A Rare Moment of Unity for a Disparate Sector

The groundswell of opposition to the Office of Management and Budget’s changes to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance is the united voice higher ed has been missing. Released at the end of May, the proposed regulations would put political appointees, not expert peer reviewers, in charge of awarding federal grants. They would allow the government to suspend active grants at any time, for any reason, and prohibit funding for projects that promote “anti-American values” (without defining what those are); international collaborations would be restricted.

In a little under two months, scientists have written op-eds against the proposal, researchers have voiced outrage to journalists, scholarly associations have condemned the rules in statements and 300 organizations have called on Russell Vought, director of the OMB, to extend the 45-day comment period so they could parse the 400-page proposal. (He refused to grant their request.)

A flood-the-zone approach to public comments on the regulations resulted in more than 300,000 submissions logged in the public docket by Monday’s 11:59 p.m. deadline. That’s the second-most-commented-on rule in Trump’s second term, just behind the 572,000 submitted for the reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards. Compared to other higher ed–related proposals, the total is even more startling: The Department of Education received about 8,500 public comments for its new earnings test regulation and about 400 for new Workforce Pell rules.

A Washington Post analysis of the comments on Friday, when they totaled just shy of 100,000, found that at least 88 percent voiced opposition to the OMB proposal.

Even Moody’s has warned that credit ratings would take a hit if agencies are allowed to terminate grants whenever they want, leaving public financiers in the lurch for funding infrastructure projects such as affordable housing or new roads.

This rare moment of mobilization across the sector is unmatched. Since the Trump administration took office and launched a multifront attack against higher education and academic research, the sector has struggled to mount a united defense. A scant few college presidents risked publicly criticizing the administration’s early efforts to criminalize DEI or erode institutional independence. Others relied on member organizations including the American Council on Education and the American Association of Universities to push back through lawsuits, amicus briefs and public letters.

The administration has targeted mostly wealthy, private institutions that get a lot of attention from the mainstream press but don’t represent the majority of higher ed institutions and, thus, are unlikely to find many friends who will have their backs. Other criticisms of higher ed—the lack of affordability, low graduation rates, millions with some credit and no degree, opaque financial aid offers, loss of public trust—may be valid, but they don’t apply to every institution to the same degree. And in any case, colleges can’t agree on how to combat them.

Unlike previous disjointed responses, urgency has galvanized this one. The OMB released the proposal at the end of May with a 45-day window for public comments. It plans to put the rules into effect by Oct. 1, meaning they’ll apply to all grants awarded in fiscal year 2027, which begins that day. And a new administration or congressional action can’t easily undo the regulations; a reversal would have to go through the same lengthy, bureaucratic process.

The clock is ticking, and the impact of the regulations is already evident. As devastating as cuts to federal research funding were, they were at once at a scale impossible to understand—billions of dollars to research behemoths—and difficult to track from researcher to researcher. Even without reading the 400-page OMB proposal, it’s easy to understand what’s on the line: peer review in federal grant awarding, consistent funding commitments and support for young academics to attend conferences and publish their work.

Read the public comments and you’ll find opposition spreads across higher ed. People from tribal colleges, community colleges, higher ed systems, small liberal arts colleges and public regionals all voiced their dissent, along with health-care provider coalitions, members of the public, city council members and lawmakers.

We won’t know for a while what the outcome of this opposition campaign will be. If advocates have their way, it will take OMB a year to respond to public comments, delaying the implementation of the rules. If the regulations are adopted, no doubt the litigation to challenge them has already been drafted. And the legal pushback could prevail, if previous rulings against the government’s attempts to politicize public funding are anything to go by. But one success that’s already certain is how the leaders, organizations and associations have overcome institutional stratification and disciplinary silos to rally for the future of U.S. federal funding. For a sector in crisis, let that be an enduring inspiration for the battles to come.