus, but if you were doing the appropriate test before, they should still withstand scrutiny now. So again, great. I'm happy to see this in some ways a retrenchment from some of the worst of what we saw in the DCL, but as far as institutional decision-making, talk to your counsel, take a breath, be calm, follow the law. This doesn't change that environment one bit.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sarah, you noted that there's a sort of a portal to be able to file some complaints. In the original Dear Colleague letter asked for institutions to come into compliance, whatever that means, within 14 days. That 14 days is up and there was a lawsuit that was filed in relation to that 14 days from the American Federation of Teachers and others. Sarah, what do we know about any of the implementation here, or is the answer we don't know anything quite yet?
Sarah Spreitzer: No, we don't know, Mushtaq, but I would say I think that we were going to talk about investigations going on around Title VI right through the OCR and this broad efforts across agencies, not just at the Department of Ed, but also we've seen at HHS, Department of Justice and others to investigate our institutions for Title VI specifically around antisemitism. I think the fear is that we're going to see the same thing, Title VI applied in the same way perhaps on this DEI or that kind of broad definition that we saw coming out of the executive order. So we will see what happens. At least for now it seems like one less thing for us to panic about. As Jon said, if you're in compliance, you're already in compliance. The FAQ gave us some additional information to work from and we can turn our to other things to worry about.
Mushtaq Gunja: Before we move on to talk a little bit about what's happening at the Department, there's a couple of folks have noted in the chat the reference to Brown v. Board in this FAQ document, and Jon said, do you have any comments on the strength of the legal arguments here that the department are making?
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, I love that you're asking us for our legal opinion, Mushtaq. I'll let Jon, who usually plays a lawyer on TV to answer that one.
Jon Fansmith: I have the same point you did, Sarah. I like how the lawyer who teaches constitutional law is asking the two non-lawyers who at best pretend to have some knowledge. I mean, look, I won't speak to the legal merits of their reference. I think there is something they did in the DCL that they did in the FAQ, which is they will constantly sort of try to underpin really questionable assertions about what the law means by referencing things that are incontrovertibly true. Segregation is discriminatory. If you are segregating students by race, that's discriminatory. Does that mean that allowing students who have affinity ceremonies that meet all of the other tests for compliance with civil rights laws is somehow discriminatory now? I mean, I would say it does not, and I think that's the kind of thing they do. They're making reference to things that are well understood and well-supported by the broader public ruling in Brown and other cases as saying this is the foundation for what we're attempting to do. I think we would strenuously disagree. I think a lot of lawyers would strenuously disagree that the two are as related as they would like them to be.
But it's not a shock. This is sort of standard. You're making an argument, so you're trying to rely on evidence that supports your argument. In this case, here are the precedents we think lead to this conclusion. Like I said, we don't think it leads there, but not a shock that they would use in that way. And I certainly understand why for some people particularly seeing those kinds of references made may seem provocative or intentional or insulting in some ways. I think probably there is less of that at play more than just trying to buttress what are generally kind of weaker arguments for this expansion they're trying to make.
Mushtaq Gunja: I appreciate that. And I wasn't trying to duck the question exactly. I guess from the highest level point of view, I think many law professors, many lawyers would disagree with the use of the precedent decided and more broadly their very expansive reading of the court's ruling in Student for Fair Admissions. I think we've made that point in the community letter that we sent over to the department, and I think we're going to continue to press that point in actions both legal and non-legal as we go forward.
Can I turn us to things that are happening at the department? So Secretary McMahon was confirmed yesterday and immediately she put out a notice to staff. I believe she put out a notice to staff or a speech of some sort. What did she say in that speech and where are we in this road to potentially closing, restricting what the Department of Education is up to?
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, Mushtaq, I was going to comment that the department's been incredibly busy even before the secretary has arrived there, right? They've been carrying out these investigations, they've been putting out guidance, but Secretary McMahon was confirmed and sworn in last night and you failed to mention, Mushtaq, that her message, which is posted on the Department of Ed website is called the Final Mission because obviously she has been charged with dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. That's been a priority for President Trump and his administration. It was discussed during her confirmation. She talked about the fact that she would work with Congress in that objective, but that objective remains. And so her message to the staff and to the American people is really about how her mission is to dismantle the Department of Education and really return education back to the states, which is something that they've talked about since Project 2025 was conceived during the campaign.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and I think one of these things that's interesting is last night you start to see leaked versions of that speech, and two interesting things... And not every leak and whatever is valid, but there's a lot of reason to believe that these were given what the final speech wound up looking like. Two big things. One, the initial drafts referenced specifically an executive order having been issued. So we expect to see today or tomorrow at least sometime in the very near future, a new executive order calling for either the abolishment of the Department of Education or the hollowing it out. I think why I'm making that distinction is the earlier drafts of speech talked very much about identifying functions and programs at the Department of Education that are not statutorily mandated and winding those down or transferring them to other agencies. None of those references survived into the speech that was actually shared with the Department's employees and posted online.
Both versions, I'll say, seem to reference a future Department of Education. So I think there is a little kind of knowing nod to the fact that as Secretary McMahon mentioned during our hearing, they need Congress to actually pass laws to get rid of the Office for Civil Rights or the Office of Post-Secondary Education or the Department of Education as a whole, and Congress at least so far hasn't shown much of an inclination to want to do that. Look, I'm not downplaying the significance of either approach, but there is a difference from hollowing out the Department of Education and what can be done there and sort of the broader Project 2025 goal of simply getting rid of the department as a whole.
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, Jon, I think when you say hollowing out, I think you're talking about kind of the DOGE efforts of cutting overall staffing, cutting the programs, but then also not ending the student loan program, but rather shifting it from the Department of Ed over to the Department of Treasury, empowering Department of Justice to kind of lead on Title VI or Title IX investigations, which we've already seen them starting to do. And then I think the hardest part will be the Pell Grant program, which Project 2025 talks about, putting those at the Department of Labor to be focused on vocational education or turning other funding into block grants to states. And obviously those were created by statute, and so that will be harder to do. But given the success that DOGE has had in other agencies, I do think that it's possible for them to move some things around or at least create a sleeker, more streamlined version of the Department of Ed.
Jon Fansmith: Oh, sorry. Mushtaq, go ahead.
Mushtaq Gunja: No, I was going to ask what the practical implications are for our campuses if the same function is going to be happening either at the Department of Education or the Department of Justice, Department of Education or Department of Labor? I mean, that has some interesting effects for our efforts here in Washington, but just from a campus point of view, what are the practical effects here, and maybe most importantly, are the dollars that come with things like loans, are they safe in the meantime? What of that is congressionally mandated?
Jon Fansmith: Right, and this is... I thought you were interrupting so Sarah and I didn't have a recurring fight over abolishing the Department of Education.
Sarah Spreitzer: And who's right, will it actually happen?
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, we'll do that later maybe.
Jon Fansmith: Okay. I think people might be tired of that at this point.
But I think the important point is it's not just that these programs, student loan funding, Pell Grant funding, even Title III, Title V funding, even a lot of things that come out as grants, are statutorily mandated. They are in law. Congress annually appropriates money for the purposes of those programs' functionality. Most of the offices at the Department of Education are also in statute. The impact for campuses right now, let's be clear, right now should be relatively nominal. Student aid dollars are still coming out from FSA, right? Now, the grants and award side, that's a bigger area, but a lot of the sets of the program areas that we focus a lot of our time and attention on, those as of now have not been interrupted.
There is a lot about hollowing out that Sarah touched on that is going to reduce the administrative capacity of the Department of Education. It simply will be fewer people doing more work under more, frankly, difficult circumstances. And we haven't talked about this, but a number of efforts are underway right now to reduce the overall staffing size of the Department of Education. The buyout offer was made to Department employees who have been in place for at least three years. The deadline for that I think passed yesterday, I think was the deadline to do that.
Mushtaq Gunja: Last night, I think.
Jon Fansmith: March 13th is the federal government's deadline for agencies to report lists of staff for what are called reductions in force, which are basically mass layoffs as part of downsizing or reorganization. There are a number of things that are in process to significantly reduce the number of staff working at the Department of Education. That does not exempt them from their statutory requirements to do things, to process FAFSAs and award student financial aid. That is real binding obligations they have to do. I worry a lot, and we don't talk about this a lot, but we just came through two years of really difficult FAFSA processing, and we generally haven't seen those kinds of interruptions or challenges in other areas of departmental operations.
It's not hard to envision not just financial aid, but lots of other areas where these things will have really meaningful impacts. The people who know these programs or experienced civil servants who work to administer this in a way that is legally compliant, that is appropriate to the requirements on them, losing those people is going to have a real impact. So yes, right now, I think you can say the impact for institutions, relatively minimal, but we're not far off from much more dramatic impacts. And then there's certainly areas that Sarah talked about where grants being held up, the contract's being terminated, the Institute for Education Sciences, things like that where there has been an immediate impact.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, we saw the Teacher Quality Partnership Grants, the SEED grants canceled, the IES grants canceled. A lot of the data collection efforts being canceled, right? Overall, that is going to reduce the footprint of the US Department of Education. I think we haven't... And Mushtaq, I don't want to jump out of your list, but we saw a new executive order last week that came out of President Trump's first cabinet meeting, which Elon Musk attended, and there was some back and forth about the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and how it was being implemented.
And as a result, there was a new executive order that came out about implementing DOGE that calls for every federal agency for the secretary or the administrator to produce a list of current grants and funding going out the door, and a justification for that funding and those grants as well as creating a process for program managers anytime there's a drawdown to justify why that money is being drawn down. And I think all of that slows down the process. It's going to frustrate people in those roles. In D.C., everybody's been talking about they got their second email from DOGE asking for the five bullet points of what did you accomplish last week? It's not fun to be a federal employee right now.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, and I think the point about the slowing down of the dollars going out, and relatedly, I mean, I see in the chat and a couple of questions in the Q&A too about whether states are really prepared to manage big block grants and able to actually move the dollars out. I mean, I think the short answer to that question about are states managed or are they prepared to be able to have all of this authority sent over their way, I mean, it's going to vary state to state, but I mean in large part, probably not on day one, and I think it's even worse on the K-12 side probably, frankly, than it is on the higher ed side. I don't know, but I'd be nervous about it. It's certainly points that I know that we will make when we're up on the Hill and talking to this administration. Go ahead, Jon.
Jon Fansmith: No. I mean, you probably got my reaction. I started sort of smirking when you said, "Are states prepared for this?" Most states don't want to do this, because you're talking about federally-funded, but more importantly federally-directed programs. If what you are saying is we're returning it to the states, what you're saying is the federal government's deciding what the allocation looks like, what the criteria are, what the formulas for funding it are, what the eligibility. I mean, think about anything in the space where there is an eligibility test. States will have to come up with ways to have students apply, have that reviewed, have institution apply, have that reviewed. It is just passing in a tremendous amount of administrative burden onto the states for programs that functionally they are neither funding nor controlling. That's not really a function lots of states are seeking to embrace.
So yeah, this sort of idea about we're going to return government to the states, absolutely sure. As a rhetorical idea, fine, but that's not really what is being talked about. It's basically passing burden onto states, not any sort of funding. And you can block grant it if you get Congress to agree to block grant it, you can't get it block granted just because you'd prefer that or the states would prefer to get the money that way.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, let's answer that question about Congress needing to appropriate when we talk about Congress funding, shut down, all of that in a second. But before we get there, I'd love to just spend a second talking about the status of research funding. So we talked over the last couple of webinars around this indirect cost cut limit at 15 percent for grants that came from the National Institutes of Health. This is a policy that would impact many of our institutions in pretty great amounts. Sarah, where are we on NIH IDC funding? What's the status of that lawsuit? What can we tell our attendees?
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, the indirect cost rate, the facilities and administration F&A rate, which is something our institutions negotiate, the NIH had tried to cap that rate, which is usually 50 percent or higher, at around 15 percent, actually at 15 percent across the board no matter what had actually been negotiated with the federal government. That has been stopped in the courts, but I think more problematic right now for our institutions and our researchers is just across the board chaos and confusion that's happening with grant funding and it really is from agency to agency some of the issues that are going on.
So for example, this week I have been dealing a lot with the fact that State and USAID month ago, right out of the gate, the Trump administration put stop work orders on everything. The only thing that was exempted was funding at educational and cultural affairs for Fulbright, for Gilman scholars, for things like that. It was recently announced that those were going to be paused for two weeks. The two weeks has passed and they still haven't lifted that pause. So as a result, the March stipends for our Fulbrighters is not being released from the Department of State.
We've also seen agencies taking actions to go beyond just the DEI executive order and stopping grants for DEI to say that these things are no longer priorities for the funding agencies, and so they're stopping payments on multi-year grants to say, "We're no longer going to be funding these grants because we're no longer prioritizing this work." At the National Institutes of Health, there were concerns because there was a policy put in place not to publish meetings in the Federal Register. That's actually needed for the study sections and for the Federal Advisory Committee meetings to actually get money out the door once the peer review panels are deciding on what should be funded. They restarted notice for the study sections, but they haven't restarted the federal advisory committees, which is the last step for that funding. And so as a result, there's just chaos, I think, and I think institutions are starting to plan for a future in which that research funding and those grants may not be coming out in regular order.
So we've seen some of the large research universities actually pause PhD admissions because they don't know what's going to happen with some of these grants. We've seen them take a step back on doing some strategic planning. And so I would say our research, it's not good, and I think we're now six weeks into this and we don't have any kind of regular action I think at any of the research agencies.
That's on top of the cuts that have been made through DOGE at these agencies. So I think it was 2,000 people at the National Institutes of Health as well as a lot of the senior leadership at NSF. It was at least 10 percent of their staff were laid off. And so if you're a researcher, your program officer may be gone. You may not even know if there's an issue with drawing down your funds or submitting an application. It may be very difficult to do that work. There's also travel restrictions put on all of the federal employees, and so they're unable to travel to external meetings to talk about grant programs or even, I think, engage really with the research community.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, I don't remember President Trump campaigning on cutting scientific research, and I don't really remember congressional Republicans campaigning on this either, making this a big point. What are we hearing from the Hill and from others? Is this something that Congress is supposed to go along with, they want to go along with?
Jon Fansmith: So I think there's a couple layers to this right now. As people know, Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and it's early in a new administration. President Trump is popular certainly within the Republican Party, and there's not a lot of appetite for publicly challenging the efforts he's put forward to disrupt funding, to slash funding, to eliminate programs or disrupt them. That said, there's a very long-standing territorialism by Congress over funding. That is really, the power of the purse, as it's called, is really one of the things that Congress has historically, Republican and Democrat, most jealously guarded because it gives them tremendous power, and frankly, as the legislative branch has become less and less powerful over the last couple of decades, it's the one area where they've sort of tried very hard to hold the line.
We've had lots of conversations with Republican staffers and members who will say, "We believe there is fraud, waste, and abuse in government. We believe the government is spending too much on too many things that we disagree with. We believe there is real value in looking at these programs and saying, 'Where can we find cuts?' But we have processes for doing those, and those start and functionally end with Congress." And I don't know that you'll see certainly in the short term a lot of very public opposition from Republicans. That said, privately, those are things... We're going into a spending cycle in which some of these things are going to start to rise to the fore in terms of the discussion.
I also think the other thing, all politics is local, right? I'm just going to lay out all the cliches right now. Members of Congress vote for funding because they see their constituents benefiting from it, because they like to be able to tell them, "I have done something that benefits you." When you send that money over for that purpose to an administration that then tears it all up and does what they want to do, you've lost not just your authority as a governing body, but your political value, the wins you've secured as a politician that are important to you. So there's some real basic political motivation for Congress reasserting itself in this area. It's challenging environment for that to do that with the administration, the popularity in some areas of these efforts, but if you're looking more long-hauled than short term, I think you're going to start to see over time Congress much more aggressively asserting itself in that area.
Sarah Spreitzer: And then, Jon, you failed to mention that President Trump is giving his joint address tonight to Congress, not the State of the Union because it's the first year of the administration, but his joint address, and from everything the press is saying, he's going to take a victory lap on the cuts that have been happening at the federal government and to talk about this before Congress. So I think local members may express concerns about some of these cuts, but overall, the mood is very supportive.
Mushtaq Gunja: We'll see, right? I mean, that first little layer of cuts perhaps, but when you start cutting hurricane centers and the National Oceanic Administration... I don't know. We'll see what this next layer are. And I guess the Democrats in Congress are betting the other way because I understand they're bringing several folks to Congress for the speech tonight that have been affected by these cuts. So I guess we'll see. Jon, Sarah, do you have advice for our institutions vis-a-vis research? So all politics are local, all the cliches. Do we have specific advice that might help in our ability to be able to raise up research projects that could potentially be caught up in these delays?
Sarah Spreitzer: I think there's a couple things, Mushtaq. I think it's very important for institutions to communicate to their researchers what's going on, and I know a lot of institutions have put up kind of transition documents. I always point people to our colleagues at the Council on Governmental Relations, or COGR, C-O-G-R, because they have a lot of really good resources. So if you're hearing, "Oh, NIH may not compete this grant," it may be a rumor and it would probably be a good idea to actually check out the sources for that information. I think in supporting our students and our researchers, I think our institutions are being very thoughtful about taking these pauses because it demonstrates the seriousness of these actions, but also means that they're trying to remain sustainable to continue to carry out their research enterprise.
And then I think, again, communicating with individual members of Congress. I continue to tell people the only real success we've had so far on these funding issues is the OMB memo, which was withdrawn the same day it was issued, and why was it withdrawn? It was because there were individuals contacting their members of Congress about the impact it was going to have on them. And so it really is those individuals reaching out, talking about how their medical care or their clinical trial may be stopped or research on their disease may be stopped, or a graduate student that's hoping to join a professor's lab, how that may impact their education.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, we have about five minutes left, and I was hoping that we could cover Congress and funding, but maybe I might impose on you to stay a couple minutes longer because I also saw, and a couple of people have noted this in the chat, that the President posted something on Truth Social about illegal protests and pulling federal funding and no masks. I'll ask about that maybe at the end, because I know that we haven't... I don't know if I've had any time to sort of think about it. Maybe you guys have. But let's talk about Congress and funding and shutdowns. Jon, where are we on whether or not the government is going to shut down, whether there will be new appropriations?
Jon Fansmith: As somebody who started my lobbying career doing budget and appropriations, the idea that we'd be 40 minutes into this before we talk about the fact that a government shutdown is 10 days away is a pretty telling sign of the environment we're in. And I think, look, my track record for agnostication is probably 50-50 at best, but I will say the growing consensus, and it's a pretty strong consensus right now as we will have a government shutdown at the midnight on the 14th, there is not a clear path forward that looks palatable to both sides and the political dynamics are what they have been for the last two and a half years, which is very narrow margins of Republican control in the House and a number of Republican members of the House who are very fiscally conservative, take that responsibility to be fiscally conservative very seriously, makes it really hard to maneuver a spending bill forward without Democratic support. And the last two years, what we've seen is every substantive spending bill passed with Democratic support. That was what was needed.
We're in an environment now where Democrats are looking at what the administration is doing in terms of freezing funding, suspending funding, ignoring congressional directions as to where to put the money and saying, "Why would we approve more funding if it won't be used for the purposes for which we've approved it?" It makes it very unclear a pathway forward for any source [inaudible 00:42:23]. What Speaker Johnson has proposed is what's called a year-long continuing resolution, essentially saying we're going to finish this fiscal year, which ends in September by essentially flat-funding programs where they were the previous year, some changes, some tweaks, things like that. The administration has asked that if they do that, they shift $30 billion from non-defense spending to defense spending, reasons for that we don't have to go into, but there's some cuts that might be on the horizon for defense spending overall, as well as doing things like eliminating earmarks from the CR. Congress has the ability to include earmarks in the CR if they so choose to write them in.
So a lot of things that could be done, what's not clear is why Democrats would be supportive of any of those things, and if you're not going to have a majority of house Republicans endorsing a bill that level funds government levels they think are too high, you need Democrats to get it out of that chamber. You need Democrats, at least seven of them, in the Senate, regardless of what Republicans agree to do to pass a bill through that chamber. So you're looking at an environment in which you need Democratic support, and so far, Democrats have not been offered anything that looks particularly compelling to offer the support. In fact, a lot of political reasons not to be supportive, to be seen as standing up to Republicans, and frankly, handing the Republicans a mess of their own creation. They control both chambers and the administration. It is their responsibility to govern, the obligation falls on them. If they can't do it without Democratic support, in many ways, that's a failure to govern.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon-
Sarah Spreitzer: Oh, I was just going to say, Jon yesterday told me that there was going to be a CR. So I think that he's changing his mind, I think we'll be in a shutdown and he was saying, "No, no, no, it'll be a CR."
Jon Fansmith: No, Sarah, this is the problem. So I will happily... Now that she's opened this can of worms-
Mushtaq Gunja: Oh, dear.
Jon Fansmith: I know, Mushtaq, you're losing control of your [inaudible 00:44:24], but I will say this-
Mushtaq Gunja: This is the worst.
Jon Fansmith: Historically, when you look at we've approached these shutdowns... You're probably shaking your head, Mushtaq. But Democrats generally ultimately go along with continuing government funding, and they do that for a lot of reasons. And I'm not assigning merit to the arguments, but Democrats historically have been much more concerned with the impact of a shutdown not just on government operations, but on people both at the federal level and who are supported by federal funds at the state level, what it means to be furloughed during a shutdown, what it means for communities, the impacts of this. We're talking sort of jokingly about a government shutdown. A government shutdown is people out of work, people not getting paychecks, and a lot of the people who aren't getting a paycheck are people who are working at low levels in the federal government doing the kind of support and administrative work that will not be deemed essential. That means they simply don't get a paycheck.
You're going to say, "Will they get the money later?" Maybe. Probably. But that doesn't matter a whole lot if you're a low-income individual or middle-income individual paycheck to paycheck. So I said that, Sarah, yes, because Democrats often cave. Do the Democrats often cave? Yes. Because they are concerned with the sort of impact of a shutdown the way that is really meaningful for a lot of people's lives. And it's politically not the strong position to take, but it's worth recognizing once in a while people who are responsibly governing and that is their goal.
Sarah Spreitzer: I was going to add, Mushtaq, that I think last week, President Trump weighed in support of a year-long CR. That could change. That could immediately change the closer we get to a CR. I also think that there are people that are likely looking at it as a cost-saver. You close down the federal government for a month, how much money are you going to save and how many of those workers might leave federal service because they're unsure if they'll even be repaid once the federal government opens back up? So I think that's a little different than previous years that we've been under CRs.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. No, this is a different day for sure. Will the Democrats hold together? Will the Republicans hold together? Will the handful of serious fiscal hawks, will they end up caving? I mean, Jon, we saw them, I don't want to say cave, but we've gotten through the first procedural hurdle to be able to have these sort of discussions with the Republicans all falling in line eventually, or basically all the Republicans falling in line to be able to start these discussions. I guess we will see. So we'll see which one of you... I'm not even sure that you're actually saying different things.
Sarah Spreitzer: Jon likes to play both sides, so he can be right either way. I'm saying definitively there will be a shutdown.
Mushtaq Gunja: Right, Sarah. I like the stake in the ground, though I really hope you are wrong. I hope that we are able to, I mean, for all the reasons, end up with a functioning federal government. Last question, speaking of functioning federal governments, did you see this Truth Social post about illegal campus protests and federal funding? What do you two make of it?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, so for people who haven't seen it, President Trump posted yesterday, and I won't read it out, but essentially that they'll shut off funding to schools, colleges, universities that have illegal protests. Non-citizen protesters will be deported, American students will be permanently expelled or arrested. There's some idea that that may be part of the joint address to Congress tonight put forward. It says protest. It's not specific to antisemitism. It seems to me clearly reflective of concerns we heard from a lot of people generally, but especially congressional Republicans in the Trump campaign about protests on college campuses following the October 7th attacks last year.
Can you legally do any of this? No, you can't legally do any of this. There is a process underway in which if protests are happening and they are proven to be discriminatory to students, there is a process in which institutions can address incidents of discrimination on their campuses. The President can't simply declare that he's doing that to begin with. I do think it's important because this is a statement that was made. We saw last night that the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration jointly announced that they were going to cancel $51 million worth of contracts with Columbia University.
Sarah Spreitzer: Stop work order.
Jon Fansmith: Stop work order?
Sarah Spreitzer: Stop work order.
Jon Fansmith: Okay. All right. And then review $5 billion in grant commitments to Columbia because they believe that Columbia has not done a, I guess, sufficiently good job at combating antisemitism on this campus. This is troubling, right? We have an understanding of a process at the Department of Education, but more importantly, in the U.S. what we generally do is we find you guilty and then we punish you, we don't start punishing you before we've made a determination that you've done anything wrong, and that determination has not been made yet. So to go forward and very publicly announce you're going to start trying to strip funding away, everything feels like an understatement, is clearly a problematic approach by the administration. So that follows on the heels of the administration announcing that their task force on antisemitism is going to visit 10 campuses to meet with university leaders, staff students, law enforcement, others to assess the climate for Jewish students on those campuses. We are beginning to see what implementation of the executive order around combating anti-Semitism looks like, and is these multifaceted multi-agency efforts across a range of different activities.
Sarah Spreitzer: And I would say multi-investigations, right? Because it's unclear if this ED-HHS-GSA investigation is related to the Department of Ed investigation or the HHS investigation on the Columbia Medical School.
Mushtaq Gunja: This feels to me like the first foray into this, and even as investigations go, the first sort of step, but I assume that we will see some legal action on the other side. It's unclear whether or not it is legal to be able to issue these stop work orders for this sort of investigatory finding, if there even is an investigatory finding here. It doesn't appear that there is. So more to come on all of this and we'll report out. Jon, do you want to wrap us up?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I mean, we could do this for about four more hours. There's so many things we haven't touched on and that I'd love to call out. One of the things we touched on, the teacher preparation programs that are being maybe not canceled but suspended or contracts are being eliminated, and shout out to our colleagues at the American Association of Councils of Colleges of Teacher Education who filed suit to block that from going forward. I think there really has been just a tremendous response and engagement. I feel like I say it every week, but every week I get new examples that keep me optimistic about the future of this.
It's tough times, right? There's no underselling that, but we are seeing people, the very best of higher education, standing up, fighting for the principles we believe in, having pride in the work we do, demonstrating the value of what we do and why that's important, not just to our students or our institutions, but to our democracy, and that is really affirming, and I appreciate all of you. I know the chat, I can't even keep up with it. There's so much dialogue and engagement there. I think it reflects the passion and commitment people have, and it is, again, very, very validating. So thank you all for all you're doing. We're going to keep working with you, keep advocating for you, and keep communicating what's going on, and we appreciate all your feedback and taking a lot of time as you do to participate. So thanks everyone.
Mushtaq Gunja: See you all soon.