Mushtaq Gunja: Hello everybody, and welcome to dotEDU, the public policy podcast from the American Council on Education. I am one of your hosts, Mushtaq Gunja. I do not know. There's Sarah Spreitzer. And hopefully Jon Fansmith will decide that he wants to come on video too. It is a very dreary, rainy day here in D.C., but you two are the bright lights in my world. Hello, Jon, Sarah, how are you guys doing?
Sarah Spreitzer: Good. I'm glad I actually got the memo to wear a jacket today. I'm impressed. Usually I'm wearing a sweatshirt or something when you guys are wearing jackets.
Jon Fansmith: I just want you and Mushtaq popped on in jacket, so I had to go get my jacket, so I wasn't losing the arms race here.
Mushtaq Gunja: This is the peek behind the curtain that our listeners and our viewers want. So Jon, I think you had a vest on earlier for an earlier presentation we were on. True.
Jon Fansmith: True. Very true. But that was a more casual crowd, Mushtaq.
Mushtaq Gunja: On today's episode, we are stepping back and taking a look at this crazy year in higher education. It has been like no other in recent memory. We are going to do something different. Jon and Sarah have ranked their top higher education policy stories of the year, and we're going to count them down. We're going to alternate picks. We're going to discuss the impact along the way. I think we are going to try to be able to do all of that. It has been such a crazy year that I wasn't even exactly playing this interviewer host type role at the beginning of the year. Do you guys remember this?
Jon Fansmith: Oh yeah. I still don't think you've mastered the intro yet.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, it's funny-
Sarah Spreitzer: I disagree.
Mushtaq Gunja: So on Sunday night, my wife and I applied for The Amazing Race finally after 20 years of talking about it, and you have to record a three-minute video. And it took us, I'd say, 17 takes to get through the first line because we didn't know what we were doing. So you don't know how often I've practiced the welcome to dotEDU, the Public Policy Podcast for the American Council on Education. It's not as easy as it looks. I guess you know that, Jon, because you've done this for a while. All right, friends. So a few plugs before we get into it first. Next episode, which I think is December 16th, sounds right. Something like that. It'll be our final episode of the year. It's going to be a fully audience-driven mailbag. So ask us anything. You guys are amazing at sending us questions and keep them coming.
So make them as broad-based as you want or as specific as you want. We'd love to be able to tackle them. Second, registration is now open for ACE 2026, our annual meeting in Washington, February 25th to 28th. We published a preview this week highlighting several announced sessions. I think we're going to do a live podcast tape and that's going to be great. We have some of our classic sessions, higher ed prediction show, what keeps presidents up at night. Those are always fan favorites. We got really cool sessions coming on free speech and on community colleges and first-gen students. I mean, honestly, there's something there for everybody. So please do come. I think it's going to be great. And last, a quick note for everyone from a campus who's joining us today, we conduct these periodic surveys at ACE in our research shop to better understand perspectives on key issues in higher education.
Our latest survey was sent, I think, this morning to senior leaders on campus. So if you wouldn't mind, if you got that survey, just taking five or 10 minutes. It's not a long survey just to answer. That really helps us understand what is going on. And if you'd like to participate and you didn't get a link, you can email our research team at research@acenet.edu. Okay. Friends, it's been a crazy year.
I asked both of you to rank your top five stories from this past year. I asked you not to compare notes. I think you did not. True? True.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yes, true.
Mushtaq Gunja: Okay. This is despite you all sitting next to each other in the ACE office, so we'll see. So let's go from five to one. I wanted to go from one to five, then got chastised for going the wrong way. So let's start with number five. And Sarah, what is your fifth most important story, interesting, important story from 2025?
Sarah Spreitzer: So I don't know. For some reason, this feels strangely competitive. I feel like whatever I say, Jon's going to be like, "That wasn't a very important story." And also I thought we were going from one to five, so I had to rearrange my thinking here. So my fifth, I think, most important story, which some people might say would be the most important story, is the executive order calling for the dismantling or closure of the US Department of Education.
I think many administrations, Republican administrations have talked about wanting to do this. Jon and I talked about this at the beginning of the year because it was a goal in the policy platform for President Trump. It was included in the Project 2025 document. And I argued that I think that it was very possible. And I think that that is what the administration has sought to carry out. We went through a series of rifts, the reductions in forces where we have less than half the staff that we previously had at the Department of Education, who knows now it's maybe down to a third. We just saw interagency agreements signed with the Department of Labor, HHS, and I believe interior.
Jon Fansmith: State and Interior. Yeah.
Sarah Spreitzer: State and Interior. So I think that that was for higher education in the larger education community. That was a pretty big news story, but not just that it had been promised, it was something that I think was very much delivered on.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, was this the closure of the Department of Ed, was that on your top five?
Jon Fansmith: It was definitely my top five. It was higher up the number five. I had that as number three. And I think Sarah hit it. And I think the thing that's really interesting about this is it gives you some insights into this administration's thinking. They knew that they can't get rid of the Department of Education without Congress acting. They also knew Congress has no interest in getting rid of the Department of Education. It's politically unpopular. It's not something outside really very conservative stakeholders wanting to see happen. And I think, as Sarah pointed out, I looked at this coming into this year as look, they have this powerful tool to implement their policies. It's a rhetorical point. They're not actually going to do it. What we've seen is they've used it as a powerful tool to implement their policies while at the same time trying to essentially gut it from within.
And there's all these other things about the ironies of saying what we're trying to do is return power to the states while at the same time trying to impose federal policy on institutions and states. I'll talk about some of those too. But this dismantling event I think is really a snapshot of that in a lot of ways, that these inconsistencies and especially the fact that the politics overrides the policy, nobody would disagree that this is probably going to wind up costing more money to deliver worse service to students and institutions and states, but they're going to plow right ahead because it was a campaign promise, it's a talking point. Doesn't make any sense, doesn't help anything, but here we go. We're going to keep plugging away at it.
Sarah Spreitzer: But Jon, you mentioned one thing [inaudible 00:08:10] Chuck, you mentioned at the beginning of the year, you kept saying it's created by Congress, the Department of Education is in a statute, it's in law. I think Secretary McMahon may listen to this podcast or may have listened to some of our earlier episodes because she has started referencing that, that the actions that they're taking, they are briefing Congress as they take these steps and also they aren't doing anything that goes against the existing statutes. So I think you're actually to blame Jon for this executive order being implemented.
Jon Fansmith: I'll just say to that point, I think one, I feel pretty confident some people in the administration do listen to this podcast. I'll also say that everybody knew what the law was, and I think the actions they're taking are still going to wind up in a court and there's going to be some decisions because these interagency agreements and their ability to actually satisfactorily administer the programs that the law requires them to, I think that's very much still in question.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, I think that's right. I think we haven't exactly seen this thing before, but if Congress establishes an agency and establishes things for that agency to do, if you cut a staff doing federal research from, I don't know, 150 to one person, have you meaningfully been able to fulfill that function? I don't know. I mean, we'll see what it looks like, but I do think that we will see lawsuits. So Sarah, I'm not quite willing to say that they have done everything by the law. I'm not sure that that's exactly right, but I do think that they're at least cognizant that there's some guardrails here.
Jon, Sarah took a little bit of a, I don't know if a shot is exactly the right word, but just noted that I think rightfully so that you, and I think I was right there with you, was like, "Oh, they've been promising to cut the Department of Education for decades, literally decades." They never really do it and it's really popular, et cetera, et cetera.
And yet we are here. I guess the question, let me just start with, just to dig in a little bit, where are we exactly? How much has actually been dismantled? Sure, we have seen very significant cuts, RIFs, reductions in force at the department, and now we have some interagency memos, is that right, that say that things are going to move? We still have a Department of Education. I just walked by the other day. Where are we?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and it's interesting because I think to Sarah's point, they are showing that they understand on a certain basic level, the requirement to continue to operate the Department of Education, to continue to staff certain positions, to continue to administer programs, even if they don't necessarily value those programs. So these agreements, if you look at what they've done, they're not saying, "All right, these are gone." They're now at the Department of Labor. What they're doing is it's like outsourcing by contracting. Department of Labor will now manage the Office of Post-Secondary Education. Department of Labor will now manage the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, in partnership with the Department of Education. So they haven't exactly kicked it out entirely. Those are no longer labor solely functions. Some of the staff is moving over to those other agencies, but big pieces aren't moving over. And I think when they made this big announcement about the clock is ticking and it's going away, in some ways when they actually announced what it was, I think people were surprised at how little was actually being transferred.
The negotiated rulemaking process, which OP oversees is going to stay at the Department of Education, the Office for Civil Rights, which everyone thought was going to the Justice Department is staying at the Department of Education. The big one, Federal Student Aid Office, financial aid and the administration of loans is staying at the Department of Education. And some of that is maybe there's not a good fit. Some of that is the agencies it would make sense to send it to don't want to take on these functions. It's important to remember an administration does not have a single mind on these matters. Even if you have a person like President Trump who kind of expects a level of loyalty and responsiveness that's unusual at these levels, there's a lot of interagency disagreement. And honestly, for some of these programs, and I'm thinking especially of student loans, why would Treasury want that?
It is a incredibly complicated, difficult to administer controversial set of programs impacting 45 million borrowers and other borrowers in repayment, and then another 11 or so million borrowers in school. It's a lot, and that's not what Treasury does. Why would they want to take it on at this point? So there's a lot of factors here that as much as they would like people to believe Ed is going away and staffing is certainly a huge impact, and the operations at the department are really problematic at this point. It isn't quite what they sort of claim that it is.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sarah, anything else you want to say to close out this Department of Education dismantling section?
Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, just that I was right back in January, that was my main point for including this executive order on my list.
Jon Fansmith: So this is not a refutation of Sarah, but I do actually think one of the things that was interesting was they haven't slowed OCR investigations into institute. They have actually done what we said they were going to do, but Sarah was absolutely right. I did not think they would dismantle the department to the degree that they would while still doing all those other things we expected them to do and really aggressively go after the culture wars by using the Department of Ed as their tool to do it. So it's kind of a nerd way, but it's a fascinating two trains going in opposite directions that they're trying to steer at the same time.
Mushtaq Gunja: How sticky is this, friends? I mean, Democrat wins the White House in '28 or the Democrats to win the House, maybe the House and the Senate in '26. I mean, how much is this moving of functions over to other places? How much are these rifts, how sticky are they? How much of this can be reversed?
Sarah Spreitzer: I think some of that, Mushtaq, goes to funding levels. I don't know if a Congress would be supportive of putting staffing levels up if they can demonstrate that they can still do the work. Take IES, which has completely been gutted and is being reshaped into whatever they see the new IES being. I think once these things are in place, I think it's going to be hard to flip the switch back and return it to what it was before.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I'm sort of with Sarah there. I think a lot of damage that gets done is going to be very hard to repair and it will force lawmakers, even lawmakers who are supportive of Ed and the programs to make some choices about what they want to prioritize. It's kind of like tearing the facade off a building. The bones are still there, but if you're going to build it back, is it going to look exactly like what it was before? And I don't think it will. And I think in a lot of ways it's going to be very unfortunate, but there is also the possibility that some of the realizations we're about to have over the next couple of years of the value of SUNAID may require answering some questions and putting priorities into things that have been taken for granted for a while. So there could be a silver lining and all this mess, but it's really hard the amount of damage you're doing to just flip the switch and undo it.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sure. Well, I think this is one of the big questions that I think Democrats are going to have to grapple with writ large, which is we're in a different world. Are we going to fight to put things back exactly the way that they were or are we going to try to go in a little bit of a different direction to try to move to a 2028, 2032, something like that? Okay. That was one topic, Sarah, that was number five on your list. Number three on yours, Jon. Jon, what was your number five?
Jon Fansmith: So mine is maybe on Sarah's list too. It was how NIH and NSF have changed the way they award funding. And there is certainly the element that's gotten a lot of attention about terminating thousands of grants because of doesn't correlate with the administration's policies, certainly on a lot of times on very specious grounds. But even, and I was reading about this today, the fact that they pushed so much money out so late in the year at both agencies and they did it by instead of doing the standard five-year annual grants with the two years for renewal, funding all four years upfront with one year for a continuation. And the fact that what this means is thousands of fewer grants awarded going out. So you'll just be doing massively less research in so many different areas. And when you looked at the numbers, you're talking about things like a 50% decrease in the number of grants that go to various fields of health studies, all of them, over 22% fewer grants at NIH.
So why is that so big? I get it. It sounds like a lot of numbers, but if the same amount of money's going, I could say, "Well, great, they're funding science at the same rate." But the fact that we have fewer competitive grants being awarded, they're for shorter periods of time and they're for less money overall is going to mean that there are promising areas of science we're simply not pursuing at all, we're abandoning leaving on the table. And the ones that we are pursuing are getting less support to do that. So our pipeline for researchers and scientists is going to narrow because with fewer grants going out, there's fewer opportunities to staff labs, train graduate students, train undergraduate students. We're abandoning promising areas of research because we're choosing to narrow the focus. It's sending our researchers abroad. If they have a particularly promising line of research into Alzheimer's and it doesn't get NIH funding, they want to pursue that work.
They will go where that work can go. So there's lots of, I think, to my mind, follow on effects to these decisions that aren't immediately obvious. And the administration will happily say, "We've spent out all the money Congress gave us. We fully funded based on what we did," but the way they fund it matters, and it's going to matter in a lot of really important ways.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, where were you reading this? This sounds fascinating.
Jon Fansmith: The New York Times had a big article today, I think today, today or yesterday with lots of charts and graphs, which always catch my eye.
Mushtaq Gunja: Okay. The New York Times, I feel like I've heard of it. Sarah, was sort of research funding and cuts, was that on your list? I imagine that it might have been.
Sarah Spreitzer: So to surprise both of you, it actually was not.
Mushtaq Gunja: Oh, interesting.
Sarah Spreitzer: I will say that number five on my list, so my last item on my list, which I think kind of encapsulates a lot of what's going on with this administration of research was RFK Jr. becoming the secretary of HHS.
Mushtaq Gunja: Oh, interesting.
Sarah Spreitzer: So that it's less about the focus on peer-reviewed research and more on continuing policies that may not be based in science. I've had an international colleague recently tell me that the actions of the Trump administration are basically killing the golden goose, that terminating grants, forward funding grants, not competing grants in the peer review process, putting new restrictions on international partnerships with these grants, all of this is going to have an enormous impact right now, but I think mostly in a couple of years when we're not seeing those innovations and because I think we're going to lose an entire generation of scientists and researchers who, as Jon said, are going to be going abroad or seeking other opportunities where they know that they're going to have certainty within their funding. I just think when people talked in January about RFK Jr. making it through a Senate confirmation, I was like, "There's no way. There's just no way. He has no scientific background. He campaigned obviously on the Make America Healthy again," but it's not somebody who's listening to the science. They have certain beliefs and then they only listen to the science or the theories that back up those beliefs.
And so it's really, I think to me, it's a good example of, or the thing that you can kind of point to how this administration has been looking at research. They believe that your grant has something to do with DEI. We're just canceling it. It doesn't even matter what the scientific basis is of the research or even more upsetting. And I think such a waste of taxpayer money at terminating those grants that might've been two years in and then those researchers saying to the government, "Okay, you canceled our grant, that's within your right. Do you want the information or the research we've already done?" No, it's just gone. I mean, that's something I really was not expecting to happen.
Jon Fansmith: Sure. Yeah. Two quick points on that too. I'll say Sarah's, I mean, she nailed it, but also there were 74,000 patients who were in live clinical trials that were in grants that were canceled. And so even set aside these long-term serious implications, they're very significant. You have 74,000 people who are probably getting the kind of treatment that is the only option available to them in serious situations who had to have that ended because the government canceled their grant. That is an enormous human impact across this country and a variety of ways that's incredibly callous kind of decision to make. And all of that is occurring. None of this is popular. The public hates this. Polling for biomedical research is really strong and polling for cutting that funding is really bad. People do not like the Trump administration. Congress, Republicans and Democrats don't like this. They don't want to cut this funding.
They keep putting it forward at or above previous year's levels. This administration is doing this sort of contrary to any political instinct seemingly just to prove a point and the harm they're casting affects really every level of our society. So it is befuddling from a political sense, but credibly damaging from a public policy sense.
Mushtaq Gunja: It seems to me that when these cuts first got announced, I felt like there were a couple of reasons for them. I mean, one was, as Sarah alluded to, some feeling that some large number of these grants were about DEI or were woke in some way. And so they were going to try to cut those off. And we remember the stories of folks seemingly doing AI searches for keywords and identifying grants that may or may not have had anything to do with DEI or anything, anything DEI. And then there was a whole other range of cuts, and maybe we'll get to this, about just trying to punish institutions that I think were disfavored where a lot of that research was happening. I mean, at some point, one would think that those grants that were coded as ones that were politically unpopular would be terminated, but the dollars are still there and should be going to other places.
Jon, you said that these were forward funded, at least some of them. I mean, maybe that's in an effort just to spend the dollars. What's your view on, given how unpopular this is? I mean, they should be able to read the polling as easily as everybody else. And there are big research institutions in all of the all Senate districts, at least, all states. What's the future of this? What does 2026 look like from a grant's perspective?
Jon Fansmith: So I think there's two things that are happening at the same time. One is, and we saw it with some of the cuts early in new year, you saw a lot of Republican senators in particular, but also members of Congress speaking out about the impact of this on their communities. It's not just that the research is being lost, it's also that jobs are being lost. Institutions are furloughing those staff. They're changing staffing plans around this because of the instability of the federal funding. And then at the same time, we have an appropriations process where in a very bipartisan way, members of Congress are looking at what the Trump administration has done this year and really very consciously and very vocally rejecting it and saying, "We're going to put constraints on this administration. We can't allow them to do this again." And I really think especially the scientific research space is going to be a real point of emphasis.
And you've seen a little bit more willingness in a couple areas of late for Republicans to stand up to the administration. A lot of privately voiced frustrations with this administration, how they've handled the relationships with Congress. I might be a little bit more hopeful than I should be, but the balance is swinging, and especially as you approach a midterm, things that are very popular among the public, especially in swing districts, those are the kind of places a lot of members will want to demonstrate their independence from the administration. So they're going to have a much harder fight trying to do these same sorts of things next year than they did this year.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, this is just putting my political science hat on. This is an easy place for folks in swing districts to be able to push back without taking too much heat probably to be able to signal, I'm going to fight for more dollars for cancer research as a ... And I disagree with the Trump administration on that is a decently winning message. Our colleague, Sarah Gast, who I think is watching is in Nashville today. There's a special election that is happening in that House district. So we'll keep an eye on whether elections have consequences here too. All right, let me move us. Sarah, what was your number four?
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, I still have number two, I think.
Mushtaq Gunja: My friend, we're going from five to one. Remember?
Sarah Spreitzer: Oh, no. Okay. You're right.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yes, indeed.
Sarah Spreitzer: I remember. Well, I'll just make this my number four then, because I wanted to build off what both you and Jon were saying about the public not being supportive of this. I think it depends on the messaging. If you're talking about clinical trials being stopped, if you're talking about the inability to deliver on life-saving drugs, voters don't like that. But I think the nuts and bolts about how some of this research is done, because this administration has talked about it as more of a cost-saving measure, I think that that is more kind of palatable to the voters. And especially, I think one of the reasons many people voted for President Trump was this idea that they were going to come in and bring some sense to the very large federal budget and federal government that we have. And so my number four would actually be DOJ or the establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency.
This might be higher for Jon, but DOJ was actually officially retired last week as a cost saving measure. I believe they actually shuddered it. I don't think it actually saved much money for the US government, but one of the biggest actions that they took at the very beginning was the closure of USAID, which is the US Agency for International Development. Many of our institutions were impacted by that. They had international partnerships that were suddenly closed. I was really surprised by that too. In fact, more so than I was by kind of the hollowing out of the Department of Education, people had talked about Elon Musk was going to have this position in the administration. I said, "Well, how would he even get Senate confirmation? What kind of role will he play?" And the administration just made a new agency out of whole cloth and gave this person who had not been elected or was not officially a federal employee an enormous amount of power to make very long-term changes.
I mean, USAID is gone. I mean, parts of it, very small parts of it were folded into the Department of State, but there aren't a lot of programs you can point to that have USAID funding. And when I talk to our international partners, they talk about the funding that disappeared and the step back that the United States took from these international parts Partnerships.
Jon Fansmith: So I didn't have DOJ as one of my top five. No, and I agree with Sarah-
Sarah Spreitzer: Because it was so long ago? It does seem like it was a long time ago.
Jon Fansmith: But I think one of the things about DOJ is even now I think it's reasonable to ask what they actually accomplished. And I think you are right. USAID was immediately targeted and you cannot deny the impact on international development, not just at USAID, but other international organizations. So I don't want to seem like I'm minimizing that, but as we've learned more about how the cuts were made and how they were applied and what sort of stood up, you get the sense that there's a lot of flash and show in what they're doing.
And the actual impacts were where they had a real impact, pretty self-destructive. You pointed out, Sarah, lots of contracts were canceled in the fourth of the fifth year. So we paid for four years and didn't get the results taxpayers paid for. They overstated the savings they were generating. And a lot of these agencies, people were cut because they didn't understand exactly what they did and they've since been reinstated. I think part of the reason ... There was the whole political issue with Musk criticizing the president and the separation and I guess the reconciliation at some point. But I think another part of it was there was an increasing awareness that for all of the attention it was drawing as an actual tool of making government more efficient was actually counterproductive. And so yeah, I mean caused some damage, made a lot of noise, but people trying to actually run agencies, even if you don't agree with their priorities, even if they're focused on downsizing, weren't really appreciating the DOJ crew coming in and blowing up function areas that they wanted to preserve or wanted to work on or wanted to reshape to achieve their policy goals. So I just thought it was more flash than substance, I guess.
Mushtaq Gunja: I would go somewhere in between. DOJ didn't seem to me, and maybe I just missed, it didn't seem to me to get to every single agency. They ran out of steam before they did, but the ones that they got to, I mean there were significant cuts and sure, they hired some people back and there's no question about the overstating of the savings, which was disparity and hilarious all at the same time, like basic math errors. I saw an interview with Elon Musk a couple of days ago in which he said that he's now scarred from politics and he's not going to be involved in politics anymore. I guess we'll see. And then of course, I mean, there's a whole set of things that I think that were ... The cuts at each of the agencies, I mean, they have real consequences for real people that, I guess we're in Washington, we see who these folks are.
But to be DOJed is now, at least for 25, I wouldn't be surprised if the OED puts it in for a year or something as a new verb. But I actually just thought of it as ... I would've had it on my list, Sarah, but maybe just as part of the dismantling of the Department of Education, because I think these things, the downsizing of the government seems like of a piece. Jon, what do you think about number ... What was your number four?
Jon Fansmith: Oh yeah, my number four was the administration going after state policies. And I'm particularly thinking about California and Maine around the definition of gender and participation in athletics, and then Minnesota and California, Texas too, but Texas with the collaboration of the state around in state tuition. And I think a couple things about this, and I talked a little bit about this in some of the other areas that dismantling of Ed, but this administration has continued to harp on this idea that a smaller federal presence is better for everyone, especially in education, that they're going to return power to the states. And then where there are what are inherently decisions we have always left to the states, and I think anyone, most people anyway, would reasonably say should remain at the state level, like which one of their students pays what tuition? The federal government suddenly feels the need to intervene and dictate to the states in a really adversarial way what they should be doing.
And it's not just one of those things where it's contrary to their own messaging. It's contrary to really where the conservative movement has been in this country historically. It's a massive expansion of federal authority, maybe clearly at odds with the 10th Amendment. And it is these two things right now that they have done. There are a range of state policies, especially in blue states around diversity, around employment rights, around all sorts of things where the law clearly allows for it, but this administration may not like it. And this is a really, really dangerous precedent to set. And certainly something you heard a lot about in the Biden administration, concerns from Republicans that the administration was overreaching and trying to use federal authority to shape state policies in ways, think about Florida and accreditation. You can't have it both ways, and this administration's really turbocharging this kind of an effort.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sarah, was that on your list?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, actually, so I think my number three was not so much the states, and I think Jon already mentioned having this on his list, but was the freeze in federal funding to certain institutions that were not changing definitions of gender or falling in line regarding DEI. So remember back on January 20th, way back when was when we got the executive orders on DEI, on the definition of gender. And I remember our first meeting after that saying, "Okay, there seems to be language that they're going to try and incorporate this into grant funding as a way to try to bring people in line with this, but how would that actually work?" And I think now, 11 months later, we've seen how it works. And I think what they're trying to do at the state level, what they're trying to do with the institutions is to use federal funding as a lever to kind of push compliance with these executive orders. We said a lot earlier this year about how executive orders don't actually change existing law, but I think these executive orders have been used in a way where they've been incorporated almost into every federal regulation they could be incorporated into.
And so then as a result, every time you're touching on the federal government, you're having to comply with these new definitions.
Mushtaq Gunja: Whether it's legal or not is sort of a problem for next year. I mean, the Trump administration is doing it in the meantime and is lawsuits take a long time. And in the meantime, if funding is frozen, it's cut. I mean, institutions are in a very, very difficult position in this regard. Yeah.
Sarah Spreitzer: And I would just say, Mushtaq, I think it's institutions, but then it's also individuals. So Columbia sees their federal funding completely frozen because of a Title VI complaint, but then an individual researcher may see their funding frozen because of a definition of DEI. And again, there are different actions being taken by the administration, but with the same goal to push this understanding of these executive orders, whether it's at the individual, institution or state level to really force compliance.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, anything else that you want to say on this freeze of certain institutions? I could imagine that it's maybe already, maybe it was incorporated already in one of the things that you said, or maybe it's a different idea altogether. What do you think?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's a huge issue. And I'll go back to another point I made in a different area, but this is also precedent setting, right? This idea of using federal research funding as a lever for policy change, especially when there's literally nothing in the law that allows for it. It sets a really dangerous precedent. The fact that Congress has sat silently while it happened as they've damaged the research enterprise, as they've targeted institutions essentially for not being politically aligned with the administration. We've talked about it a lot. We don't need to go into great detail about that, but that is really the antithesis of what we have held to be valuable principles in American higher education. And I just saw Allison Gunn saying the word I'm looking for is extortion. Alison, I have said that too, I don't know how many newspaper reporters over the last year. It's what it is. It is extortion and it is harmful, it's damaging, it's illegal, it's immoral, it's a terrible thing for our government to be doing and it doesn't benefit anyone. So I'll leave it there.
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, and Jon, this may be on your list, but I think it's all encapsulated in the proposed Compact or at least the first version that we saw, right? Everything has been building up to that. And you can see how that's tied to federal funding to an institution, whether it's through Title IV or whether it's through research funding.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, Compact is number two for me. Oh, sorry. Number two. Yeah. And I think, Sarah, to your point, it built up to that. And the reason I went back and forth on whether the Compact should be number one or number two, but you read that document and it is this almost stunning sort of summation of what this administration thinks not just is wrong with higher ed or what should be done in higher ed, but what they just think generally about higher ed, where they think the problems are, what they think the solutions are. And it is so wildly outside what anyone else would have thought are reasonable approaches to real problems. Let's be clear, they weren't wrong about the problems they were talking about: affordability, quality, threats to students being discriminated against, what a civil debate on a college campus looks like. They just look at these things in a way that left or right, policymakers have never really said these are effective solutions. And even more importantly, have never said, "We want the federal government this deep in campus operations making decisions about what appropriate speech is, what appropriate conduct is, what appropriate policies are, what appropriate governance is because we don't want our federal government jumping in and dictating to institutions at that level.
It destroys the idea of civil debate. It destroys the idea of academic freedom. It destroys these things that we understand to be effective in accomplishing not just preparing students to be great citizens, but to be effective employees and powerful innovators and creators of our economy." So it's kind of an amazing statement to put out there in the public that so thoroughly encapsulates their views in a way that I think certainly has backfired on them. Understanding what they think and what they want is not aligned with where the public is and not aligned where a lot of even their erstwhile supporters in Congress and elsewhere want to see happen.
Sarah Spreitzer: So this is going to be our argument for 2026, Jon, because I don't think we've seen the last of the Compact.
Jon Fansmith: Oh, I don't think so either. No, no, I agree.
Sarah Spreitzer: It didn't play very well, right? None of the original institutions that were approached signed onto it. I think we're going to see a Compact 2.0. I think that there's likely going to be more regulations tied into it. Secretary McMahon signed the first one. I think the next one will have more of a research flavor to it. So I don't think that this is going away. And again, I think it's how you sell it to the public. And if it's sold in a way that we're going to address affordability, we're going to address admissions practices, those types of things, I think it could be popular.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, no, so I don't think we're going to be fighting about this, Sarah. I agree it is not dead, right?
Sarah Spreitzer: "Fight, fight."
Jon Fansmith: No, but what's interesting, and I think we've talked about this on here, the administration held a round table on higher education and the Compact was sort of the underlying issue of it. And they did something that we had said they should have done from the beginning of their administration was they invited a lot of institutions who weren't elite, highly selective, well-resourced R1s to the table, community college presidents, regional publics, and said, "What about this? " And one of the most common responses they got was, "This doesn't reflect our campus at all. " So I do think whether you want to see this as the administration learning from its mistakes or pivoting because they got so much public pushback on this and no buy-in, I think this conversation is one we're going to have with the administration for the next three years, not just next year, it's where they're going to decide to land.
It's almost shocking, frankly, the way they backtracked off the original approach and are now trying to build something out of the ashes of it because I agree with you. I think this will still be their messaging, their tent pole around their policy space, but what exactly that will look like, what they'll put in the regulatory space, what they'll put around funding requirements for grants, how it all ties in, I think that's very much to be determined at this. I don't think they know, honestly.
Mushtaq Gunja: Do you think, on the Compact, do you think that they thought that either the one of the nine or several of the nine would take them up on it and/or were they expecting those nine to reject and they were hoping that more of the 3,922 institutions in the Carnegie classifications would pick them up? I mean, we haven't seen a lot of take up on this idea. Did they just miss the mark and they were politically unsavvy about what it is? Or do you think that they were hoping that we would reject?
Jon Fansmith: I think they were hoping that some of those initial nine and then they invited three more similar institutions, I think they really believed a couple of them would sign on and that would start a chain of events in which a number of other institutions would sign on. At this point, I'm only aware of two institutions that have said they would like to sign the Compact, and that's New College in Florida, which obviously is operating under a really different set of circumstances in most schools. And then Valley Forge Military Academy is the other one I know of, which just want to give a shout out to because my high school used to play Valley Forge Military Academy Football. So personal connection to that institution. We always got crushed. I mean, they were a bunch of very tough and angry guys and we were not. But anyway, look, those institutions are what they are, but they certainly are not reflective of the broader mainstream of higher ed. And I think the administration was surprised by how uniform the opposition was to this approach. Yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: And I only ask because Sarah said in '26, what if they just repackaged this as being about affordability and it being about fair admissions? Except that I think they already tried to do that. I think that was the push that they made here. But Sarah, I guess we will, "Fight, fight."
Sarah Spreitzer: Yes, we can fight. I think that they were very much testing the waters. And I think it was actually a tactic that we saw in the first Trump administration start so far over that when you move kind of closer to the middle, that it looks reasonable.
Mushtaq Gunja: Okay. I'm going to move us if that's okay. Jon, your number two is Compact. Sarah, what was your number? I think the last thing may be on your list, because I've got Department of Ed, DOJ freeze to funding of certain institutions and RFK question mark, I think.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. I only have one left on my-
Mushtaq Gunja: What is it, Sarah?
Sarah Spreitzer: I think that this could be ... We've talked a lot about the administration. We haven't touched on Congress yet at all. And I don't know if Jon would agree with this being the number one story, but I think one of the things that surprised me the most was Congress voting in favor of the Rescissions Package. And for those who don't remember, that was where the administration took a package to Congress and said, "We closed USAID. Even though you had voted back in March to fund this agency, you need to now pass a Rescissions Package that says, yes, we support your efforts to claw back this money." And I did not think that it would pass. It did. And I think it's also a bigger kind of bellwether of how much rope this Congress, the Republican Party has given this administration in testing their executive authority.
I mean, the rescission package would've been the time for Congress to say, "We're going to pause this. We had just voted on this in March." I think the Rescissions Package was in June or July, so two or three months after they'd passed the continuing resolution. And I think that really encapsulates the fact that Congress has not acted in any way as these executive actions have been taken to dismantle programs or to terminate programs that have previously been supported or even authorized by Congress.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, we got a big, big problem with Rescissions here because funding these days is a 60 vote proposition and Rescissions are a 50 vote proposition, meaning that you have to get some significant bipartisan support to pass actual funding. But a party here, the Republican Party with 50 votes can just go ahead and take that funding back. And that's-
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, but I mean, there were Dems that crossed over in the Senate to vote for the rescission package.
Mushtaq Gunja: We got to 60? I don't remember that.
Jon Fansmith: No, no, no, no. But Federman I think voted for the Rescissions package.
Sarah Spreitzer: I think Federman.
Jon Fansmith: I don't know if any other DEMs did.
Sarah Spreitzer: They have such tight majorities in the House and the Senate. And to me, it was just very surprising that Congress said, "Yes, we're going to change course and allow for this money to be clawed back." And I think that it's just telling more of, again, programs that were created under the CHIPS and Science Act, which every member of Congress stood up and applauded, those programs have now been ended after a short couple years of them being authorized and receiving funding. So yeah, I'd say that's my number one.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. I mean, it's hard to argue. It is very difficult to have a functioning government when dollars are allocated and then immediately could be pulled back. It's very, very difficult. Jon, I think I've got one left for you and I'd be shocked if it's not One Big, Beautiful Bill, but am I right?
Jon Fansmith: You got it. Yeah. I'm shocked we haven't even talked about reconciliation up to this point, but look, think about the changes to graduate loans and what that's going to mean for not just what students borrow, but what programs continue going forward at institutions and what kinds of students can pursue graduate education. It's going to cause a complete shift in the graduate education space in ways that we can't fully understand yet. The accountability provisions, first major statutory accountability provisions since the last reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. There are going to be programs that will be closed on college campuses as a result of their exposure. The Medicaid cuts, 1.1 trillion in funding for Medicaid. We have millions of students who get their healthcare through Medicaid. They're all going to be under new requirements. It's going to make their lives significantly more difficult to try to pursue their educations.
But step forward, the cuts to state budgets and how higher education is immediately the area that states go for immediate funding cuts because we can raise tuition. That's a double whammy for low-income students. It will be a massive impact on institutions. And then health systems too. I mean, Medicaid covers so many areas of impact for colleges and universities. And then you think about other thing, there's Workforce Pell, the proration of loans and what that will mean, especially for low-income undergraduate students.
This process that was such a great case study in politics, House versus Senate, the president weighing in different spaces and sometimes with different messages to the different chambers about what he wanted to see, the way they rushed forward, how quickly the process went, which has left this really ambiguous language and statute that even now we're dealing with the rulemaking process, which the definition of professional graduate student is going to have further compound the problems in the graduate education space and lots of other things down the road. I've said this before, this is the most significant higher education bill, even that's not what people think about it, probably even maybe surpassing the 2008 reauthorization. This is massive in its scope and its scale and what the impact will be short-term, long-term, and change a directional shift in big areas of American higher ed.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sure. Jon, Sarah, I know it's law. How baked is this stuff? I mean, so I know we went through NPRM on graduate and professional loan limits, which to me is at least as big, if not bigger than some of the other things that are in there. I mean, devastating cuts to other programs as well. I mean, do we have a second bite at this apple to be able to try to reverse some of this? Does this need to happen with the new Congress and the new bill? I mean, where are we?
Sarah Spreitzer: Mushtaq, I was going to say in this environment, what is law? I don't know. But no, in all seriousness, I think we will have another bite at the apple. I think depending on what happens in the midterms, I think we've already seen one of the things with the continuing resolution was an extension of the ACA subsidies, which wasn't included in the reconciliation bill. I think that it's likely going to be a campaign issue in 2026. And I think that even if we don't see a legislation move, I think there will be legislation introduced to maybe tweak some of the cuts that were made. We already saw President Trump this summer say that he no longer wanted to call it the One Big, Beautiful Bill. He didn't want to be as associated with it, even though it was his biggest legislative ask for the year because there was negativity coming out of the many, many cuts that were included in the bill.
So I think that there will likely be more action around it. I just don't know if it'll actually advance.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I mean, I would agree with Sarah. I think one of the things, the Medicaid changes were delayed for three years in part to put the problem on a different administration's agenda. And I think that's very intentional. One of it is Republicans wanted somebody else to bear the blame when the cuts actually took effect, but it also allows for the possibility of a shift in political fortunes and efforts. We saw with the Affordable Care Act subsidies fight around the shutdown and everything else, this is an issue that really resonates with people. People already think healthcare is not to the quality they deserve and far more expensive than they can afford. Changes like these are going to make those even more so, and they are the kind of things that motivate voters. So you will not only get Democrats continuing to push this as an issue, but you're going to see Republicans who will want to do something in this space too.
So there will be other bites at the apple. I think on some of the things like the loan proposal, I know there's some comments in the chat about Congress is already, there's noise coming out of Congress about fixing what the consensus language in the rulemaking was around graduate and professional students. Things are rising to the attention, and I think they're going to be targeted, they're going to be small, but a lot of the consequences as this bill was rushed forward, OB-3 weren't really understood and there will likely be some corrections happening in a couple of different arenas.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sure. Okay. I'm going to recap where we are and then just make one comment on one thing that ... I'll tell you a couple that were on my list and then I maybe comment on one, ask you to comment on one of them. I mean, Sarah, if I'm reading your list right, and we went a little bit out of order, but it might be Rescissions Package , the cuts to the Department of Education, DOJ freeze to certain institutions funding, and then RFK question mark.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yep, that's right.
Mushtaq Gunja: And then Jon, in order, I think we've got the 03B, which I'm going down with a ship calling it that. The Compact, the cuts to the Department of Ed, state policies and their impact on, well, the attempt by the federal government to force states to do what they want, and then NIH and NSF funding. The other things that were on my list were, I don't even know what to call this category, but all things international. I mean, so international students, the visa restrictions, all of that sort of thing, Sarah, we might've bullied you into not saying that because we know it's your area of expertise.
Second thing, there's a whole set of congressional investigations, I'm sorry, department investigations into antisemitism and the rest that have been happening in the background, and they're sort of behind some of the Compact, but the settlements that the administrations has entered into, I think are big news.
We saw Vanderbilt just this, I guess this week, and maybe I'll ask you, I know there's a question in the Q&A about that, maybe we'll ask about that next time and next episode. But what I'm just curious about, and maybe Jon, it's in your federal government enforcing states do what they want, I think all things DEI are just like, I don't know exactly how to name that category, but the administration came out swinging trying to, with a first executive order saying you can't do a whole range of things around DEI. And on this podcast over and over, we said, "Don't overcomply." And I think our institutions by and large have mostly been trying to hold the line. But man, I think all things DEI, it just feels like when I think back to this year, it will be the first thing I'm going to think about actually are the administration just coming out and trying to attack DEI.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I agree with you entirely. And this was one of the things honestly where the format was so challenging for me because I had on my list of things that are sort of six, seven, eight, nine, the UVA, Jim Ryan being forced to resign, the attacks by the federal government and the state on Gregory Washington at George Mason, in both cases, allegedly because of their embrace of diversity initiatives on those campuses, the Tennessee lawsuit against Hispanic serving institutions, which especially when coupled with the administration shifting money away from HSIs to other institutions, again and again, I think you're right, as a bucket, the administration's attack on diversity and education has been enormously impactful. It probably is one of the biggest stories. I just had trouble parsing it because there's so many different and unique kind of elements in how they've chosen to do it. We just saw that announcement that the State Department is kicking out 38 at least institutions from the diplomacy pilot programs.
Sarah Spreitzer: Diplomacy Lab.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, thank you, Sarah. Diplomacy Lab, ostensibly because of their DEI hiring policies without any documentation or even conversation with the institutions. They're just kind of throwing everything against the wall using DEI as this catchall term. And look, it doesn't seem to really matter to them what the policy is so long as they can yell to the press, "We're going after DEI." And whether that's forcing out a great president, whether that's going after another great president, whether that's trying to scare institutions into making changes, you're right, I think it's impacting so many different areas.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. It wasn't a criticism. I know it's tough to fit everything in and it sort of is overarching on a lot of the things that we're talking about. Sarah, reactions in 30 seconds. I'm going to let everybody go.
Sarah Spreitzer: Oh man, 30 seconds. Okay. Well, I was just going to say right before this, I was watching the cabinet meeting that's taking place today at the White House and I tuned in for Secretary McMahon's comments and they were talking about their accomplishments the first year of this administration. And Secretary McMahon talked about efforts to root out DEI and transgender policies and antisemitism at college campuses. So I thought that that was interesting. It was an incredible issue. I think on international students Mushtaq, I didn't include it on my list because those were things that we were expecting. It's very much a continuation from the first term. I think the regulations and some of the actions that have been taken are slightly different, but this trying to reduce the number of international students, I think in the US is very similar to the first administration.
So I'll just say that.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. Okay, Prince. We didn't get to some of the questions, really good questions in the Q&A, but I think we noted them. The producers are hard at work in the background, making sure that we have all them. I think we'll start with many of those questions that are in this week's Q&A next time. Please send in questions for this next session. Really, really excited to be able to do all of that. And in this fortnight of Thanksgiving, I know that I speak for Jon and Sarah. When I say thank you to the audience who's live with us and who's listening afterwards, it's a great community and we love doing this. So thank you all. We'll catch you next time.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yep. Look forward to it.
Jon Fansmith: Thanks everyone.
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 fall 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.
