The News
The Trump administration’s plan to rollback federal funding for US universities and colleges has left educators on edge, with some institutions preemptively tightening their belts by paring back on graduate programs and freezing new hires.
The timing of the cuts is particularly challenging: Most institutions set their budgets a year in advance, and even those that are well-resourced “don’t have millions of dollars lying around that they can use to make up for that shortfall,” the assistant vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education told The Hill.
SIGNALS
Federal funding cuts threaten US innovation dominance
Where in the past a nation’s power might stem purely from its physical resources, modern economies increasingly rely on “intangible resources — the knowledge and technologies…super-charging economic growth, scientific discovery, and military potential,” one analyst wrote in Foreign Affairs. Years of chronic underinvestment in basic research already threatens both the institutions and the people on which US innovation dominance depends, she added, pushing the brightest to look for work elsewhere. The current uncertainty around federal funding will exacerbate the problem, an economist argued: “Educational disinvestment represents a self-inflicted wound whose consequences will burden us, our children, and our grandchildren.”
Trump is poised to gut the Department of Education
US President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to shutter the Department of Education would require an act of Congress and is generally unpopular across the electorate. Nevertheless, Trump will likely try to reduce its footprint — Elon Musk’s efficiency efforts have already led to the cancellation of myriad research grants — and instead assign some of its functions to other government agencies, a Washington Post education reporter told NPR. States and local districts could be left “scrambling to fill the gaps” left by the lack of federal cash, the president of the National Parents Union warned. Children whose education relies on government funding and oversight to ensure equal access, such as those with disabilities, are particularly at risk, K-12 Dive reported.