Jon Fansmith: Hello everyone and welcome to this June 4th edition dotEDU Live. As you can probably tell by the fact that I can’t even recall what date it is, there are a lot of things going on that we’re eager to share with you today. And as always, I have the two best people in the world to join me to share that information with you and talk it over, in my colleagues Sarah Spreitzer and Mushtaq Gunja. Sarah and Mushtaq, how are you both doing?
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, really relaxed. I have a lot of free time on my hands. I’m surprised you couldn’t remember that it’s already June. Looking forward to the summer. I’m sure I’m going to have lots of time off, lots of beach vacations.
Mushtaq Gunja: I don’t think so, Sarah. I think you’re going to be busy, as we all are thinking about higher ed issues. And it’s nice to see both of you. It’s good to see you, Jon Fansmith.
And I am going to moderate today, if that’s okay. I’ve got lots of questions for both of you. Thanks for the, goodness, several hundred of you who have joined for this very important discussion. As always, if you have questions, put them in the Q&A. We’ll try to monitor the chat too, but it’s always a little bit easier for us to look at the Q&A. And thanks for everybody who is putting where they’re from. It’s nice to be among a community at this point.
Friends, here’s what I think we’re going to talk about today. I want to ask a bunch of questions about reconciliation, talk about the several developments that are happening with international students, and then talk a little bit about Trump budget and this rescission package that just went up.
So let’s start with reconciliation, if that works for you guys. And Jon, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you as worried about a bill as you have appeared to me to be over the last week about what’s happening with reconciliation, which is of course the budget measure that helps us understand what the fiscal situation is going to look like over the next little bit. Jon, where are we and why are you so worried?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, thanks, Mushtaq. I don’t know if thanks, really. But I think you’re right. And Sarah will probably testify to my relatively tenuous emotional state these days. I’m making a little bit of light of it. But look, we have been working under a number of assumptions around reconciliation for a while, and not just because we were speculating because these are what our conversations with people on and off the Hill have been informing us, that the Senate would be a very, very different beast than the House. The House was always going to make big cuts. The House was required to make big cuts, $2 trillion in spending cuts, $330 billion in education cuts, $880 billion in Medicaid cuts. But the Senate was different. The Senate’s only required to make a billion dollars in education cuts.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, let me just stop you just for a quick second because I think the last time we were all together, I think it was May 15th, we spent a lot of time talking about reconciliation. The House bill had not yet passed. Remind us what’s in the House bill and then tell us what’s happening with the Senate.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, it’s a great reminder. Thanks, Mushtaq. So the House passed their bill. They had all of those cuts and more that they were required to make. On the education provisions, the House has over $349 billion in cuts to education programs, and topping that list is changes to Pell Grants. And what the House did, somewhat unexpectedly, was to say that they are going to deal with the Pell shortfall a little bit by putting a little bit of money into the program, but more significantly by cutting eligibility for the program. And what they did was they said the current full-time level is 12 credits per semester or 24 credits per year. They would make that 15 and 30. That would also mean that the half-time level goes up because obviously it’s a higher threshold. And then maybe most immediately impactful too, they would eliminate eligibility for all students studying less than half-time, which is about one out of every 10 Pell students, around 700,000 Pell students.
The net effect of that is about $87 billion in a funding cut for Pell Grants. That is a massive cut. It is a massive cut, and especially because it’s targeted at students who by and large are not your... Relatively small but population of residential dependent undergraduate students, the part-time population, disproportionately in open-access institutions, community colleges, disproportionately working adults, disproportionately student-parents. These are a population that ostensibly could get more aid if they took more courses, but they realistically don’t have the resources, the time, the money, the ability to juggle family and work obligations to take more courses.
Beyond that, there’s some other things in the bill around Pell. We can talk about that. One of them is the expansion of Pell, the short-term programs. But beyond that, the bill would eliminate subsidized Stafford loans for undergrads. These are loans where the federal government basically pays the interest for low-income students while they’re studying. I was actually kind of shocked when we ran the analysis. That works out on average to costing those students over $6,000 on average in terms of what their borrowing costs will be. So $6,000 more in low-income students will have to repay not to see any benefit whatsoever. They are borrowing the same amount; they’re just paying more to do it.
And then you have all these other provisions we saw, where Grad PLUS is eliminated, where Parent PLUS loans are severely curtailed, where the endowment tax is put on a broader range of institutions at massively higher levels, 7, 14, 21%, where it’s currently 1.4%. And add to that the Medicaid cuts, where 3.4 million students get Medicaid, what you have is, area after area after area, resources, programs, benefits low-income students depend on are being curtailed at the same time that institutions’ ability to provide extra support, maybe fill some of those holes that are being created, is also being taken away. So it’s a broad-based assault.
And where I started was talking about this process, the difference between the House and the Senate. The thought had been the Senate would move in a very different direction. And what we have increasingly heard is no, the Senate is under tremendous pressure by the administration, by House leadership, by Senate leadership, because the House bill passed so narrowly, it passed 215 votes to 214 votes, a one-vote margin, to not make many changes. And what we have seen is that is the goal of Senate leadership, is to pass a bill that looks substantially like the really terrible House bill.
So we’re not necessarily hearing at this point openness to limiting the harm of some of these provisions, to rolling some of these things back. And if you’ve been following ACE’s advocacy, we are doing everything possible. But you asked why I’m concerned; that’s why I’m concerned. And it really starts with Pell students, where this is moving faster than expected. It’s going to be much more dramatic than expected. And Pell alone is big; add all the other impacts, it’s going to fundamentally change the ability of a lot of students, millions of students to afford to access higher ed.
Sarah Spreitzer: Jon, you touched on the fact that this is moving so quickly. When the House passed their bill, it was in the dead of the night. There were deals being made on the fly to ensure that there were enough votes. And I think looking to the Senate, we thought that we might have some more time. But to that enormous amount of pressure that the Senate is under, they want to pass this before July 4th. So that gives them, what, two weeks, three weeks?
Jon Fansmith: What we’ve seen is the president has asked the Senate to move this bill to his desk by July 4th. If you look at both what the Senate schedule is, a couple of the other things they have to do in short term, especially if you think about the debt ceiling, that something has to be done to address the debt ceiling, what we-
Mushtaq Gunja: When does the debt ceiling expire, Jon?
Jon Fansmith: I don’t know the exact date; I believe relatively soon. I think the extraordinary measures are running down. And apologies, I probably should know that.
But what it really leaves and what we’re increasingly hearing is that the Senate wants to have the reconciliation bill on the floor the week of June 16th, so about a week and a half from now. And to do that, they’re actually doing something very different than the procedure they normally do in reconciliation. Normally in reconciliation, the committees set their levels and so the normal procedure would be the Senate gets the House bill, the relevant provisions from House committees go to their Senate counterparts, the Senate committees mark them up, they have a committee pre, they’re skipping all of that. They are consulting with members of the committees, they’re having the members of the committees weigh in, and then they’re going to take that feedback but produce a bill that goes directly to the floor. And reconciliation moves under different rules. The amount of floor time is functionally capped at 20 total hours. There’s some quirks in this worth knowing about but not really critical to this process. Once it goes to the floor, it moves pretty quickly, and that’s the goal. There’s a lot of resources being put behind that.
Mushtaq Gunja: Before we talk about what’s next in the Senate and what our institutions might be able to, can I just ask about a couple of specific things? I might’ve missed a reference to Work-Study, but I understand that Work-Study is also affected in this package. Is that right?
Jon Fansmith: No. And we’re going to talk about the president’s budget request later. Work-Study is very heavily targeted in that. There aren’t provisions specific to the funding for Work-Study in the reconciliation bill, SEOG similarly. There’s a lot of financial aid programs that are at risk, I don’t want to minimize that, but not from reconciliation specifically.
Sarah Spreitzer: You know-
Mushtaq Gunja: Well... Go ahead, Sarah.
Sarah Spreitzer: Oh, I was just going to say, Mushtaq, for those that don’t remember, reconciliation has to do with the mandatory side of the budget. So it only impacts things that the federal government has to pay or takes in money, like from taxes or student loans. The Pell Grant acts like a mandatory program. Federal Work-Study is on the discretionary side. It’s up to Congress to fund that. So that falls under, we talk about the budget request and the appropriations side, but the budget or reconciliation package really only impacts student loans and the Pell Grant program.
Mushtaq Gunja: Good. Yeah, thank you. Is risk-sharing in this part of the proposal? And what would that look like? I know that Secretary McMahon was talking a little bit about it yesterday in her hearing on the Hill.
Jon Fansmith: So the House had risk-sharing as part of their proposal in the bill that they passed. Look, risk-sharing is a terrible idea. I think if you haven’t heard that from me at some point in these webinars, I’ll be louder, but I’ve certainly been saying it a lot. It’s a terrible idea for lots of reasons. I think what we continue to hear and we’ve heard from the beginning is the Senate is not nearly as interested in the House’s version of accountability, that risk-sharing proposal, as the House is.
There’s also some issues with how the proposal is structured that might make it susceptible to a Byrd Rule challenge, which the Byrd Rule is a big part of the reconciliation process, which is very different than regular order. But essentially to what Sarah was saying, the Byrd Rule says things in a reconciliation bill must be relevant to revenue or outlays of the federal government. And if it’s not, if it’s a policy provision, then it’s not relevant to reconciliation, gets struck. It’s named after late Senator Bobby Byrd who was the drafter really of those rules.
They’re not precise; they’re not specific. It’s more of a general idea than it is a firm set of rules, but it means a lot of the things actually we saw in the House bill probably will get stripped out in the Senate as a result. But the things we’re most worried about, the reasons I’m worried, all of those will likely very much be germane and could be included in a final Senate bill.
Mushtaq Gunja: So Jon, Sarah, over the last, I don’t know, 24, 48 hours, seems like there’s a little bit of turbulence in the air around some of the numbers. Elon Musk seems to have come out fairly hard in the last 24 hours on this bill that there’s actually not enough cuts in the bill. The CBO has put out its numbers and have projected this bill to increase the deficit by trillions of dollars. What does that mean for the prospects of this bill in the Senate? We’re in reconciliation, which means that we don’t need 60 votes in the Senate. We just need 50. There are 53 Republicans in the Senate, and JD Vance has a tie-breaking vote. What are the prospects here?
Jon Fansmith: So certainly on the Senate side, the idea that this will add to the deficit is almost meaningless. The Senate went into that, their instructions, which is basically their blueprint for what their bills would have to look like as a total package, envisioned lots of new spending, mostly through the tax side, and very little in the way of cuts being required. This is a bigger deal on the House side. The House had this $2 trillion threshold for spending cuts. They were trying to keep overall spending low. As it turned out, the House didn’t cut Medicaid quite as sharply as they were supposed to have done. They spent more on the tax side, on things like SALT and others that weren’t originally envisioned. So that $2.3 trillion deficit increase is big on the House side, but again, the House got their bill passed. The Senate side, it’s not that much of a factor. The Senate has a lot more latitude in that regard.
That said, the Senate will make changes. The Senate will have to make changes, which means at some point, whether it’s House leadership negotiating a final bill with Senate leadership, it will have to go back to the House for a vote.
And as you begin to look at the impact of this... Elon Musk is, by all accounts, not as close to the administration as he was even a few weeks ago. His criticism was certainly unwelcome by Speaker Johnson. But you start to see some other conservative members of the House and of the Senate who have talked about why are we adding this enormously a deficit. Frankly, that’s certainly conservative members, but there’s been a lot of Wall Street worries about adding significant amounts, what that might mean for the bond market, what it might mean for the stock market, adding additional debt. Those are the kinds of things with small margins that might add up into looking at changes. Now unfortunately, most of the tax provisions seem pretty vague, so that’s going to put a lot of pressure on increasing cuts rather than necessarily reducing spending. But look, the messier the dynamics, the harder it is to move the bill forward quickly.
That said, this is the top legislative priority for the President, maybe, as somebody was saying earlier in something else I was reading, the only legislative priority he has for this year. There’s pretty lockstep agreement between the House and Senate leadership about the urgency of doing this and doing this quickly. The longer you leave a bill out in Congress, whatever that bill is, the harder it is to advance as groups galvanize in opposition. So they will try to move this quickly, they will try to roll their members, and so far, they have been successful in doing just that.
Mushtaq Gunja: Right. So Jon, Sarah, what can our institutions do in the meantime? So what are the strategies that we’re employing? Where would we be able to put some pressure?
Sarah Spreitzer: So I know our producers put the reconciliation toolkit that we have in the chat, and there are pre-drafted messages for you to send to your members of Congress. We’re especially focused on states that have Republican senators. And we are going to be sharing the range of Pell dollars that your state might be expected to lose. And we are talking millions of dollars here based on those eligibility changes and then the amount of funding that will be lost based on the changes to the subsidized Stafford loans.
Jon Fansmith: I want to be also really clear, and one of the reasons I think, Mushtaq, I have probably seemed stressed is this is not too late. I’m reading the comments. I get the fact that people will hear this. It’s been a blow. It is a very serious concern. I don’t want to underscore both the significance and the urgency of what is happening in the Senate, but it is not past the point where things can happen. And the Senate requires 53 votes, 50 votes to move this with the vice president providing the tiebreaker. There are a lot of members of Congress who don’t like aspects of this. And just like in the House, there are a lot of members of Congress who look at 2.3 trillion in costs and say, “I’m a fiscal conservative. That’s not something I was sent to do.” There’s a lot of members of the Senate who are looking at programs they’ve created that are getting cut in this program, who are looking at the impact of Medicaid cuts on rural health, who are looking at the cuts to financial aid and what it means for the students that they need in their states to be pursuing careers, to be fueling their economy.
Use the reconciliation website. Use whatever resources appeal to you and frame the message in the way you do, but absolutely this is the time that you and your institution should be talking to their Senate offices, especially if you’re in a state with Republican senators. The more they hear what we’ve already heard just from the past week, that messages are resonating, that concerns are being raised, that leadership is being asked about these things and ideas are being considered about maybe there’s ways to ameliorate it, it matters and it matters a lot for the next week and a half. I would urge you strongly do what you can do to have your voice heard. Talk to your neighbors. Share what this might mean for you and especially for those low-income students that don’t necessarily have a voice at the table the way that groups like ACE or institutions do.
Sarah Spreitzer: And Jon, I don’t remember if you mentioned this, but it’s not going to go through the regular order in the Senate, right? We’re not expecting the Senate HELP Committee to get a number from the overall budget committee and then put together a bill. This will be going straight to the floor.
Jon Fansmith: Right. They are bypassing the committee process to expedite the passage. And again, time is not their friend, not just because the president wants this, but we’ve seen things, Joni Ernst’s comments at the town hall about the cuts to Medicaid. It doesn’t take a lot to get things into the public mind that raise concerns and make taking these votes perilous. And there aren’t huge, it’s not a huge majority you’re working with. You only have to make one or two things toxic before it blows up.
The other thing it’s worth, and I know we’re spending a lot of time on the technicalities of reconciliation, but one of the things that is a real vulnerability for Senate leadership, Republican leadership in moving this bill with this approach is going through committees does take more time, but it also gives you more time to address where the flashpoints are.
If you go to the floor, and we’ve seen people like Josh Hawley, who you would think traditionally more of a bedrock conservative supporter of the president would be on board with his agenda, has been very vocal about not wanting to see any cuts to Medicaid benefits. And a coalition that involves someone like a Josh Hawley and someone like a Lisa Murkowski might be sufficient if it goes to the floor to align with Democrats to strip provisions or limit provisions. And that’s the risk leadership runs. They’re doing it quickly, but it gives them less time to manage their caucus to make sure that all the trouble spots from their perspective are covered.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, one last question about reconciliation, then I want to talk a little bit about international students and developments there. If this were to pass, let’s say it passes in, we meet the July 4th deadline or we pass sometime in mid-July, when do the provisions go into effect?
Jon Fansmith: So depending on which provisions you’re talking about, but generally for financial aid, the start of the federal financial aid year is July 1st. You would need to essentially get those provisions in place in law by November 1st for them to take effect the following July 1st. So if they pass this by July 1st of this year, sorry, by November 1st of this year, functionally October 31st of this year, they would take effect July 1st, 2026. There had been language in the House bill that said they would take effect as of July 1st, 2025. They won’t be able to make that timeframe.
Mushtaq Gunja: The amount of news on the international student front has been, well, there’s been a lot of it. Do you want to catch us up on the latest developments?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, sure. So I think folks remember that the last time we spoke, the State Department had been revoking student visas for a variety of reasons, one for participation in political protests and then also for students that may have been caught up under a criminal database, whether or not they were supposed to be on that list. But the interesting thing was there was this new policy where they were revoking the student visa and then they were actually going in and deleting or terminating the student’s record under the Student Exchange Visitor Program. And by doing that, it seemed to indicate that the student should leave immediately if their student visa had been revoked and basically do not pass go and just leave the country as soon as possible.
And so those revocations and the termination of those records is being challenged in the courts by over a hundred different cases. And I believe that the government is losing on those cases. Again, I think a lot of it is because there hasn’t actually been a policy published regarding the termination of these records.
But since that time, there’s been a couple other things with international student visas. One, the State Department announced that they are pausing any new student visa interviews for the time being. They haven’t said how long the pause is going to be. But obviously we are at the height of students going to US embassies and consulates to interview for their student visa, so that’s very concerning.
And the reason that they’re doing this pause is because they want to implement a new policy around vetting of social media. We don’t have a lot of details about what this policy is going to look like, although there was a leak of a policy that the State Department wanted to start applying to students and scholars who might be applying for visas for Harvard. And under that policy it looked like it would be a lot of vetting on whether or not there were things posted on social media that didn’t align with US policy. But also, probably most concerning, was they said the lack of a social media profile would indicate concern. So you couldn’t just go in and delete your social media accounts because they would take that as almost admitting that you had had something to hide on your social media.
So we haven’t seen that policy implemented yet. We haven’t gotten any information from the State Department about how long this pause is going to be. We sent a letter to the State Department last Friday that we know that they have received asking these questions, and I believe our producers are going to put that in the chat.
But then following that, we also heard from Secretary Rubio that they’re going to start revoking visas for certain groups of Chinese students, specifically those students that have ties to the CCP and who may be working in critical fields. So we currently have a presidential proclamation, PP 10043, which is in place, which allows the State Department to decline visas for graduate students coming from China that may have ties to certain organizations or certain entities of concern who may be doing graduate work in critical fields. Under the Biden administration, they continued that presidential proclamation, but they did allow for some flexibility in the granting of visas. And so I keep thinking perhaps they’re going to try and retroactively apply that policy on people that they believe shouldn’t have received visas during that time. But again, it’s really important that we get some more details from the State Department and that some of these policies be put into writing so we know what is actually happening.
And I saw in the chat, somebody asked about what are the critical fields? Those have never actually been made public to us because the State Department considers it a national security issue. But think about STEM fields, specifically STEM fields such as AI, quantum computing, things that we are very competitive on with China. I think that that’s the biggest concern. So a lot going on with student visas, a lot of uncertainty, especially as those students are going to apply for their student visas. And we’re hoping to get more details from the State Department.
Mushtaq Gunja: I have my kids off social media. Thought that was a smart thing to do. The idea that a lack of social media would be held against you is...
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, again, this hasn’t been published. This is just something that’s been leaked. And so again, we’re kind of just going off on what we’ve seen. On the termination of the records under the Student Exchange Visitor Program, there was a draft policy that was entered into some of the court documents by DHS that we’ve seen, but that policy has never been officially announced. So we can assume that that’s the policy that they’re acting under, but we really need to see the details of these things to understand how many international students are actually being impacted.
Mushtaq Gunja: So what do we know about the situation on the ground? I mean are all appointments right now paused? Is this just new, these applications that are getting this new vetting procedure? What do we know?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, so we know it’s only for new student visas that were going to be for those that were seeking appointments. So if you have an appointment this week, that appointment should be going forward. It would not fall under this new policy. But again, right now, we’ve been about a week into this pause. Secretary Rubio did indicate that it would be a short pause but didn’t offer any other details. In our letter to the State Department, we are also asking that the State Department take action to address this delay. And there are ways that they can do that where they will surge personnel in certain consulates to handle an uptick in student visa appointments. We’ve seen them do this at the height of when they are processing these student visa applications. And so we’re really hopeful that we’re not going to see any delays.
But again, the uncertainty of it’s June, you’re hoping to come here in August, all you need is to get that interview completed, you’re going to be pretty concerned. How long is this delay going to take? When am I going to be able to set up the interview? And is this new policy going to delay the entire process?
Mushtaq Gunja: And have we seen impacts on, maybe we just don’t quite know yet, but have we seen impacts on renewals? Do we know yet? It seems like there’s a little bit of conflicting information in the chat at least about institutions that have been affected in that regard.
Sarah Spreitzer: On renewals of visas or renewals on certification?
Mushtaq Gunja: Both, I suppose.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, so I think part of the question about renewals may be on your certification in the Student Exchange Visitor Program, which is done by the Department of Homeland Security. One of the other things that happened is Secretary Noem of Homeland Security announced that they were going to decertify or remove the certification for Harvard and their ability to accept international students. We have heard of a few other institutions getting notices that their certification is under review, but that’s at the institutional side. On student visas, this really should only be impacting those students that are applying for a new student visa.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, and what’s your sense here? Is this what the administration intended? Is there information that can be brought to bear about the impact that this is going to have on our universities that might be able to be heard by somebody over at the State Department or at the White House? I mean, what’s the strategy here?
Jon Fansmith: I think there’s an interesting dichotomy here because what we have seen from press reports is, I’m going to have to come back to the administration’s goals and approach, but that at the State Department level, the actual administrative level, and I think it’s reflected what we’ve heard from campuses and what we’ve heard from our colleagues at NAFSA and other organizations, lots of consulates are fulfilling pre-made appointments, not taking new ones. That’s the announced pause. But there are some places where it seems they’re scheduling new appointments. There are some places where it seems they’re scheduling previously canceled ones.
And there’s been multiple people speaking, anonymous leaks from the State Department, said there’s no understanding of how complicated it is to implement a new strategy and what that means. And the social media pause is not something you turn on and then it’s a couple days you come back. We’ve already seen it’s been much longer in practice than even the administration initially promised.
And so the impact of a delay at this moment when it is so critical for those students trying to secure their plans to study and then for institutions that are counting on students who have been accepted, who have indicated their intent to enroll, their actual ability to attend the institution, throws everything else in your plans around. What your yields are, what your enrollment is, what students are taking, what classes.
Which gets me to the administration. The administration in the field of international students, in the field of undocumented students, in the field of research policy, has shown very clearly that they are not just okay with but eager to introduce chaos and uncertainty, to make it difficult for institutions to do things that have been generally non-controversial, hosting international students pursuing research grants, fulfilling that. And a lot of that reflects policy priors. A lot of it reflects just a hostility to institutions.
It’s not an accident, I don’t think, that President Trump, when he talked about Harvard, talked about what was their percentage of international students, that he talked about the percentage of international students at Ivy institutions. This is all part and parcel of a broader assault on higher ed generally. And while that may be they’re thinking about a handful of institutions, the actual impact, as our chat is showing, is at community colleges and regional institutions and flagships and religious institutions and everyone else, with a million plus international students last year in this country.
Mushtaq Gunja: The impact of international students on America is profound, from the intellectual rigor that they bring and diversity of viewpoints to the dollars that they spend in local economies to the fact that often many of them are close to full-pay, if not full-pay. The impacts are enormous. I know everybody on this podcast understands that. But it’s disheartening, this move against international students. Sarah, can I ask you about OPT?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: So what does this pause, where are we on OPT?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, so OPT is Optional Practical Training, which a student can complete after they finish their studies. They remain on their student visa, but they get a separate work authorization from the Department of Homeland Security. And we did see, I believe it was last week, some notices going out to students on OPT that they were in danger of having their student visa revoked because perhaps they hadn’t entered the correct information into the SEVIS. So again, this is a place where we’re seeing State and DHS very closely coordinate and really narrowing their focus on the student visas.
Also last week, we had the nominee for the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, USCIS, the nominee was appearing before the Senate Judiciary and was asked specifically about Optional Practical Training and what he thought of the program. So this is the division within DHS which gives that work authorization to these students. And the nominee expressed a lot of concern about OPT and thought that it had been expanded a bit too fast or too much.
And remember, OPT was established by executive policy. It’s not actually in statute anywhere. And under President Biden, they had been able to expand STEM OPT, which allows up to three years of Optional Practical Training in STEM fields tied to specific majors. And so I think that we had seen an increase of students doing STEM OPT. We know that that’s a program that’s really popular with prospective international students.
So nothing has happened yet on OPT, but we’ve had these signals from the administration that they may look at walking it back in the future. And so if you’re an international student thinking, I’m going to come, I’m going to study for four years, and then when I’m done, I’d like that option of doing Optional Practical Training, you may be taking into account is there uncertainty? Is the visa policy going to change once I actually get to the United States? Will my student visa suddenly be limited? Will I not be able to do OPT? And it’s just causing a lot of uncertainty. Again, even if these actions are impacting a narrow group of students or a small number of our over 1 million international students here in the United States, the messaging and the uncertainty it’s causing, it’s very much outsized.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, is there legal recourse here? Are there legal attacks that are possible here? And do you want to talk a little bit about what’s happening with Harvard?
Jon Fansmith: Harvard’s probably the best example of, at least in the area of international students, where the legal process has been playing out. And I’m sure people have seen the coverage. But because DHS targeted Harvard specifically and arbitrarily and immediately, Harvard went to court the next day and secured a restraining order. Which the administration came back and said, I think their argument was, “Well, we’re not going to impose it immediately. We’re going to give Harvard 30 days to essentially find someplace either for their international students to go or to suggest they leave the country.” And the judge wasn’t having that and granted an injunction. So at least temporarily, Harvard went to court to block that.
I think, and Sarah’s got more expertise in this area than I do, but what we have seen, this pause on international applications, the enhanced screening processes, I think unfortunately they fall within areas of the law where the secretary of state has pretty great discretion. And I can certainly say, to my mind, it looks like an abuse of the law, it looks like an intentional effort to harm institutions, to harm international students, to create a climate that’s unwelcoming to international students. But at least so far, and we’ll see what policy they put forward, what that might mean for First Amendment rights, but it’s important to think these are international students who are applying overseas. They aren’t necessarily given the same protections we offer to students who are here in the United States. And so they’re working within the parameters of something where they have some pretty clear legal authority and it’s going to make it hard to challenge the policies overall.
Harvard has a particular case because Harvard can identify, as they have again and again and again, that they are being targeted without due process. The vetting process, the pause, that’s less clear, at least to me. I don’t know, Sarah, correct me if I’m wrong there.
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, we haven’t seen any actual policy. Right? We have a cable that went out to the consulates and to the embassies saying that there’s going to be a pause on appointments. There hasn’t yet been a harm that we can show to our international students because the pause has only been about a week. We don’t know what this new policy is going to look at or how it’s going to be applied. And even on the Chinese students, I don’t think we’ve seen any visa revocations yet. And so again, this is why we, in our letter, we’ve asked the State Department for more information because we don’t understand what these new policies are or how they’re being applied.
And the other thing I’ll say is that we have a long, long tradition of working with the federal government in welcoming our international students. The Student Exchange Visitor Program was set up after September 11th as a way to root out fraud that might be fraudulently taking advantage of international students, but also to address national security issues. I don’t think either of those things Harvard is in danger of defrauding students or having a national security concern about them welcoming international students. And yet at the same time, that certification process is being weaponized for political reasons. And so we want to work with the federal government in welcoming our international students. And I think getting some more information about these policies is really important.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sarah, Jon, are there suggestions, resources that we might be able to share in the chat or elsewhere for either students or institutions that are nervous about how to think about this question? I mean, where are we pointing folks to?
Sarah Spreitzer: So I’m telling institutions to remain flexible, to continue to send a welcoming message to their international students, which I think they all are doing right, and to continue to inform their congressional members about the fact that this pause is coming at the worst possible time, and to push on the State Department to pretty quickly get these interviews back up and running. So that would be my advice. And I know our producers have linked our letter in the chat. And if you need talking points or anything, I would use that letter.
Mushtaq Gunja: All right, friends, can I ask, going back to dollars just for a second, can I ask you a couple questions about what is termed “rescission”? Actually, let me ask you, Jon, what is rescission?
Jon Fansmith: So rescission is basically, I’m going to try to make this as simple as possible, but when Congress does funding bills every year, the appropriations bills, those are laws. They’re telling the administration, these are the programs that we’ve authorized and this is the amount of money we’re putting into them and often exactly how that money should be spent. That money then goes to the executive agencies, and they’re supposed to spread that money out based on what the law requires them to do. So Social Security, your eligibility is determined law, you get the check because you qualify at the level you qualify for. There are times in which the administration is not spending that money out. There’s lots of reasons why that could be, a lot of them to reflect changes in the law, a lot of them to do other things. And that’s basically been the case for a long time.
What we saw starting with Richard Nixon was he tried very hard to essentially say the president has sole authority over how the money’s spent. If I don’t like a program, even if Congress has a law and they’ve sent me money to do that, I’m not going to do that. He tried this a lot. Congress came up with another law called the Impoundment Control Act that said you can’t do that. If you are choosing not to spend money the way we tell you, you have one of two options. One is to shut up and spend the money the way we told you to. And two is to send us a justification saying what you’re not going to do, why you’re not going to do it, and then we, Congress, will vote to approve that. So we can check your decision.
That’s what rescission is, the administration sending a proposal to Congress saying we don’t want to spend this money, here’s why. And if Congress votes in support of that, then the administration’s allowed to. If Congress does not vote in support of that, we go back to option one, shut up and spend the money the way we told you. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
And the reason I think you’re asking is because the administration just sent a request to Congress for a $9.4 billion in rescission funding in a number of different areas, but especially, I think highest-profile, eliminating funding for USAID, eliminating funding in a variety of areas of international aid, eliminating funding for things like PBS and other areas that they are now asking Congress to essentially say, support us in this decision not to spend this money.
Mushtaq Gunja: And any of that affect education spending? Can you tell yet, Jon?
Jon Fansmith: Sarah, go ahead if you want.
Sarah Spreitzer: I was going to say not yet. But the interesting thing about the rescission package that went up, we were talking about reconciliation and we’re going to talk a bit about the President’s FY26 budget request, all of this is kind of under the umbrella of even if the reconciliation bill is going to cost $2.7 trillion, we’re still trying to cut funding on this side of the ledger. So see how fiscally conservative we are being.
And so this first rescission package went up to Congress, but it really only includes a few small programs. Well, small. I mean it includes USAID, which is not a small program, but it doesn’t include all the programs that have been terminated so far by DOGE and by the White House. So it includes USAID, it includes PBS, it includes NPR, it includes some of the global health programs. It also includes funding for the United Nations, and I think some of our global health programs.
And what the Office of Management and Budget within the White House has said is they’re going to see how this works with Congress, if Congress is going to take this forward, and then they would send up other rescission packages. And this is coming at a time when we just saw the president’s budget request, which makes deep, deep cuts to Federal Work-Study, the Pell program, a lot of things that the administration is already terminating. And so it’s playing along, I think, with that reconciliation bill, where they can say, look, you can still claim to be fiscally conservative if you pass this rescission package or the president’s budget but yet you vote for this reconciliation bill.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And, Mushtaq, I’ll say here too, it is really worth setting aside for a second the president’s budget request because it is a truly, I think, terrible set of proposals, and we can talk about that. But a lot of what’s happening right now, this rescission package, congressional appropriators have identified $425 billion in appropriated funding that the administration has not put out. And that’s for the current year. That’s not going forward. That’s not a proposal. That’s they have the money; they’ve been told to spend it; they are not doing it.
And then we have seen things like TRIO programs that received notices on I think May 29th that their grants were being canceled and they had two days to wind down the program, essentially wind it down by the end of May. Job Corps centers on college campuses, those grants similarly being canceled with two-day windows for withdrawing it.
In many ways, while the administration with this $9.4 billion rescission package is sending up a test balloon, seeing how receptive Congress is to doing it, at the same time, the much bigger impact is that they’re simply not putting the money out. $3 billion at NIH that hasn’t been allocated. And one thing that makes this even more problematic, and I feel like I keep adding elements for people to worry about, but the loophole in the Impoundment Control Act is if money is unspent at the last 45 days of a fiscal year, so functionally mid-August, then the federal government, the administration is simply allowed to automatically rescind all that money. So if they can get to that deadline without Congress acting, and this Congress has shown no inclination to act, they don’t need Congress to approve it. All of this money, the $425 billion they haven’t spent, that goes away; they don’t have to allocate it. So there are some real issues here in terms of not only what they’re actively canceling but the things they’re stringing out that ultimately may not be funded as a result.
Sarah Spreitzer: Maybe it’s actually three-dimensional chess and we just don’t see it yet. But all of this stuff seems to be like, let’s act now and then ask Congress to pass the policy afterwards. And I am worried about whether or not they can actually get the appropriations process done this year. I mean, we were talking this morning, Jon, you were saying like, oh, they’re not going to get the rescission package passed. But I think if you vote for a reconciliation bill and you want to demonstrate that you’re fiscally conservative, maybe you do vote for it. And I think that that’s also going to impact this FY26 appropriations process where they’re already starting from very, very low numbers.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And at the risk of rehashing whether the Dems will force a shutdown or not, our ugliest point of contention in the history of our discussions, it’s worth talking about the budget proposal because what we saw a few months ago, I think before our last one, President Trump and his administration released the skinny budget, sort of the highlights of what they wanted to see in next year’s funding bills.
We’ve gotten the full budget details from the Department of Education, other agencies. And while it doesn’t necessarily provide a huge amount of information, Secretary McMahon has been up on Capitol Hill, three hearings in the last week, defending the administration’s budget request. The additional details we’ve gotten, we’ve gotten a very clear picture of what their perspective is. And I’m not going to give everybody a million numbers, but I’ll highlight some things.
The budget would eliminate the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program, nearly a billion dollars in grant aid for students. It would eliminate the TRIO and GEAR UP programs entirely. Not level-fund them, not reduce them, eliminate them entirely. It would eliminate programs like the international education programs, international language programs, programs that provide childcare for students on campuses.
Of all of the programs that it preserves, they all see massive cuts. Pell Grants would see a $1,685 cut to the maximum award, going down to below $6,000. I don’t think I need to tell anyone what $1,700 of student financial aid would mean. And let’s say that also is separate from what’s going on in reconciliation, where there’s further efforts to reduce Pell eligibility.
Work-Study would go from over 1.2 billion to 250 million, so a nearly billion dollar cut there. And the reason it’s being cut so low is because they would switch from the government providing 75% of the funding and employers providing 25% to employers providing 75% and the government providing 25%. Again and again and across the board, and Sarah knows the scientific research numbers better than I do, but we’ve seen what’s happening with NIH proposals, with NSF, cuts approaching or over 50% of scientific research funding. These are huge and massive cuts. And Secretary McMahon has been very vocal about defending them.
The last thing I want to say, and I know I’m going on, and sorry, Sarah, just indulge me for one second, what has been helpful is, and particularly in the Senate yesterday, things like TRIO, Republicans and Democrats alike were attacking the administration’s policies and making very clear that this is not what they envisioned from this administration. And it’s one thing to talk about theoretical budget numbers, the program cancellations for TRIO, the program cancellations for Job Corps, these are programs... Susan Collins is co-chair of the Senate TRIO Caucus. Tom Cole, who’s the chair of the Appropriations Committee in the House, these are two appropriations committee chairs, has been a longtime champion of TRIO programs. It’s one thing for the administration to propose these things. It’s a whole nother thing when Congress gets them to say, “You’re not just eliminating things that have been hallmarks of my legislative career; you’re canceling those grants with two days’ notice without telling me either this is coming.” That means something. And I think, Sarah, maybe you’re shaking your head a little bit.
Sarah Spreitzer: I actually think... Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: I actually think what the pattern we’ve seen is Congress does not always give a lot of deference to the president’s budget request. They can be as dramatic as they want. They won’t push back on the president in a lot of ways, but this is an area where I think you will start to see some pushback.
Sarah Spreitzer: I agree. Whether or not Congress can actually get their act together though to do appropriations bills, I think we have yet to see. On the scientific agencies, we saw in the president’s budget request a 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health, so an $18 billion cut, taking the agency down to 27.5 billion. And then for the National Science Foundation, a 57% cut, taking it down to $3.9 billion from $7 billion.
And this is all being messaged as a way of we’re not going to stop doing gold-standard science, that institutions and researchers have been too caught up in doing, pushing these woke agendas, and we’re going to get back to doing what we’re doing the best. But we’re talking about canceling whole studies, any work on vaccines, any work on minority health, all of this stuff that’s really, really going to set us back.
And I guess why I was kind of rolling my eyes there, Jon, is that Congress has still not acted to say, “We appropriated money in FY25 and you are not expending that money.” So we know the National Institutes of Health is billions of dollars behind on getting grants out the door. We know that NSF is in the same sort of situation. And so yes, you can submit a rescission package and say we’re going to claw back that money, but Congress has not yet acted to kind of say, “Hey, let’s tap the brakes. There are some things that we want you to keep. Don’t throw everything out.” And these are going to have huge impacts on our country. So I guess I’m a bit frustrated because going into FY26, I would think we’re all doing our Dear Colleague letters, members of Congress are saying, “Hey, we want funding for TRIO, we want funding for the National Institutes of Health,” but where’s the actual action?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I don’t disagree with you and certainly not on the frustration front. The one big distinction I will say, and certainly the last few congresses, this has been true too, it is one thing to affirmatively go after the administration, especially when both chambers are controlled by the same party. It’s a whole nother thing to push appropriations bills through that will require some level of Democratic support to enact with cuts at the levels the administration wants.
And you’re right; you’re absolutely right. It is a very frustrating... I grew up in the advocacy space with the understanding that no matter Republican or Democrat, the power of the purse was what Congress prioritized. It was their one true absolute authority. And regardless of administration or party, they would jealously protect that. So to see them not doing that, it’s more than frustrating. It’s incredibly disappointing for the institution, regardless of the party.
That said, they will need seven Democratic votes in the Senate to pass any appropriations bills. Maybe we’ll get into the shutdown debate; maybe we won’t. But there’s a whole different dynamic than saying we need to get people on board to affirmatively check this than we need to get people affirmatively on board to pass this. And I think that’s meaningful.
Sarah Spreitzer: But again, all of this seems to be, again, the administration’s going to act, and then they’re going to allow Congress to vote and put the policy in place after. So I don’t know. We’ll see. But we’re heading into the summer. This is when all the legislation gets done. They’re supposed to be marking up. When did... I think Chairman Cole already scheduled the markups for the FY26 bills in July, so they’re going to try and get all their bills marked up and I think on the floor maybe before August recess. Yeah, it’s going to be busy.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, Sarah, Jon, thank you so much for answering all my questions. I know that we didn’t get to all of them in the Q&A. I hope we at least touched on a few of them. And we’ll be back very soon. But thanks, Jon, thanks, Sarah, for a really important conversation. I’m sorry it wasn’t a little more optimistic, but maybe in a couple of weeks, things will look slightly brighter. Maybe we’ll be able to make some more progress.
And for all of us on this chat, please check out those links. There are resources that have been put in the chat as well to help our international students, to help us figure out how we’re going to fight back on all things reconciliation. Please do it. Listen to Jon. If Jon is this worried, we don’t ask for much for much, but-
Sarah Spreitzer: Yes, please just make those calls.
Jon Fansmith: I would love it if you did. Please do. We need it.
Mushtaq Gunja: We’ll see you in a couple of weeks, all. Thanks.
Jon Fansmith: Thank you for joining us on dotEDU. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback is important to us, and it helps other policy wonks discover our show. Don’t forget to follow ACE on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes and other higher education content. You can find us on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And of course, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, please feel free to reach out to us at podcast@ACEnet.edu. We love hearing from our listeners and who knows, your input might inspire a future episode.