5 Things to Know About Trump’s Latest Budget Proposal

President Trump is again asking Congress to do what it has so far refused to do: gut federal research agencies that provide billions of dollars to colleges and universities. And he’s still pushing to eliminate the Education Department, another move lawmakers have rejected.

The president released his budget request for the next fiscal year Friday. It shows he hasn’t fully backed down from proposals he presented to the Republican-controlled Congress for this fiscal year, most of which were rejected.

However, he has walked back his requests in some areas, including reducing his proposed slash to the National Institutes of Health to roughly a quarter of the cut he requested last year. And, instead of zeroing out funding for the Education Department, his budget would continue funding it next year to the tune of over $75 billion, though a number of higher ed programs are on the chopping block. Only Congress can actually shutter the agency, and it chose not to, even with more Republican lawmakers in the Capitol last year.

Trump’s overall fiscal year 2027 budget requests $1.5 trillion for defense spending while cutting the budget for nondefense items by 10 percent to $660 billion.

“The 2027 Budget builds on the President’s vision by continuing to constrain nondefense spending and reform the Federal Government,” Russell T. Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote in the 2027 budget request. Among other things, he said the “budget continues the Department of Education’s path to elimination” while also ensuring the U.S. “continues to maintain the world’s most powerful and capable military.”

The proposal is the start of a long appropriations process, in which Congress has the final say.

House Education and Workforce Committee chair Tim Walberg praised the proposed budget in a statement.

“This budget proposal is a blueprint for cutting wasteful spending, improving government efficiency, and ensuring that every dollar spent delivers real value to taxpayers,” the Michigan Republican said.

But Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, lambasted the proposal in a statement, saying Trump “wants Congress to defund dozens of programs that help students so that he can send other people’s kids to fight a war with no justification.”

“President Trump wants to slash medical research to fund costly foreign wars,” Murray said. “It doesn’t get more backward than that, and the only responsible thing to do with a budget this morally bankrupt is to toss it in the trash.”

Here are the key higher ed takeaways from Trump’s proposed budget.

1. Administration Protects Pell Grant Funding

While the Trump administration wants to slash the Education Department’s overall budget by at least $2.3 billion, officials are proposing to allocate an additional $10.5 billion to the Pell Grant in order to address the program’s shortfall, which the Congressional Budget Office projected to amount to at least $5.5 billion by the end of September. The deficit could grow to nearly $17 billion in fiscal year 2027 if Congress doesn’t put more money into the financial aid program.

The administration also is planning to keep the maximum annual award at $7,395, which was a top priority for higher ed associations and advocates. Last year, in response to a smaller projected deficit, the department proposed slashing the maximum award by $1,685.

“This administration is committed to fulfilling its promise to preserve the Pell Grant program,” ED officials wrote in the budget documents. “The administration looks forward to working with Congress to develop a long-term, sustainable solution to the growing funding shortfall in out-years created by past congressional decisions.”

The National College Attainment Network, an advocacy group, said in a statement that the White House’s proposed budget fully funds Pell, fixing the immediate shortfall.

“Fully funding the Pell Grant program reflects the deep bipartisan support for the program and is an important step towards restoring Pell’s purchasing power for students,” NCAN CEO Kim Cook said. “But level funding isn’t enough—three years of flat appropriations have already cost students hundreds of dollars in purchasing power. Congress must now go further and restore Pell’s value for the millions of low-income students counting on it.”

2. Several Higher Ed Programs Are Slashed

The money for Pell has to come from somewhere, and the department’s proposal eliminates dozens of programs that Trump unsuccessfully sought to cut last year. NCAN and other advocacy groups opposed the cuts.

Among $4.5 billion in higher ed and student aid cuts, the administration wants to defund all of the grant programs that support minority-serving institutions and eliminate the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. Last year, the administration proposed maintaining funding for the MSI grants, but since then, it has deemed them unconstitutional and reallocated millions to historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges.

In the fiscal year 2026 budget, Congress prevented the administration from doing that again but allowed the department to move funds for the programs into a broader grant.

“We’re not supportive of zeroing out funding for MSI programs and neither is Congress,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education.

Other programs on the chopping block include the Strengthening Institutions grant, TRIO, GEAR UP and grants for student parents. The administration also wants to stop funding programs that support comprehensive language and area study centers.

Similar to last year, the administration proposed zeroing out the federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants and cutting Federal Work-Study from $1.23 billion to $123 million.

Guillory said that while the boost in funding for Pell is a win, cutting these programs could hinder students’ ability to access, persist and complete college, noting that many students who benefit from work-study and TRIO also receive the Pell Grant.

“To zero out funding for critical programs that support those very students who receive the Pell Grant is very concerning,” he said.

The department also wants just $261.3 million for the Institute for Education Sciences, which received nearly $800 million from Congress for fiscal year 2026. The Office for Civil Rights would also see its budget cut by 35 percent, from $140 million to $91 million, which would support 271 full-time employees—down from 530 in fiscal year 2025.

ED officials wrote in the budget documents that shuttering the department doesn’t mean “eliminating all its programs and zeroing out its entire budget.”

“This misinformation is spread by those who seek to preserve the status quo—a system that produces illiteracy, innumeracy, and ignorance among American youth,” they wrote. “The truth is winding down the Department means returning rightful direction and responsibility to States, Tribes, communities, and families. It means reallocating to other agencies those few appropriate Federal functions and programs of which the Department has been the custodian.”

3. ED Follows Through on Moving Career and Technical Ed Funding to the Labor Department

In the last year, the Education Department has temporarily outsourced many programs to other agencies via interagency agreements, and the administration’s proposed budget aims to make career and technical education’s move to the Labor Department permanent.

The Labor Department is requesting $1.45 billion for career and technical education—funding that ED requested last fiscal year. Neither agency is requesting funding for adult education. Labor took over administering the CTE and adult ed grants last fall under the first interagency agreement. ED has since signed nine others.

Labor officials wrote in their budget request that this change will position DOL “as the lead agency overseeing work to prepare Americans for high-paying skilled jobs and build pipelines of skilled talent for employers in critical industries.”

“DOL can now operate a seamless workforce development system that includes programs formerly housed at the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) at the Department of Education,” the documents say. “This eases the administrative burden on States by reducing and aligning reporting requirements, enabling them to focus more on helping Americans go to work.”

4. Trump Proposes a Smaller NIH Cut Than Last Year

Trump is proposing cutting $5 billion from the National Institutes of Health—a huge reduction, but nowhere near the roughly $19 billion slash he requested for the current fiscal year. Congress soundly rejected that proposal, increasing NIH’s budget for fiscal year 2026 by more than $400 million, to surpass $47 billion.

The OMB budget request document for next fiscal year denounces the NIH, which calls itself the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, using language now familiar coming from conservative critics of the medical research community.

“NIH broke the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health,” the document says. The NIH is a major funder of university research.

Wesley Lapointe/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Congress rejected the administration’s last proposal to merge many of the 27 institutes and centers that comprise the NIH and eliminate four entirely: the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center, and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Now, Trump is proposing to spare the nursing institute but still eliminate the other three—all of which are led by acting rather than permanent directors, as are more than half NIH’s institutes and centers.

The document denounced the focus of research the institutes fund by using examples of particular studies without fully identifying them or describing what percentage of appropriations such studies represent (OMB didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed further information Friday). It says the minority health institute “is replete with DEI expenditures,” including research “comparing sexually transmitted infections in ‘transgender women,’” and says the integrative health center has funded research “on ‘racial and ethnic disparities’ in back pain therapies and on ‘mindfulness-based intervention’ on HIV risk and ‘mental and sexual health’ among ‘young men who have sex with men.’”

It also says spending at other centers “would be eliminated through reforms,” including “funneling millions of dollars to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic,” and “a program for nurses to learn about ‘transgender and gender diverse’ patient care.”

5. Other Cuts to Science and Research Raise Alarm

While Trump significantly reduced his proposed cut to NIH, he didn’t do the same for the National Science Foundation, another major higher ed funder. The new budget proposes cutting more than half its funding, a reduction of $4.8 billion, without offering any rationale. For this fiscal year, Congress largely rejected Trump’s request to cut NSF, slicing off just $300 million instead of the billions he requested.

The president has also proposed cutting $1.1 billion from the Energy Department’s Office of Science. The OMB document says this will end “funding for climate change and Green New Scam research while maintaining U.S. competitiveness in priority areas such as high-performance computing, AI, quantum information science, fusion, and critical mineral research.” It also says it won’t fund “Minority Serving Institutions for the Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce initiative,” which it calls “a discriminatory DEI program to ‘diversify American leadership in the physical sciences, including energy and climate.’”

In all, the proposed cuts have already spurred research advocates to plead with Congress to reject Trump’s requests. Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the Science journals, said in a statement Friday, “Once again, we urge lawmakers to deny the steep cuts proposed to federal R&D [research and development] funding.”

“Thanks to bipartisan support, Congress did its job and rejected a catastrophic proposal for FY26, which would have further damaged U.S. global competitiveness,” Parikh said. “It is imperative that all FY26 funds are put to use for research as intended by Congress to ensure momentum for American science—the greatest engine of innovation, prosperity and well-being the world has ever known. Funding should be driven by scientific opportunity and possibility, not politics.”