It’s easy to forget how bleak January, 2021, felt for conservatives in Washington. Donald Trump had lost the election. The January 6th Capitol riot was seen as an irredeemable scandal. The pandemic was raging, and the country was still reeling from the George Floyd protests. “Republicans had been run out of town,” one Trump Administration official told me. “I thought, I’ll go to Texas, where I might still be able to get a job with a scarlet ‘T’ on me. It’s like, this city, and the federal government—it’s over.”
Those who stayed in D.C. hunkered down in think tanks, preparing for a long winter in the opposition. Some were convinced that Trump’s first term had been a missed opportunity. The Administration had been slow to hire, and many staffers were unfamiliar with the intricacies of bureaucratic combat. As Trump loyalists planned their return to power, they studied up. Jim Blew, an Assistant Secretary in the Department of Education during Trump’s first term, recalled fielding dozens of calls about arcane processes like negotiated rule-making. “We all realized it really helps to understand these things,” Blew said.
During this period, Republicans also watched American culture shift dramatically. Companies and universities pledged to do more to support racial minorities, expanding their D.E.I. bureaucracies. Lia Thomas, a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, became the first transgender athlete to win a women’s N.C.A.A. Division I national championship. The October 7th attacks in Israel led to campus protests nationwide. Conservatives were particularly outraged by Joe Biden’s higher-ed agenda. Biden officials attempted to use the HEROES Act—a law passed after 9/11 allowing the government to waive student-loan requirements in a national emergency—to cancel billions in student debt, long after the pandemic’s peak. Bob Eitel, a senior counsellor at the Department of Education during the first Trump Administration, helped mobilize lawyers who ultimately challenged the debt-forgiveness efforts in court and won. The Biden Administration also pushed for colleges to allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. The proposal stalled, but Republicans saw it as a glaring federal overreach. Eitel said the Biden years made him feel that there was a “stark, almost unbridgeable difference” in the two parties’ understanding of reality.
In all this upheaval, there was a common theme: campuses were the battleground. Conservatives have long viewed universities as radical enclaves. In 2021, when J. D. Vance gave a speech called “Universities Are the Enemy,” he was echoing Richard Nixon. What has changed is that higher ed itself is arguably weaker than ever. Both parties have denounced its soaring costs, crushing debt, and degrees that don’t yield jobs. The culture wars gave Republicans political permission to target not just progressive bias in higher ed but the basic structures of the sector. This was, according to Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to push through some real conservative reforms.”
In Washington backrooms, a playbook took shape, centered on two insights. First, nearly all universities depend on federal money. There’s student aid, and there’s research money—at some top schools, federal funding has made up a quarter or more of their revenue in recent years. Even Harvard, with the country’s largest endowment, cannot afford to walk away from the government, which awarded it nearly seven hundred million dollars for research in 2024. Second, some conservatives believed that research funds could be frozen or cancelled almost instantly, giving a future Administration a powerful tool to pressure universities.
By the time Trump returned to office, the higher-ed playbook was ready. The person in charge of coördinating it was May Mailman, then a policy deputy to Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers. Mailman, a Harvard-trained lawyer, previously led the Independent Women’s Law Center, arguing in court that biologically male athletes who identified as transgender had undermined legal protections for female athletes. (“May Mailman is my Taylor Swift,” Riley Gaines, a swimmer who became a prominent activist after competing against Thomas, wrote on X in February.) Mailman told me that the Administration’s critique of higher ed has roughly three parts. The first is that many of these institutions are too rich to deserve endless public largesse. “We have a thirty-six-plus-trillion-dollar national debt, and American taxpayers are paying billions to élite universities with extremely generous endowments,” she said. The second is that universities are failing in their basic mission. Instead of producing citizens who will “propel our country into the next generation of greatness,” they are, in her view, creating “indebted students with useless majors who hate our country and like to go to riots.” The third is that the so-called woke aspects of campus culture—D.E.I., transgender athletes, unchecked antisemitism—violate federal laws.
Over the past nine months, the Administration has waged an effective, unrelenting assault on higher education. D.E.I. programs have been dismantled nationwide. Columbia will pay more than two hundred million dollars to settle allegations of antisemitism and violations of antidiscrimination laws. The N.C.A.A. ruled that athletes “assigned male at birth may not compete on a women’s team.” This campaign has been framed by Trump officials as existential. Max Eden, a former Domestic Policy Council staffer who wrote a brief outlining how to “destroy Columbia University,” published a Substack post likening the second Trump Administration to the Battle of Agincourt, in which an outnumbered English Army crushed the French. The Administration has also pledged to abolish the Department of Education altogether—a long-held goal among conservative activists, who believe education should be managed locally. “They can’t repeal the department,” James Kvaal, Biden’s Under-Secretary of Education, told me. “So they’re vandalizing it.”
A decade ago, higher education was “an away game for Republicans,” Rick Hess, a senior fellow at A.E.I., said. That has changed. “The Trump Administration’s very aggressive moves against Columbia and Harvard in 2025 would have been unthinkable in 2017,” Eitel, the former Education Department official, told me. As Trump’s assault on higher ed has unfolded, conservatives have learned to stop worrying and love federal power. “For so long, conservatives were, like, ‘We can get there by hoping,’ ” Mailman said. “ ‘We’ll write some op-eds. We’re going to be nice to people.’ ” That approach has failed, she said. This Trump Administration marks a new era. “You don’t feel like a bunch of losers anymore,” Mailman told me. “You have a seat at the table.”
The Department of Education building is ugly in a distinctly Washington way—a concrete shoebox more suggestive of bureaucratic toil than of any grand vision of government. Directly in front of it stands a memorial to Dwight Eisenhower, which includes a metal tapestry of the Normandy cliffs, where Eisenhower oversaw troops on D Day. When Eisenhower, a Republican, was elected President in 1952, the memory of World War Two and the pressures of the Cold War shaped every aspect of politics, including education. He championed the National Defense Education Act and poured federal money into universities to advance weaponry and space technology. Eisenhower’s investments built on a long history; in the nineteenth century, the U.S. government had created numerous land-grant universities, which became the backbone of America’s public-university system. There was a compact between the federal government and higher ed: taxpayers would fund research and student aid. In return, universities would deliver scientific breakthroughs and educate citizens who could defend the nation.
This compact was broadly popular. Conservatives groused about ideology—in the nineteen-fifties, the public intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr., blasted Yale as dogmatically secular; in the eighties, the political philosopher Allan Bloom decried relativism—but the consensus held. “The general feeling about American higher education was that it was the finest in the world,” Margaret Spellings, who served as George W. Bush’s Education Secretary, told me. “People came from all over the world to study here. It was a major driver of our economy. Scholars and academics were widely respected.” Republican reformers worked within that consensus: Spellings convened a commission to push for greater affordability and accountability, asking colleges to provide better data on things like student outcomes and employment, but “the university community was, like, ‘Hell no—give us our money and leave us alone,’ ” Spellings recalled. “It does make me wonder if we had read the room and rung the bell back then, whether that would have prevented some of this cynicism.”
Around this time, a political scientist named Jonathan Pidluzny was launching his academic career. Universities, he told me, are “where young people are empowered to live good lives—to think, to write, to appreciate beauty.” These schools ought to drive the economy, bolster national defense, and serve as “repositories of our civilizational inheritance.” All this, he said, has been “imperilled by the woke takeover of higher education.”
“That one’s just laundry.”
Cartoon by Lars Kenseth
In January, Pidluzny joined the Department of Education, becoming the deputy chief of staff for strategy and implementation. He came from the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, where he argued that D.E.I. was fuelling antisemitism and the spread of “transgender ideology.” In his writing, he urged concessions from universities accused of enabling antisemitism, including an audit of D.E.I. offices and academic programs that allegedly promote “anti-Israel bias.” He called for the government to revoke visas of students suspected of supporting Hamas and to penalize universities that failed to disclose large foreign gifts, which violates federal law and arguably exposes schools to ideological influence. Under Trump, much of this has become policy. “How did I get to where I am?” Pidluzny said. “It’s watching something really valuable to our way of life slip away.”
Pidluzny’s perspective reflected the broader conservative mood: disillusionment with the cultural dogmas of the left, fused with populist anger toward élite hoarding of wealth and influence. His cultural critiques were unmistakably right-wing, but his scorn for the corporatization of universities might have come from the mouth of a disaffected leftist. “With very few exceptions, universities are or aspire to be hedge funds, welded to multinational corporations, welded to think tanks,” he said at a 2022 conference. “They teach a few courses to keep tax-exempt status.”
In January, Trump signed an executive order pledging to fight antisemitism on campuses, citing instances when Jewish students had been physically threatened and blocked from libraries and classrooms. The D.O.J. soon assembled a task force. Pidluzny joined, as did officials from Health and Human Services, which controls much of the nation’s scientific-research funding. Josh Gruenbaum, an investor who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household and had been tapped to run the Federal Acquisition Service—the government’s clearing house for goods, services, and contracts—was invited to join, too. “I was literally sitting in the delivery room right after my son was born, and this executive order came down,” he recalled. “The galaxy is telling you, ‘This is a moment.’ ”
One key to combatting campus antisemitism, Gruenbaum believed, lay in the billions of dollars’ worth of federal contracts that the government has with universities. “The way we need to be thinking about these things is: we are making an investment,” Gruenbaum said. “It is a privilege to do business with the federal government.” Every contract requires compliance with federal law, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs. The theory behind the task force was simple: formal civil-rights investigations are slow, but agencies could quickly freeze or cancel funds on the ground that the schools had violated their federal contracts, forcing universities to try and cut a deal.
The task force met at least once a week and reported developments to Mailman, the White House point person. The schools it targeted had some of the most visible conflicts after October 7th: Columbia and Harvard, along with peer institutions such as Brown, Cornell, and Northwestern. “All of higher ed takes its cues from the élite institutions,” Pidluzny told me. “They’re also the places where the alleged violations of law have been most significant.” When schools were targeted for investigation, multiple agencies would issue press releases or letters in quick succession, creating the effect of a strike team. Veterans of past Administrations were astonished. “I remember how difficult it was to get cross-agency coöperation on anything when I was in the Obama and Clinton Administrations,” Bob Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told me. The fact that it’s happening now, he said, suggests that there’s “muscle from the White House.”
The Administration also scrutinized schools for things like offering race-specific scholarships and for charging in-state tuition to undocumented students, arguing that these benefits disadvantage American students. Mailman called it a “whole-of-government” strategy. “It’s one thing to go give some speeches,” she said. “It’s another thing to actually say out loud that we, the federal government, are no longer sponsoring, promoting, or supporting wokeism.” Mailman even claimed that some universities were grateful for the political cover to course-correct: “Finally, now, there’s almost an excuse—they can just act normally.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency was recommending cuts to federal grants and contracts, often targeting proposals with progressive-sounding keywords. Many of these cuts were to scientific research, something that, for decades, both parties had treated as sacrosanct, steadily boosting funds for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Not so under Trump. He proposed a forty-per-cent cut to the N.I.H. budget and a cap on the reimbursement rate for indirect costs, which includes spending on things like equipment and maintenance. The Administration has also targeted science funding at the schools under investigation, largely by freezing grants. Pidluzny pushed back on the notion that this is a crackdown on the scientific enterprise; the Administration has simply recognized that science funding is the most valuable leverage it has. Schools “need to understand that the consequences would be real,” he said. “Élite institutions tend to be responsive to two things: prestige and money.”
Gruenbaum made a claim that I heard from numerous other Trump officials: if the endangered research is truly vital, universities can figure out other ways to fund it, such as donor dollars. Penny Gordon-Larsen, the vice-chancellor for research at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, was less optimistic, arguing that companies are “market-driven” and unlikely to “sink money” into university research that might take decades to pay off. Lon Cardon, who runs a biomedical-research institution called the Jackson Laboratory, noted that even the richest companies and foundations cannot replace federal science spending. “It is absolutely impossible to fund the scale of basic research needed in this country or anywhere” with just philanthropic and private funds, he said.
“But what kind of couch are we going to be leaving for the next generation?”
Cartoon by Drew Dernavich
The Administration has leaned into the optics of a fight between Trump and Harvard. It’s a useful spectacle: the President taking on wealthy institutions that embody upper-crust privilege. But in reality the Administration’s focus has stretched far beyond the Ivies. In March, the Education Department announced that it would investigate or monitor sixty colleges and universities for alleged antisemitism, including large, red-state publics such as Ohio State and the University of Tennessee. The department opened inquiries into schools such as the University of Alabama-Birmingham and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for allegedly awarding “impermissible race-based scholarships”; it has announced investigations into universities in Nebraska and Florida, among other states, for giving scholarships to undocumented students.
After working as Bush’s Education Secretary, Margaret Spellings served as the president of the U.N.C. system, which has lost significant federal funds under Trump. At schools like this, she said, the researchers “are the best and the brightest scientists.” She added, “This is what I’m really worried about.” Undermining faith in big public institutions “is a scary, slippery slope.”
In February, President Trump convened a bipartisan group of governors at the White House. “He was in a rambunctious mood,” Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, told me. He brought up an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which had been drafted by Mailman. “Is Maine here, the governor of Maine?” Trump asked. Mills stood.
A few days earlier, a transgender student had competed in a pole-vaulting event at a high-school track-and-field meet in Maine. Last year, the student had tied for ninth in the boys’ division; this year, competing in the girls’ division, the student had placed first. A Republican state legislator, Laurel Libby, had posted side-by-side photos with the athlete’s first name, using male pronouns—which went viral.
Trump asked whether Mills would follow the executive order. “I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she told him. One state law, the Maine Human Rights Act, prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
“We are the federal law,” Trump replied. “You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.”
“See you in court,” Mills replied.
“I look forward to it,” Trump said. “And enjoy your life after, Governor. Because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.” Mailman later told me that this was Trump’s announcement: Maine was his next target.
Federal agencies started investigations across the state, including into the entire University of Maine system. The Department of Agriculture, which provides significant grant money to the university, announced that it would be reviewing the system’s compliance with Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination at federally funded schools and protects women’s access to sports. Soon afterward, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration informed the university that funding for its Maine Sea Grant program, which supports coastal communities, had been discontinued. Joan Ferrini-Mundy, the university’s president, was at a dogsled race near the Canadian border when she got the news. She rushed to a hot-cocoa stand and called Senator Susan Collins.
Maine can feel like a small town. It has about one and a half million people, with true “Mainer” status reserved for families who have lived there for generations. UMaine embodies this ethos. It’s the state’s only flagship public school and its only top-tier research university. Maine’s politics are purple: Democrats hold the governor’s mansion and the legislature, but Trump carried one of the state’s four electoral votes in 2024, and Collins, a Republican whose family has deep UMaine ties, has held her Senate seat for nearly three decades. When Collins heard about the Sea Grant cuts, she had just returned from the Maine Fishermen’s Forum, a gathering for the state’s fishing industry. The potential consequences of the cuts couldn’t have been clearer.
On a recent morning, Gayle Zydlewski, the director of the Maine Sea Grant program, took me out on the Damariscotta River, near the coast. The water was dotted with signs of a nearly invisible ecosystem: clamdiggers on the shore, kelp lines in the current, rows of what looked like small floating oil drums, which turned out to be an underwater oyster farm. Sea Grant helps keep this ecosystem functioning.
We stopped at a wooden platform in the middle of the river and hopped up. Beneath our feet were trapdoors, which opened to reveal trays of about two hundred oysters. Workers hauled them up, sorted them by size, hosed them off, and bagged them so that they’d be ready to sell. Brendan Parsons, who owned the oyster farm, explained how Sea Grant had supported his business: the Maine Oyster Trail, a statewide tourism program developed by Sea Grant staff, funnels visitors to his farm and restaurant. About half his workers had taken a Sea Grant training course. UMaine’s researchers are also developing cheaper methods of growing oysters. “This isn’t some willy-nilly program,” Parsons said. “It’s just astonishing that people would think that there’s waste there.”
UMaine is a land-grant university, with a mission to support agriculture and forestry. Researchers joke that Sea Grant is the university’s “salty extension.” “A lot of people in the country, when they think of research institutions, they tend to think of the Ivy League colleges,” Collins told me. But much more of higher education looks like UMaine. The school’s scientists are developing blight-resistant potatoes and testing ways to make jet fuel out of the wood in Maine’s forests. “This is not research that is likely to be picked up by a Harvard or a Yale,” Collins said.
The senator recalled having at least five conversations with Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce—which oversees NOAA—about Sea Grant. Within days of receiving the termination letter, UMaine was told that the funding would eventually be restored. But the narrative around the university had been set, and the crackdown was just beginning. As Andy Harris, a Republican congressman, wrote in a statement about UMaine a week later, “Women and Girls’ sports must be protected from woke identity politics.”
When the U.S.D.A. opened its Title IX review of UMaine, in February, the school’s leaders responded but never heard back. Two weeks later, Griffin Dill, who runs UMaine’s Tick Lab, forwarded them an e-mail he had received, stating that the U.S.D.A. had been directed to pause all funding to Columbia and the University of Maine system. Dill’s lab, which dissects ticks to check for Lyme and other diseases, seemed far removed from campus culture wars. “No one likes ticks,” he said.
As the spring went on, the confusion deepened. Grant administrators logged in to federal dashboards to draw down funds that had been awarded, only to find money missing. One vanished U.S.D.A. grant was for a STEM program for rural high-school girls, including “students from minority, immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking families.” When the university wrote to the U.S.D.A., program officers explained that the funds had been paused “during the transition of government” but wouldn’t elaborate; when UMaine officials tried to call, no one answered. A program officer for a different grant, related to soil health, wrote that his department had been told to pause any Biden-era funding. “I am very sorry and know this is causing much turmoil on your side,” he added.
Ferrini-Mundy told researchers that whenever they discovered that money was missing, received a notice letter, or even heard a rumor about a funding change, they were to report it. At town halls, professors worried aloud about their labs, staff, and graduate students, whom they employed with federal money. It wasn’t even clear which grants were being frozen as part of a Maine-specific Title IX crackdown, which ones were part of the broader DOGE dragnet, or what other mysterious government machinations might be to blame.
In April, UMaine learned that a Department of Energy grant for a floating offshore wind-turbine project was suspended—on the same day that a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-ton platform had been hauled to a dock in Searsport. The university couldn’t fund the project’s launch, but it couldn’t leave the platform in port, either, forcing school officials to find emergency funds to move forward. Trump, who has called wind turbines “ugly,” had issued an executive order pausing leasing and permitting for offshore wind projects. Yet when UMaine contacted the Department of Energy, a program officer explained that the suspensions were tied to another executive order: “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Different political priorities had gotten tangled together. Offshore wind had become part of a debate about transgender athletes, rather than a debate about offshore wind.
But there was one pesky detail in all this talk about Title IX: the university didn’t have any known transgender athletes on its women’s teams. Mailman told me the Administration was concerned with university policy, which is “hard to know without asking.” UMaine didn’t want to make a public announcement, which risked looking like a disavowal of its trans students, but it did provide information to the U.S.D.A. showing that it was in compliance with Trump’s executive order. The U.S.D.A. then issued a press release headlined “University of Maine System Chooses Sanity.”
It seemed as though the university’s internal strategy was to look as MAGA as possible. One administrator sent a boilerplate e-mail to program officers for any grant that had been inexplicably frozen, stating that UMaine “does not permit a male studentathlete” to participate in “women’s sports by selfidentifying as female.” (The phrasing mirrored the Administration’s, avoiding the word “transgender.”) Zydlewski worked with Collins’s office to revise Sea Grant’s funding application, specifying how the program aligned with Administration priorities. Collins had many conversations with Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and Vice-President Vance. “Frequently, it was just getting them past certain verbiage,” she said. When Samantha Warren, the spokesperson for the UMaine system, took me around the campus in Orono, she highlighted projects that seemed to have MAGA appeal: new manufacturing techniques that might create jobs, 3-D-printed components for a nuclear-energy facility. Damian Brady, a marine-science professor, noted that Sea Grant-funded research could reduce the nation’s trade deficits. “We’re trying to make America’s seafood great again,” he said.
While the university has focussed on back-channel diplomacy, Maine’s Democratic government has gone to court. Aaron Frey, the state’s attorney general, said that Maine is involved in thirty-six lawsuits, including defending itself against a Justice Department suit over its K-12 Title IX policy. The complaint cites just three examples of transgender athletes on girls’ teams in Maine, including the pole-vaulter. “There is nobody who is identifying as transgender in order to win a medal,” Frey told me. “They know that the most powerful person in the world is going to target them.” Unlike UMaine, he sees no point in compromise. “I don’t think any deal that we make with the Trump Administration behind the scenes is going to be worth whatever it’s written on tomorrow,” he said.
Governor Mills has become something of a resistance folk hero. A sign reading “DO NOT CAPITULATE” sits in her office. A constituent mailed her a doily embroidered with the words “see you in court.” “What really blew me away was when the President stood there and said, ‘We are the law,’ ” Mills told me. “That’s just wrong. Law isn’t created by executive orders and tweets and social-media posts.” She said the Administration isn’t actually protecting women and girls, the way it purports to. “They’re targeting a small number of kids, and ignoring everything else that girls and women really need in life.”
After the state representative Laurel Libby posted about the pole-vaulter, the Maine legislature stripped Libby’s voting and speaking privileges, arguing that she had endangered the student, and demanded an apology. “I think it was politically inadvisable,” Libby said, of the censure. “It made folks more aware of the issue than they would have been otherwise.” (In May, the Supreme Court ordered the legislature to reinstate Libby’s voting privileges.) Still, she said that UMaine didn’t deserve to lose federal funds. “It’s unfortunate that Governor Mills and the Democrat majority are embroiling them in this by insisting on their extreme stance.” Mailman argued that the pressure on UMaine was justified, because universities have influence beyond their campuses: if the school took a public stance on Title IX, it could shift the rest of Maine. “There is a role that the university plays in the state that maybe even it minimizes,” she said.
Meanwhile, at UMaine, administrators spent the spring and summer more or less searching the couch cushions for quarters to keep various research projects afloat. The main campus looks classically New England—handsome brick buildings in decay, with about a billion dollars in deferred maintenance. Ferrini-Mundy joked that the leaky air-conditioners were exacerbating her allergies; Warren, the spokesperson, referred to one science lab as a “hovel.” At the end of August, UMaine was still missing about thirty million dollars in grants. It was unclear when, if ever, any of the money would be reinstated.
When students hear that the President wants to slash science funding, Collins told me, “they wonder, ‘Is America the place for me to pursue my goals?’ ” For Collins, this period of global competition is precisely the time to strengthen the compact between the government and higher ed. Congress has pushed back on Trump’s proposed cuts to the N.I.H. budget, instead supporting funding increases. “We don’t want to lag behind in discovery and scientific research,” Collins said. “That’s the risk if this link is stretched too thin or broken.” She added, “If we break that compact, the damage will last for generations.”
Trump’s battles with individual universities have made headlines, but the structural reforms happening in the background may prove more lasting. This summer, Madison Biedermann, a press aide, showed me around the Department of Education. “When I first came to work in January, it was a ghost town,” she said—everyone was still working remotely. Then Trump ordered federal employees to return to the office. The department has been focussing on team-building; we passed a wall that was covered with photos of puppies, whose names and owners colleagues had to guess.
In the spring, the department laid off nearly fourteen hundred of its more than four thousand employees, after roughly six hundred workers had already taken buyouts. Twenty states and the District of Columbia sued the Administration, arguing that the layoffs were meant to hobble the department out of existence, but the Supreme Court allowed the cuts to move forward.
The Department of Education was created by Jimmy Carter in 1979, fulfilling a campaign promise to a prominent teachers’ union. His goals were to increase attention to education with a Cabinet-level secretary and streamline funding. Conservative activists have spent the past forty-six years arguing that this was a terrible mistake. “If you were going to design an education system from scratch, I doubt very many people would say they’re going to tax local taxpayers, send it up to Washington, and filter it through the bureaucracy at the Department of Ed,” Lindsey Burke, a former Heritage Foundation scholar, told me. Burke helped draft a line-item blueprint for dismantling the department in 2020, and she wrote the chapter on education in Project 2025. In June, she joined the department with the aim of shrinking it.
Conservative K-12 activists like Burke have long led the charge to close the department. The irony is that much of its spending goes not to K-12 but to higher ed, for student grants and loans. At $1.6 trillion, the student-loan portfolio is only slightly smaller than the assets of Citigroup. Trump has said that he wants to move the portfolio to the Small Business Administration, an idea that former officials dismiss. “S.B.A. makes, in a year, about the number of loans that the department makes to Arizona State,” Jordan Matsudaira, the chief economist at the department under Biden, told me. Another idea, to transfer the portfolio to the Treasury Department, gets more serious consideration; Treasury has a legal mandate to collect debt owed to the government and has the tax data to streamline income-driven repayment. Still, the portfolio isn’t a flash drive that someone could just walk from Education to Treasury. It’s more like a tremendously complicated, resource-starved digital network, with platforms for various loan functions grafted onto one another. Much of the work of administering federal student aid is basically I.T.—maintaining the data systems and overseeing contractors who deal with borrowers. “In practicality, it’s just far too complicated to get done,” Colleen Campbell, who previously led the student-loan office at Federal Student Aid, said.
Besides, moving the portfolio would be like trying to disassemble a plane mid-flight. Conservatives passed major reforms in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which shifted higher ed away from the Obama-era ideal of “college for all.” It awards federal funds to low-income students to pursue certain short-term certificates or training programs—an initiative that the Education Department will oversee. The department also has to implement the bill’s changes to federal student aid: it limits how much some people can borrow and eliminates certain types of borrowing entirely, such as Grad Plus loans, which conservatives see as subsidies for useless master’s degrees. The bill also establishes penalties for degree programs whose graduates can’t earn a basic income.
There are more reforms ahead: conservatives want to overhaul the accreditation system, which gives schools access to billions in federal financial aid. Trump has called this his “secret weapon,” and new accreditors, including an association championed by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, are now working to become gatekeepers for that money. The Administration has also offered a handful of universities special access to federal funds if they agree to follow Trump’s vision for things like admissions and “maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas.”
“One form of conservatism is, we use the government tools to make this sector look like what conservatives like about higher education. That’s the heavy-handed approach,” Beth Akers, a senior fellow at A.E.I., said. “Then there’s the more ideologically pure, small-government version, which is to do less and let the sector evolve.” What the Administration has produced, she said, are “mashup compromises.” She added, “I think it’s generous to call it being in tension, rather than straight-up hypocrisy.”
There’s one major unresolved question about the Administration’s higher-ed agenda: whether it’s legal. Civil-rights laws, including Title VI, prescribe a long, detailed process for resolving alleged violations, which includes giving universities a chance to respond and fix things voluntarily. The Administration has sidestepped this process by maintaining that its conflicts with universities, though centered on civil rights, are not civil-rights investigations but contract disputes; universities are allegedly violating the agreements they made with the government by breaking the law.
“No lawyer worth their mettle would think that they could actually defend that this is a contract dispute,” Catherine Lhamon, who ran the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department under Obama and Biden, told me. “I am the most aggressive civil-rights lawyer I know. Had I thought we could use this approach to protect civil rights, we would have.” In May, the Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, told CNBC that “universities should continue to be able to do research, as long as they’re abiding by the laws and are in synch, I think, with the Administration and what the Administration is trying to accomplish.” For Lhamon, that remark was “jaw-dropping”: “That is thought control, that we have a President who dictates what can be researched, what can be learned and understood in every university in the country.”
In September, Harvard scored a significant legal victory when a district-court judge concluded that the Administration had “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault,” violating the First Amendment, administrative law, and Title VI along the way. Recently, two preliminary injunctions forced the government to restore more than five hundred million dollars in grants to U.C.L.A. Another district-court judge deemed the Education Department’s D.E.I. guidance—which threatened investigations into the “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences” in diversity offices on campuses—unconstitutionally vague. In another case, involving hundreds of millions of dollars in terminated science grants, William G. Young, a Reagan-appointed district-court judge, invoked the long-standing compact between the federal government and higher education. “The American people have enjoyed a historical norm of a largely apolitical scientific research agency supporting research in an elegant, merit-based approach,” he wrote. “That historical norm changed on January 20, 2025.”
And yet these wins may be temporary—the Administration is pursuing appeals. The Supreme Court has signalled sympathy for the Administration’s argument that its conflicts with universities are largely contract disputes; it has issued an order allowing N.I.H. funding cuts to move forward. The Justices have also harshly criticized lower-court judges who have blocked the Administration’s actions, including Young, who went so far as to apologize from the bench.
Cartoon by Jared Nangle
To hear conservatives tell it, the techniques that they’re using against universities were pioneered by Democrats. “If there is an original sin in what changed the landscape of higher ed, it was when the Obama Office for Civil Rights decided to use some extraordinarily dubious research regarding campus sexual assault,” Hess, the A.E.I. senior fellow, told me. The Administration put schools on notice to address sexual-misconduct claims more aggressively, or else they’d be penalized or investigated. “The last thing you wanted to do was to be dragged in court and have the federal government accuse you of being a rape apologist,” Hess said.
Officials from former Democratic Administrations didn’t exactly sign on to this Frankenstein-like narrative. (“You have created a monster, and it will destroy you!”) They argued that there’s a difference between threatening to investigate and jumping straight to the punishment. “We can use legal words for it, like ‘due process’ and ‘procedural rights,’ ” Toby Merrill, a former principal deputy general counsel under Biden, told me. “But ultimately, threatening to obliterate anyone to try to get them to do something that you want them to do, when that thing is not legally required—it doesn’t seem to me like treating people fairly.” Lhamon put it more bluntly: “We don’t live under a king in this country. We don’t give unilateral authority to the President to make decisions about every walk of life for all Americans. This President is operating as if we do.”
Even if Trump doesn’t win on the legal merits, by the time cases are finally resolved, serious damage will have been done. Colleges “don’t get put back to where they were,” Kvaal, the Biden Under-Secretary, said. “They’ve had to make due without that research funding, without those student visas, under a cloud of uncertainty.” The result, he said, is “a climate of fear. You don’t want to be targeted by the Administration, even if you feel that the facts and the law are on your side.”
This summer, I met Kvaal for lunch at Immigrant Food, a “gastroadvocacy” restaurant that has become something of a gathering spot for exiled Democrats in D.C. He was in a reflective mood. “I don’t think they get enough credit for picking issues that make us”—Democrats—“really mad, but where most people don’t agree with us, like due-process rights for El Salvadoran gangsters,” he said. Kvaal, who helped design Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness plans, admitted that these efforts, along with the proposed transgender-athlete policies, showed that Democrats are often “responsive to the groups more than a broad segment of voters.”
“The groups”—a shorthand for the advocacy organizations that drive the Democratic base—“are very good at articulating where we need to get to,” Kvaal said. “But part of democracy is persuasion, and perhaps because our country has been a fifty-fifty country for so long, we’ve kind of lost sight of that. You can’t help people if you’re not going to win elections.” He understands the populist backlash against higher education. “A small number of élite institutions have really benefitted from growing inequality,” he said. “Their endowments have skyrocketed with the stock market. The value of their ticket to the upper class has grown. While those of us in the higher-education community see ourselves as proponents of upward mobility, there are ways in which we have also benefitted from our role as gatekeepers.”
And yet, for all of Kvaal’s soul-searching, he kept returning to a basic point: this is not how the government is supposed to work. “If they had gone to Congress and said, ‘We want to eliminate these programs, and we want to lay off these staff,’ and Congress had voted, at least you would have a policy-making legitimacy,” he said. “Instead, they’ve done it in an extralegal way.”
Just before the school year began, I visited Hunter Farm, in central Maine. Sue Hunter has owned the property since 2009; before that, it belonged to her husband’s family. For years, she raised dairy cows and grew grass and corn for animal feed. Then, in 2021, she learned that her fields were contaminated with high levels of PFAS—the “forever chemicals” used in Teflon and Gore-Tex. The problem, now affecting farms across the country, is grave: PFAS exposure can increase the risk of thyroid issues, cancer, and other diseases.
The farm contamination was a result of government policy. In the seventies, after Congress passed the Clean Water Act, forbidding sewage dumping, the E.P.A. encouraged wastewater-treatment plants to offer sewage sludge to farmers as fertilizer. What seemed like a win-win—cheap sewage disposal, free nutrients for farms—was actually toxic. Hunter’s farm was rendered almost unusable. At fifty-nine, she took a job as a home health aide in order to keep her land. “Many people said, ‘Sell it. Put solar in it. Put houses in it.’ I didn’t want to,” she told me. “It’s a legacy, being in our family and being a farmer.”
The state connected Hunter with researchers, including some from UMaine, who were tackling the PFAS crisis. Agronomists tested her soil and proposed ideas, such as mixing a form of charcoal with the soil to neutralize the chemicals. With grants from federal agencies, including the E.P.A., they launched a multiyear research project at Hunter Farm. She and her family members came on as subcontractors, preparing research plots and tilling the land; the money kept them afloat.
Then, just before their first sampling, the researchers received a letter from the E.P.A. saying that the project’s funding had been terminated, as it “no longer aligned with agency priorities.” Similar projects in Texas and Michigan also received termination notices. “The research is so important, and these numbers are so needed—there was no way I was going to let the season go by,” Ellen Mallory, a UMaine scientist, told me.
When I visited Hunter Farm, three UMaine students were weeding research plots—Gen Z kids in wide-legged pants and matching baseball caps. One of them, Lilli Mandras, told me, “I just want everyone to feel better and have good food.” The sentiment wasn’t explicitly MAHA. But it wasn’t not MAHA. When UMaine filed its appeal to the E.P.A., the university emphasized the connection to the Make America Healthy Again agenda. The Administration has signalled its own concerns about PFAS contamination: in May, Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, testified that this issue “is very close to my family’s heart.”
About a month after the grant was cancelled, it was restored, although the E.P.A. claimed this decision was unrelated to the university’s appeal. You could read the reversal as an instance of government responsiveness: the government moved to make a cut, the university argued against it, and the government changed course. But academic research doesn’t work on that timetable. “If somebody can send you an e-mail just eleven days before your first sampling and say, ‘Stop right now,’ what do we do?” Mallory asked. All their earlier work was a taxpayer investment, and it was nearly wasted. “Scrambling will not work in the long term,” she said.
Mallory pointed out that PFAS is an American problem. Companies have mass-produced waterproof jackets and nonstick pans, and we’ve all used them. Similarly, “our little effort here—we need it to be a federal response,” she said. It’s ultimately the government’s responsibility to find solutions to the problems it created—and it can do so only with the help of universities, these imperfect institutions that create knowledge, support communities, and train the next generation to care about fixing the country. “We do need the federal resources,” Mallory said. “But the feds, and society at large—they need us, too.” ♦