Higher Ed Groups Bash ED Proposal to Allow More Grant Terminations

Thousands of comments have poured in on the Education Department’s proposed rule that would give the agency’s secretary the power to cancel grants “for convenience,” prioritize applicants who charge lower indirect cost rates and generally exert more discretion over grantmaking. The regulation would also force states that receive grants, and their subgrantees, to comply with President Trump’s numerous executive orders.

The one-month public comment period on the proposal ended just before midnight Wednesday, and many prominent higher ed groups don’t like the changes. For one, they say ED seems to be attempting to adopt major parts of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) controversial proposed rule that attempted to cement political appointees’ control over grantmaking—despite Congress blocking that government-wide change at least until December, after it received a deluge of criticism.

Additionally, in their comments on ED’s proposal, higher ed groups drilled down into how they said the changes would harm the sector, students and others in ways echoing, or going beyond, the OMB proposal. They said ED’s changes would violate Congress’s intent when it established the department’s grant programs, undermine efforts to serve the students those grants were intended for and generally increase uncertainty for grant applicants and recipients, all while increasing the possibility for politicization.

Critics say this rule would affect a broad sweep of ED grants, from TRIO college-access efforts to Institute of Education Sciences research grants to Perkins state formula grants for career and technical education.

ED is required to respond to the more than 5,500 individual public comments before possibly finalizing the rule.

“We do not understand why anyone would have a problem with prioritizing merit, incentivizing higher quality outcomes for students and families, and better protecting taxpayer dollars,” a department spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed in an email Thursday.

In a comment on behalf of 40 groups—including the American Association of University Professors, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the Association of American Universities—American Council on Education president Ted Mitchell wrote that ED’s proposal would “codify many of the harmful actions the agency has taken over the past 18 months that have caused confusion for institutions, faculty, students, and communities. This has included sudden changes to established grant priorities, as well as the sudden termination of existing grants.”

Mitchell was blunt about the provision that would force state grant recipients and their subrecipients to follow Trump’s executive orders, or EOs, or lose their funding.

“EOs are not law, and many of the policy directives outlined in recent EOs go well beyond settled law, requiring endorsement of legal interpretations that in numerous cases have been rejected by courts,” Mitchell wrote. “Further, many recent EOs contain provisions that directly conflict with existing state and local laws. While EOs may help provide context and understanding as to how the federal government may interpret the requirements of federal law, they do not supersede federal, state, and local law.”

His comment ran about three pages. The one from Tabbye M. Chavous, executive director of the American Educational Research Association, ran seven, covering similar themes but particularly raising concerns about the impact on Institute of Education Sciences (IES) grants, which fund studies on how to improve K–12 and higher ed.

Chavous expressed concern that requiring grant recipients to follow Trump’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion executive orders could stifle such research, saying her group is worried that efforts to “examine variations in outcomes among different student and educator populations would not be funded because they would be considered ‘disparate impact studies’ when, in fact, the studies intend to examine groups with the goal of supporting access to quality learning opportunities for all students.”

More broadly, she wrote that “the possibility of terminating IES grants mid-cycle puts at risk continued access to education interventions and professional development,” while undermining “partnerships between researchers and schools and communities” and “financial support for graduate students.” She further said “the increased flexibility to terminate grants” would mean more wasted federal dollars due to “disruptions to the production of scientific innovation and, particularly in the case of education research, abandoning supports and dismantling capacity for promising effective practices for teaching and learning.”

Chavous also wrote that giving the education secretary more power to annually review grants that are funded over multiple years “would also inject shifting political priorities into IES activities that are required to be ‘objective, secular, neutral, and nonideological and are free of partisan political influence and racial, cultural, gender, or regional bias,’” under federal law.

Multiple commenters took issue with part of the proposal that says a grantee must “ensure that hiring, admissions, promotions, and compensation practices under the grant are based on merit and high standards, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or proxies thereof unless an appropriate exception applies.” Merit and high standards aren’t defined, critics noted.

“It is beyond the scope of the Department’s authority to direct admissions, hiring, and employment practices through grant guidance,” Mitchell wrote. “Further, for many institutions, hiring, promotion, and compensation policies are set by their state government, university system, governing board, or some combination of the three, and are not within the power of the institution to modify.”

Chavous wrote that “IES research grants typically involve research teams based at multiple institutions through the use of sub-grants. The lead institution would then be held responsible for ensuring other institutions’ employment practices comply with undefined standards.”

Kimberly Jones, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, which trains and supports staff at universities running TRIO grants, raised similar subjects in her nine-page comment, and also spoke to how ED’s plan to preference grant applicants that charge lower indirect cost rates to the government may harm many of the institutions her organization serves.

“Applicants that cannot afford to self-subsidize their administrative costs would be placed at a structural disadvantage relative to applicants that can, regardless of the underlying quality of their proposed projects,” she said. “This risks disadvantaging exactly the kind of community-based, locally rooted organizations that have long been part of what makes TRIO effective.”

Amanda Fuchs Miller, president of Seventh Street Strategies and a former deputy assistant secretary for higher ed programs during the Biden administration, said 5,500 comments on ED’s proposal was “incredible,” given the same set of regulations got only 29 back in 2024.

“What this shows is people are paying attention, they’re worried and they recognize how harmful this will be,” she said.