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Mushtaq Gunja: Hello and welcome to dotEDU, the public policy podcast from the American Council on Education. I'm Mushtaq Gunja, along with my co-host as always, Jon Fansmith, Sarah Spreitzer. Jon, Sarah, how are you?
Jon Fansmith: I'm good. I think we're all doing this from home. Is that right? Or Sarah, are you in the office?
Sarah Spreitzer: No. I am in the office. I'm holding the fort down.
Mushtaq Gunja: If you think those framed pictures ... I don't have anything nearly as nice in my house.
Jon Fansmith: Are you at a hotel? Oh my goodness.
Mushtaq Gunja: Always. In bucolic, cloudy, Cleveland, where the wind off the lake this morning had the wind chill at 54 degrees.
Sarah Spreitzer: Wow.
Jon Fansmith: Nice.
Mushtaq Gunja: Not good. Cold.
Jon Fansmith: Hey, it's nice to be somewhere cold when DC is 87 or whatever it is today.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon and Sarah, how were your Father's Days? Jon-
Jon Fansmith: Lovely. Very nice.
Sarah Spreitzer: I'll let Jon go first there.
Jon Fansmith: Super relaxing. Lots of love and attention. My oldest daughter gave me just the sweetest card. Really thoughtful. I don't know. It was just a lovely day. No huge fireworks, but is a really great day.
Sarah Spreitzer: Did they follow it up at all today asking for money or a ride?
Jon Fansmith: Oh, yeah. Money and screen time and take me out of camp early. I don't care that you're doing a live podcast. That's not as important-
Sarah Spreitzer: Right. Right.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. My kids were surprisingly well-behaved yesterday and then today they were like, "Okay, that's over now. Now we can start going back to our usual self."
Jon Fansmith: What about you, Mushtaq, were you in Cleveland for Father's Day?
Mushtaq Gunja: No. I took the first flight out this morning. I was camping out at Rocky Gap State Park, just a little bit west of Hagerstown. Between Hagerstown and Morgantown in rural Maryland, which would be great. I don't love camping, but I got to spend time with the kids. And with the older one leaving us, as much time as I can get then we'll take. And both of you, we got a lot to get to, we'll have a great conversation today about the shifting landscape where OCR is heading in civil rights. Want to talk a little bit about appropriations. There's a whole set of interesting things that are happening around international students. So we'll have a good conversation about all that, but I wanted to ask you both if you had World Cup fever as I do.
Jon Fansmith: Oh yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: I do not.
Jon Fansmith: I guess that falls on predictable patterns.
Sarah Spreitzer: I'm happy to talk to both of you about Widow's Bay, which I watched in one week, but I have nothing to add.
Mushtaq Gunja: Okay. Here's what we're going to do. Jon and I will watch Widow's Bay. It's got Matthew Rhys in it, right?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. Yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: I like him. He's awesome. We'll do that. You will come with us to the round of 32 US watch party on the National Mall.
Sarah Spreitzer: Okay. I'll do it.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, you in?
Jon Fansmith: Oh, I'm in. Yeah.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. Let's go.
Mushtaq Gunja: Any listeners that want to come, just let us know. We'll meet up. We'll talk a little public policy and then we'll watch the US hopefully win in the round of 32. Okay. Sorry, friends. Breaking news late last week. I got an alert on my phone from the New York Times saying that the Department of Education was moving a couple of big functions, civil rights and then special education to different parts of the federal government. Special education was heading over to HHS and the Office of Civil Rights, or at least some of the civil rights functions were moving over to DOJ. It wasn't entirely clear to me from the reports exactly how much of the functions we're going to be moving over. Jon, Sarah, Jon first, maybe, what do you make of it?
Jon Fansmith: There's a lot to unpack here. The top level thing is the obvious one, which is this is now the ... I don't know how many. 30th or something.
Sarah Spreitzer: It's like the 11th. No. It seems like 30th.
Jon Fansmith: I know. Full dramatic exaggeration. Right. Efforts to move programs and offices at the Department of Education to other agencies through the use of these interagency agreements. And so to that extent, it's pretty consistent with what we've seen. That said, when they started talking about this process, we circled a couple different functions at the Department of Education as the ones that were really significant and Federal Student Aid certainly a huge one. And even there, they've only touched on that a little bit with moving some of the collections efforts to treasury. But OCR is a big one. For a lot of campuses, that is the office at the Department of Education with the most significant direct interaction they might have. And given its responsibilities for overseeing the entirety of civil rights law in the educational context, it's incredibly important office. And I think there is a reason they waited so long to do this, they were trying to make these processes work, but this is big for a lot of reasons. This has not been an administration that has shied away from reinterpreting what discrimination looks like in the educational context, trying to put their stamp on it. They've very clearly focused on issues around antisemitism, around what they perceive as discrimination against white and Asian students, staff and others, but they haven't really leaned in on a lot of the other areas of civil rights enforcement.
So just a couple data points I want to throw out there because I think it makes it pretty clear. Last year we now know that the Office for Civil Rights at Ed received 9,000 complaints. They had a backlog of over 20,000 complaints coming in. Of those 9,000 new complaints, they dismissed over 7,000 of those without opening an investigation based on their view that either they were without merit or there wasn't sufficient cause to proceed. Of the other issues, the huge backlog they had handled and these new complaints, they reached 112 resolution agreements, essentially finding an agreement between the either school district or school or institution and the government on how to proceed. On average, in the first Trump term, they're doing about 818 resolution agreements per year on average. So they're doing about one eighth of the activity they did in terms of resolving these matters.
What's more across those 112 that they resolved, there were none for sexual assault, none for sexual harassment, none for gender discrimination, discrimination by sexual identity, none for discrimination on the basis of disability. Those are the areas in which overwhelmingly the majority of complaints come into the Department of Education. It's overwhelmingly the area where OCR has done the bulk of its work historically. To do no work in those areas is a pretty clear statement as to what their views and enforcement priorities are. And now ... And I promise I'll wrap this up, though you know Mushtaq, I could talk about this forever. This move to the Department of Justice, the MOU is vague. It says Ed retains the authority to investigate, to select cases for resolution. They have the ultimate decision. Really seemingly the only change in the MOU is that justice can request that they get to take over cases, which is new. Usually they have to be referred to justice from Ed for justice to be involved. I think the bigger issue is you are moving and really that's because there's statutory obligations. The real effect is they're trying to off source it.
And when you move from this model you have at the Department of Education, which by law is directed towards finding resolution, that bylaw is structured to give institutions a chance to work with the administration to resolve a problem, to solve the problem for students. Let's be clear, the reason that is in place is not because it's a finding of law that they're trying to get to. It's because there is a student or a staff member who has a problem who feels they have been discriminated against and you want to resolve that in a timely manner so that their education isn't disrupted. Now you're moving it to justice where the goal has always been litigation, the enforcement of these laws, civil criminal proceedings, initiating those, being the prosecutors of the government. They don't have the specialized expertise in educational discrimination that OCR does. They don't have the outlook or the background or the experience for a resolution process. So what are you going to see? I think it's very likely we will see a much more adversarial approach. And then going back to all those data points I put in, that's what this administration has chosen to do. They've targeted a couple areas that they think politically resonate and they have chosen to take a very aggressive enforcement approach rather than a resolution approach and they haven't done the resolution work.
So this will, I think, really greatly compound what we've already seen from this administration in ways that are, let me be clear, bad for students, bad for those who are looking for a quick resolution to issues they're encountering. And of course, bad for institutions too, because you've sidestepped a really useful and productive process for one that's costly, expensive, time-consuming, and adversarial. Far less likely to produce a good outcome.
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, and I want to take a step back. I totally agree, Jon. I think this is not good for our students, for institutions, for anyone that cares about civil rights. But there's a reason that these were like ... They've been doing these interagency agreements for over six months, right? There's 14 of them. I went and I read the press release this morning. I was reading the fact sheet that they put out. It looks very similar to the other fact sheets that they put out for the other interagency agreements, meaning there's not much there. It repeats what the office is supposed to do and where it may sit at the other agency, but doesn't really delineate who's going to do what. And we are also at a time when we've gone through all of the reductions in force, the RIFs. And so what we've seen with the other interagency agreements is Ed is sending detailees to these other agencies, remember to demonstrate that you don't need a Department of Education. And I think it's very telling that these are some of the last offices, at least in regards to higher education, to get these interagency agreements, because it's much harder to justify that they don't have to sit at the Department of Ed.
OCR is one of the largest offices. I deal in my portfolio with the programs that got moved to the Department of State. Ed is detailing two employees, two whole employees when there used to be ... Again, my programs are not big, but maybe a dozen people that worked on those. And so now they're moving two employees over to state to work on them. OCR had hundreds of lawyers on staff. They also had those regional offices. So if they follow the path of putting out the press release, we're putting out this MOU that doesn't really say anything, who are they going to send over to the Department of Justice and will it be the same where you pick up the phone to call and you're talking to an Ed employee but they're sitting in a different building than what they'd previously sat at?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. Those are such good points, Sarah, because I think one of the things, they closed seven of the 12 OCR regional offices and concentrated essentially in a handful of remaining offices. There's less than 50% of the OCR staffing that was in place when the administration took office. So you're moving people, you're adding layers of bureaucracy to it, you're adding confusion to change in mission. There's no reason to think this will move more effectively. And is that intentional? Is that the administration being consistent to their goal of dismantling the department without thinking through the next steps?
I do think that data we've seen about what they are choosing to investigate on, what they're choosing to enforce speaks to this. They are in a lot of ways, walking away from their civil rights obligations to prioritize certain areas. And so there's less than 25% of the civil rights staff at the Department of Justice from when this administration took over. It's not like they're going to a place with great capacity there. So I think your point is well taken. There is this process in place. Now, the other thing I'll say is one of the reasons I think they waited was they are caught between a rock and a hard place. They have committed to this gutting the Department of Education and they waited as long as they could to move these functions ... Sarah, that's such a great point, hard to envision why it makes sense for them not to be-
Sarah Spreitzer: It's special everyday. Special ed along with OCR.
Jon Fansmith: And I think this might be ... And we haven't really talked about Congress yet, but I think this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back with Congress. And in part, civil rights. Civil rights hugely contentious, but both parties have a real interest in being seen as advocates for people who are being discriminated against. You can interpret that in lots of ways, but especially, and then the other one which we haven't been talking about as much, but the special education, the disability support programs, disability education programs, those are enormously bipartisanly popular on the Hill. Members of Congress from both sides make a real priority of being advocates for those programs. The comments that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has made around particularly autistic students and their abilities to learn, those are not old and the communities that support students with disabilities are very, very concerned and have raised that concern.
We've already seen Chairman Cassidy and HELP talk about Congress moving legislation to bar the department from making these changes. There is a lot that you can maybe as a moderate or even conservative Republican on the hill say, well, does the office for post-secondary education need to be at its own agency? Could it be at labor? I think we know what we think. But there's at least a rhetorical place you can put yourself where you can say, this is government efficiency. When you're getting into these really sensitive functions, really personal, really impactful and the kinds of things that a screw-up by one of these offices is going to resonate across headlines for a long time, you want them to proceed with a lot more caution. And I don't think anyone's getting the sense this was well-thought-out, well managed, deliberately transitioned away that's actually going to benefit students.
Sarah Spreitzer: And thinking about the goal of the administration is ultimately to return education back to the states, but there's never been ... There's a reason that we have IDEA, the individuals with disabilities in Education Act because states were not fulfilling their federal obligations. There's a reason that we have an Office of Civil Rights and it's because states were not fulfilling civil rights obligations. And so I think you're right. I think Congress ... This is going to be a much harder one for them to sit back and say, we'll wait to see how this plays out. Because the secretary has always been clear, she's not going against Congress. This is meant to be pilot programs almost to demonstrate that you don't need a Department of Education. But I think especially for those two functions, it's going to be very difficult.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. No. I think you're right.
Mushtaq Gunja: That point about the returning education to states is such an important one, Sarah, and I think it really is running headlong into the reality that states can't enforce federal law. That's just not the way that it is. these sorts of resolutions need to happen at the federal level. I think they didn't fully understand too that the Department of Education is not that large a department, really doesn't have that many employees. And actually a lot of the employees are doing this sort of work, which is not the work that can get returned to the states. You can return the dollars to the states. Some of the administration can get returned, but not this. And so it's really quite frustrating actually.
And it was very interesting to see Secretary McMahon in justifying some of this move to talk about that return to the states again. But I don't know that she got the next question, which is, wait, what? Or maybe probably asked slightly more articulately than, wait what? But it is that. Just digging a little bit deeper, it makes it all a little bit confusing.
Now, I guess I'm just curious, Sarah, Jon ... I guess I have a view on this, but if the real difference is you call over to either DOJ or Department of Ed and you're talking to the same person they're just like, we've rearranged the deck chairs, that would be annoying potentially. It might add a layer of confusion, but isn't a problem itself. Jon, you noted that moving over to the Department of Justice may actually change the orientation of how we try to resolve these cases. Is that what you think is likely to happen? I just can't exactly see how this is going to play out. Partially because ... Well, I've got a whole other thought here about whether they're actually fulfilling their statutory duties because I think they aren't. But I've got a real worry that the people that have signed up to be attorneys at the Department of Education and OCR, often very talented mid-career attorneys that did something before and probably could have continued to do that and often making a lot more money in the private sector, but wanted to protect student civil rights as a career are going to leave. We've seen this at DOJ/OCR. We've seen this a little bit voluntarily at DOEOCR. What's your take on how this is all going to actually play out?
Jon Fansmith: There's no guarantees in part because they've been so vague about this, but you and I are thinking along the same lines. I think the biggest question here is who will be making decisions about which complaints, and frankly, as we've seen from Ed's OCR office and times which news reports to follow up on, even if they don't have an actual complaint against and institution. And what we have seen particularly at civil rights at DOJ is a very, very adversarial aggressive politicized process whereas it relates to high education, individual institutions that are seen as contrary to the administration's policies get really aggressive enforcement actions taken against them. UVA is a great example of the involvement of the Civil Rights Office at Justice getting involved in the presidential role and everything like that. And will the people who are moving over from ED if they are willing to make this move want to work in that kind of a climate, see that as what they committed to do? I think it's reasonable to think a lot of them won't.
What's more important in a lot of ways is, it doesn't in some ways matter because this is what the administration's been doing. What we know from OCR at Ed is when it's operating at the Department of Education, they're still not stepping out to do anything other than these politicized very narrow focus areas of discrimination. So in some ways, will it change anything? Maybe not. Maybe they're just functionally codifying a way of preferencing their enforcement authority that I think I agree with you, I think walks away from what their actual statutory obligations are.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. Just one quick note for the audience. It looks like we're having a hard time getting the chat working, but we're working on it. In the meantime, I think if you're trying to chat, it may only be going to the hosts and panelists and not to everyone. If you have a question, if you want to throw it in the Q&A, that's probably a slightly easier way for us to be able to see it, but we're actively working on getting the chat working too. Okay. Friends, Jon, I totally agree with you that I think the numbers prove the point that they have decided that they are not going to resolve any cases that are around disability. They're not going to investigate anything around sexual assault Title IX. What remedy do our students have? Is this just these complaints are just going to get stuck in limbo until the next administration looks at them? What happens?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And I will just say, it looked like, Sarah, maybe you had something to say too.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: I think one of the big problems will be that if you are a student and what you know is that you have an unresponsive federal civil rights process that is essentially no longer available to you unless you are issuing a complaint in one of these areas, your recourse you can work with your state, more likely you'll probably seek some form of civil suit or other measure to try to compel your institution to address your concerns. What we know about that is that is a process that almost inherently does not lead to a quick resolution. It is expensive. It is time-consuming. Again, because it is a battle in court, it becomes adversarial much like what the department's doing. Forecloses these options of a quick mutual resolution. So it is the worst pathway forward for everyone involved. But if it's the only recourse left, how can you blame somebody for taking what options are left to them?
Sarah Spreitzer: Mushtaq, playing out next year if the majority changes at all in the Congress, I think we'll likely see a lot of oversight hearings on a whole host of issues, but it will be interesting because, well, Secretary McMahon has spoken about these interagency agreements. The other secretaries have not really talked about them. And when you talk to politicals within those other agencies, they're very excited to take onto the work, but they're still like, "But we don't know exactly how it's going to work." So Ed is still very much driving this bus, but we haven't heard from those other agencies about the role they're going to play or what exactly they're doing.
And then the second thing I think is unfortunately, I think this is going to be a huge waste of money, whether it's those students that are going to have to bring civil suits, whether it's going to be rehiring people to work at OCR, all of those things, it's going to cost a lot of money that could otherwise go to programs at the Department of Education that helps students that are pushing that money out to grants. I try and explain that, that by breaking this stuff apart and in the way that they're doing it's really going to result in a lot more federal funding I think than if you just dissolve the Department of Education.
Mushtaq Gunja: I think we've seen this over the course of the last 15 months where agency after agency having done some version of a RIF for firing and then realizing they need to bring at least some of those folks back. So I think that's right.
Jon Fansmith: Well, and Secretary McMahon said at her appropriations hearing. It's confusing because they're proposing a cut OCR's budget by 35 million, but before they announced this move, she said, "Oh, we need to hire more attorneys to deal with the caseload that we're facing." Okay.
Sarah Spreitzer: And is that Ed hiring or DOG hiring, right? [inaudible 00:25:32].
Jon Fansmith: Right. That was in the context of they hadn't announced the move yet. So it begs a lot of questions about how well-thought-out this entire process was and what was decided when that she would be making those statements and then within about six weeks announcing this kind of a transition, but set that aside.
Mushtaq Gunja: I'm going to move us, but I've been struck a little bit by how many questions at the hearings Secretary McMahon's been getting on this. I think that's only going to increase because I think this is a safe place for both Republicans and Democrats to press the administration on protecting students. And that's just a good place for both folks to be in. And if those numbers don't start evening out, I don't think they can live in a world where they're just ignoring 80, 90% of the complaints that are coming in, just not making any progress on any of them. I just don't think that's tenable. I don't think-
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, it's illegal. There's laws in place that you can't just ignore a complaint.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. At some point standing will be granted and students are not just going to have a civil suit against the institution against their harassers, but somebody will have standing to be able to sue the government to be able to try to enforce law. And it is very difficult to do. Suits against federal government for reasons that are complicated, they're difficult to do. But you don't usually have numbers that are this striking.
Can we talk appropriations, friends? So the House put out their appropriations bill for FY27, lots of very interesting things in there from a department from an education point of view. 10% cut, if I'm reading this right, to the Department of Education, but some stuff that was maybe a little bit surprising. Pell basically in place with a $50 increase, some elimination of subsidized loans maybe to offset some of those costs, some cuts to work study and SEOG, I think pretty big ones. And then maybe a modest increase to TRIO and GEAR UP, if I'm looking at that correctly. Jon then, Sarah, what should we make of this? What struck you about the House Bill?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I think there's two narratives that came out of the House Bill. The first is a continuation of last year, which is that Congress is not the administration and Congress is unhappy with the administration's funding policies and what we saw in certainly in the House loan, and let's be clear, we would always in this current political environment expect the Senate to probably be more generous to higher education programs than the House would be. So the House we tend to think of as the low watermark and the Senate as the high watermark and usually where they resolve is somewhere in between. The House is pretty high. They did not make the eliminations the administration was looking for. They did not make the cuts the administration was asking for. They put increases into ... TRIO is a great example. They not only put more money into TRIO, which the administration had sought to eliminate, they put language in saying that what the administration's trying to do by radically reshaping the Upward Bound and Educational Opportunity Center grant programs would be blocked under the funding bills. And even if these bills will not pass in time, that is a shot across about the administration about a very specific area where they are looking and saying, "We do not agree with what you are doing." And so that is all good news.
I think the other narrative though is we are beginning to get in this environment into the place where hard decisions are being made by appropriators and it's going to leave some real challenges. I know research side will probably clarify all these, but Pell is the one that I think is most important. There's a $50 increase for Pell Grants to the maximum award. It is not a huge increase, but to get an increase is a good thing. The problem, of course, is the way that they choose to pay for that is eliminating subsidized Stafford loans for undergraduate students. That saves, I think ... And Emmanuel, if he's watching, will be annoyed with my getting the number wrong. But I think it saves approximately $16 billion and that's a little bit more than is needed to fully fund Pell Grants out at this level through the end of fiscal year '27, so a year and a half of activity.
The problem with that is you're trading a permanent benefit to low income students having their interest paid while they're in school on their loans for a one-time one-year fix of the Pell Grant program. It's not going to be sufficient, but in a year we're going to be having the same conversation, where do we find the money? The administration, oddly enough, the one contrast in this case came forward and said, "Look, put the money in, fix the problem long-term, adjust the baseline, set it up so that these changes made to Pell that we supported are covered and students aren't losing a benefit as a result." So you have this little bit of attention. What's very clear is among the appropriators whose job is to allocate the money, they have to come at some of these policy choices, not from what do we think is the best policy, but where do we find the dollars?
And in the absence of another place to find dollars, the Labor HHS Education Committee is going to try to find the funding in their pool to maintain a program. Hard choices are happening and what we need is more support from the administration and certainly people off the committee to weigh in and say, "Look, there are other ways to solve this problem you need to prioritize." So those I think are two big things, at least on the education provisions. But Sarah, I know research has been tumultuous to say the least.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. And I think it's related a bit back to the education program. So the National Institutes of Health, which is probably the biggest funder for extramural research, they would get a slight increase in the House Bill. The president had asked for a cut, but not the draconian cut that had been requested in 2026. But is NIH spending out the money? And I guess I would ask that to you, Jon. You touched on the TRIO programs, they're rewriting the TRIO program. They just announced the RFP for the Title VI international programs and they appear to have rewritten that one. And so it's almost like Congress is going to continue to fund things that they believe that they've created by statute and the administration is saying, "Thanks for the funds. Now we're going to use these funds to further politicize these grant programs that everyone had one understanding of but we're going to change the purpose for."
So I'm very happy that the House saw that it was important to fund the National Institutes of Health, but we're still having a really hard time getting grant competitions out there. The other thing is they're putting the blocking language regarding indirect costs in all of the appropriations bills that's not in the House Bill yet. Rather, they have a language that says schools with private institutions with endowments of a certain size will actually be capped at a 30% indirect cost rate. Again, going after those elite institutions, which I think is a very telling of where the House's attitude is towards higher education. They want to support us, but they're still not completely bought in on pushing out these research and education dollars. And I think that they're more willing to allow the administration ... Like how do they want to make changes to these programs? But I will say, Jon, you didn't mention the Senate. Oh, I guess you did talk about the Senate a bit. But we have to get through the Senate first. And so anything we're seeing here, it's not going to become law tomorrow. It's just an indication of where the House is.
Mushtaq Gunja: I'm sorry, go ahead, Jon.
Jon Fansmith: No, sorry. One point I just wanted to add, and I think Sarah really cut to the marrow of this, but one of the things we are seeing with this relationship between the administration and Congress is, so last year the administration shifted funds wildly, canceled funding, did a lot of disruptive behavior and Congress responded by putting limitations on whether they could transfer funds between programs, being more explicit, setting levels across program funding. And so now we've seen the administration has responded to that by doing the things Sarah was talking about. Okay. So we have to fund TRIO programs, but we can change the terms of the grant proposal so that we're funding the things we want to fund, not the things that this program was created to do and has been doing for decades. And so what did you see? You saw language in House that says, "Okay, we're going to borrow you from making changes to TRIO programs." There's an evolution of back and forth that's going on here.
I'm sure the administration thinks this is working to their advantage. It seems like a very shortsighted policy because the responses, and we've already seen Republican members both on and off appropriations talking about maybe we need to start doing blanket bans on their authority because if we can't trust them to color within the lines when we draw the lines for them, maybe we need to take away some of their ability to do it at all. And we will see what will happen. But I think Sarah's point about this still needs to go to the Senate. There are a lot of members in the Senate right now, including Chairman Cassidy of the Help Committee, including some of the folks on appropriations who aren't feeling kindly towards the President. And if you've been paying attention to how the relationship with Majority Leader Thune and the White House is going, they're not likely to get more of their views reflected in the Senate than they were in the House. So this is not playing out the way I think they want it to play out.
Sarah Spreitzer: But Jon, in the meantime, the RFPs are going out. I think for our institutions, they can call their member of Congress, they can say, "Protect TRIO. We're very worried about this." We all know this legislation isn't going to move until at the earliest October, we'll see a continuing resolution. The way the administration is doing these grant competitions ... And again, this is another priority is they're doing these very fast turnaround times. And if you want to compete, you have a month to get your response in. For many of these programs, they're completely new priorities and things. And so I think our institutions are scrambling to keep up. I think that goes to one of the other goals of the administration, which was outlined in Project 2025, which was some of these programs we don't think the federal government should be supporting and they're killing it through this or again, putting a state priority in some of these competitions and thereby returning the programs back to the state. So it's really very, very smart.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. No. They're trying to move faster than courts and Congress can respond. And I think that is ... We saw it last year, there's a lot of places where the research funding being suspended or canceled was reversed by courts, but it wasn't immediately. And in some cases it was destroyed work that was underway because the interruption. You know me, I'm not being overly optimistic about what this means, but I do think-
Sarah Spreitzer: I know. You seem very optimistic. You're like, "Hey, appropriations."
Jon Fansmith: Look, it's not so much optimism as I think you see a pretty clear pattern of the administration came in and had a clear plan and flooded the field and was able to accomplish a lot of chaos and disruption. And what we have seen is now a growing response both by ... Let me be clear, by Republicans and Democrats in Congress and by the public as a whole and the administration is now having to push harder. The harder they push, the bigger the swings they take, the more vulnerable they are to having those things not only overturned, but engendering broader and broader opposition. So I think they played the cards they had a little bit too strongly. Now, who knows? I've been wrong about things before, I could be wrong about this, but the tide certainly seems to be shifting against them.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. I think from taking a big step back and just comparing what the president's budget was or his proposed budget to what this House approach is, and Congress has the power of the purse. This is much better and has been a rejection, I think, of what the president had proposed, especially around TRIO, which is I know a significant import to so many of the folks that listen to the podcasts that are here. I can't help but think that some of the pressure that our institutions have been putting, the phone calls that they've been making to their members of Congress, the advocacy that all of us have been doing has had some effect.
Jon Fansmith: We know it has. We absolutely know it has.
Mushtaq Gunja: I just think that we got to keep that up for the rest of ... We just got to keep it up forever, probably. Just to keep justifying the importance of these programs because I think it is having some effect. Sarah, that doesn't mean that, man, all things research right now are obviously a mess, and there are a lot of things that the administration can do.
Sarah Spreitzer: And we have the uniform guidance out there for comment and we talked a lot about the summary on the last podcast, but I think they're up to 20,000 comments, which is another great example of people getting out there and having their voice heard. But I will say my one bright spot since I poo-pooed Jon's hope on appropriations is that I've actually been on panels recently with federal officials and I've started doing meetings and for the longest time there were those restrictions on whether or not federal employees could interact or go to conferences or talk about some of these changes. And I think that that is shifting. And so even if these priorities are not what we're expecting in the RFPs, what I'm finding is there's actually somebody that you can talk to about it. And to me, that's hopeful.
Mushtaq Gunja: You mentioned uniform guidance. This is of course the OMB guidance that dictates how federal contracts are supposed to go-
Sarah Spreitzer: Grants.
Mushtaq Gunja: And grants.
Sarah Spreitzer: It's everything to do with federal grant making and the proposed changes would actually change it from guidance to a regulation, which all federal agencies would have to follow for the purposes of making grants.
Mushtaq Gunja: So Sarah, we spent, I don't know, 20 minutes talking about this in our last podcast and outlined the major points, the major changes to the informed guidance. Sarah, Jon, what's happened in the last couple of weeks? So this I think was proposed two and a half, three weeks ago now, 20,000 comments. What else should we be watching out for? What advice do you have for our institutions?
Sarah Spreitzer: So I think Congress ... And I think if people have Republican members that they can talk to about the impact that this will have on research funding at their institution, that's really important, especially the changes to the peer review process, the changes moving from fixed amount awards, meaning that you get a lump sum of money to incurred costs, meaning that you're going to have to submit receipts every time you want to draw it down. Moving to all of these very administrative burden type things, which is just going to make it much more difficult and much more costly to do research. I think have those conversations.
We saw in the House when they were considering the Labor Age Appropriations Bill, a Democratic Congresswoman introduced blocking language that would be applied to the National Institutes of Health. It didn't go very far because it was on a partisan basis, but it's obvious that Congress is starting to think about this stuff. Now just like the RFPs with the grants, the uniform guidance is moving incredibly fast. Comments are due July 13th and they want this in place for the start of the fiscal year on October 1st, which means we're not likely going to get blocking language because October 1st is the first time you would see an appropriations bill pass Congress likely. So I think the more comments that we can put in, that's really important because that'll make the October 1st implementation more difficult. Because obviously they have to respond to every single comment. But we will be circulating our draft comments. I think we're going to try and file ours early. So institutions who may want to comment will be able to see the ACE community comments and either reference them or pull things out that they want to talk about.
Mushtaq Gunja: Thanks.
Jon Fansmith: If I could just add to that too, Mushtaq. I think there's a couple elements. I do think the best case scenario for us is Congress putting blocking language in a CR. Because the rule will take effect October 1st, they'll need something unless they're prepared to fund the government by October 1st to at least push out through a continuing resolution at deadline. So the timing aligns a little bit for something to be done there. The other thing I'll note is we are very focused for understandable reasons on the impact on scientific research, but this applies to grants not just to higher education but across the entire country. So housing grants and transportation and infrastructure projects, an enormous range of activities. So there are a lot of entities from corporations to nonprofits that have a stake in what this looks like and will be impacted by it. So their reach is very, very big.
And you've asked what's changed from the government, nothing much. We've seen their proposed rule, they're gathering comments. What I think most importantly has changed is the public is getting a sense. There's a growing drumbeat of coverage in the media. There's a lot more public conversation about the implications of this. Some things about it are just on its face farcical. The idea that a political appointee should make decisions, not a peer review panel with expertise. But beyond that, this administration knows they're going to get sued in many, many, many parts of this because they wrote it to be severable. Have every single provision severable from the rest because they know they're going to get sued and they want to keep as much of it in place as possible facing an onslaught of legal challenges. So it's going to be a really murky, messy fall around this, but certainly there's going to be a lot of opposition that's only going to grow. And this rushed process where there's no way they're going to be able to review 30, 40,000 public comments, the technical requirements, everything else in time to pass a rule that's in place by October 1st. So we shall see, but it does not show a good faith process.
Sarah Spreitzer: And Jon's just happy because he doesn't have to draft the comments.
Jon Fansmith: I'm very happy about that. 412-page proposal, I should point out, Sarah and Lindsay Tepe on our team had a summary of that proposal in what, two days, some extraordinary. I think across a weekend the life of a lobbyist, very rarely glamorous. I read it this morning.
Sarah Spreitzer: [inaudible 00:46:20].
Mushtaq Gunja: I read that summary this morning in preparation for the podcast. Very well done. And everybody should take a quick look. In very short order, tells you exactly what you need to know. So I'm sure it's in the links and please go and check it out. Speaking of research and funding, there's a question in the chat about ... I think about the Carnegie classifications and my eyes lit up, of course. I think the gist of the question is the Carnegie classification team aware of the possible cuts to funding and these actions that the administration has taken? Short answer, yes. It's good to be on this podcast and to be paying attention to all of that. And we certainly are looking at what the data is.
The data to determine your research activity designation in the 28 classifications will be data from the fiscal years '24, '25 and '26. Some of those years are before some of these cuts have come in. I haven't seen the '26 data yet. We haven't looked at it yet, but we're certainly aware and we'll be data-driven as we set the thresholds for the next classification. And Jon, Sarah, feel free to ask me more in a few months when the next set of heard and IPEDS data comes in on doctorate production and on research expenditures. Happy to talk about it. I like talking about as much as Sarah likes talking about the NDAA.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yes. I love talking about the NDAA.
Mushtaq Gunja: Hey, can we talk a little bit around international students? And actually maybe start someplace, maybe a little bit unexpected. I saw a couple of stories in the last couple of days, including one in political, maybe yesterday around Dreamers and the extraordinary lack of movement in processing dreamer work applications. Sarah, what can you tell us about what is happening there?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, Mushtaq-
Mushtaq Gunja: First of all, who are Dreamers? We haven't talked about it in a long time.
Sarah Spreitzer: Thanks for teeing that up because this has been a longstanding priority at the American Council on Education. Definitely predates my time here. We have supported since its introduction the DREAM Act, which has been championed always by Senator Durbin and then always a Republican co-sponsor and the DACA program, which is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. These are people that came to the country illegally at a very young age, sometimes without any knowledge that what they were doing was illegal and may have grown up knowing the United States as their only country and suddenly they find out that they're out of status when they go to apply to college or they go to get their first job.
The DACA program was established by President Obama through executive order. It was never put into statute by Congress. There's been several court cases trying to end the program and it's existed in limbo. So we now have a program where new people cannot come into the DACA program. You can apply for renewals every two years for your DACA status. Unfortunately, this administration, or at least USCIS is not processing those renewals. And so what's happening is people are losing their work authorizations, they can no longer work and so they're leaving the country or giving up because they don't want to be out of status. It was just the anniversary of the establishment of DACA, June 15th. And so as part of that, we reinvigorated or went and put a lot of new resources and cleaned up the Remember the Dreamers website. And that's at rememberthedreamers.org. It was an effort by the American Council on Education as well as other academic partners to put up some resources for institutions, especially in the first Trump administration as there were these challenges to DACA.
And so if you go there, you'll find that there's a contact Congress to ask them to pass the DREAM Act. You'll see our latest letter to USCIS asking them to promptly process renewals for DACA. And then you can also read all about the court cases in a timeline that we have on there. So we haven't given up on the Dreamers. Unfortunately, I don't think Congress is going to do anything on immigration this year, but we continue to fight for that legislation.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, anything to add on Dreamers? Did I see correctly that Florida is trying to restrict access to Florida public education to students that are here without status?
Sarah Spreitzer: I think that's very likely. I believe Texas has done that too. And it's an interesting shift because those were two states where previously they had allowed for the admittance of Dreamers into the high schools if you could establish state residency and a pathway to post-secondary education.
Jon Fansmith: And I believe both those states had in state tuition rates for undocumented students. So it's a real 180 from where we have been relatively recently.
Mushtaq Gunja: Speaking of delays in processing, Sarah, what's the latest with H1Bs? What's happening with OPT?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. So H1Bs are the work authorizations that you can get. It's a visa, but the work authorization part is processed by USCIS. And then OPT is optional practical training for our students. It's a work authorization they get after they finish their degree four year or three years. OPT has been under fire by some Republican members of Congress and also by the administration. I think that there's a real chance of them trying to end the program in the next couple of years. But for H1Bs, you may remember Mushtaq, they announced a new $100,000 fee that you would have to pay in order to get an H1B. A court recently tossed that out, but I do believe that the administration's going to appeal it. So I haven't talked to anybody recently that's applied for an H1B.
And then the other thing that the courts recently decided on that we were following very closely is they weren't processing OPT or work authorizations for foreign nationals from travel banned countries. So we have a travel ban in place, but if you were in the country before the travel ban was issued, you're allowed to stay. So if you're a student from Iran, you're here studying, you're allowed to stay as long as you don't leave the US and try and reenter. Those Iranian students or students from other countries under the travel ban are graduating and they'd like to transition to an H1B because they have a valid offer of employment or they want to do optional practical training and USCIS is just not processing them. So a court recently said, "No, for the purposes of the travel ban, you can't stop processing this because these people have been vetted they're allowed to be in the United States. The travel ban does not apply to them." However, it's unclear if they really are processing those. And I see somebody said they've already filed an appeal.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. That's not surprising. And all that's a little bit depressing. Sarah, Jon, what can our institutions do to try to move the processing a little bit faster?
Sarah Spreitzer: I tell institutions a lot and when I speak to international groups is that what's happening now is these partnerships are shifting from government to government to institution to institution, or even foreign government to institution. I think our institutions remain incredibly welcoming to our international students and partners and they are going to do whatever they can to help even with this very murky policy environment. And so I hope that they will continue to do that. And then I think talking to members of Congress about the importance of international students. President Trump is on record as talking about the importance of international students, Chinese students. I think H1Bs are supported by many people within his administration. It really is an internal, I think, debate between two different people within the administration, Stephen Miller versus other people about whether or not H1Bs are helpful. So I think talking to members of Congress, especially about the economic impact, that's really important.
Jon Fansmith: The one thing I would add to that too is it is really helpful when you are talking to these members of Congress to personalize the issue. If you can have them meet with an international student. We've heard really compelling stories from students who have fled persecution in their home country or are advocating for ideas that are very clearly the things that we as a country benefit from people learning in our environment about how to advance issues in their own countries. You put a face to a name a lot of times, it's easy to dismiss people as a category. It's much harder to dismiss people as individuals. And we see that the power of an anecdote within Congress and putting a face to a policy means a lot in how that member of Congress may approach that policy.
Mushtaq Gunja: That seems very right and names to face is probably right in the H1B space and in the DACA space and in the TRIO space and in all the spaces. I think that's just generally good advice. And the only thing I might add is just I think it's not just that there are two different voices in the administration, one pro H1B and one anti, but I really am starting to see this split, the Trump base as well. There's a set of folks that I think recognize that in general, the H1B program has been good for American business, been good for technology, been-
Sarah Spreitzer: Good for Good for jobs. These are people that are establishing businesses in the US and creating jobs.
Mushtaq Gunja: Paying taxes, all of the things. And then there's a set of people that think that life is a little bit of a zero-sum game. And if you're going to allow somebody from another country to be able to come, you're taking something from somebody else. And that split is just at the heart of all things. It might be the split from the last 18 months, so we'll just have to keep fighting on it. Okay, friends, we're going to reconvene in a couple of weeks, but we're here at the end-ish of June just past the summer solstice. Any last hopeful words for the audience? What's the thing that's made you most optimistic about where we are higher ed policy-wise in the last couple of weeks?
Sarah Spreitzer: I want to hear Jon's first.
Jon Fansmith: This is purely selfish. It's a midterm year. Congress is rapidly heading towards shutting down on most important business. The administration is ... Regardless of your political views, they're in a position where it's going to be very hard for them to advance a lot of initiatives based on relationships with the hill and their public standing. I am just hoping I can enjoy a little bit of summer vacation. That's my sense of optimism. I don't know. Sarah's going to destroy that, I think.
Sarah Spreitzer: No, I'm not. I was just going to say that this is our last podcast, I believe, before the July 4th holiday and we're going to be 250 years. We have an amazing post-secondary education system, which is the envy of the world. We're all working towards making the United States and the world a better place and so I'm still optimistic. I think we can still do it.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, if those words of optimism tickled to your fancy, please rate and review the podcast. It is a great way for folks to be able to come find the show. And if you could do that before the July 4th holiday, that'll be your 250th anniversary present to us. So thank you all for joining. Thanks, Jon. Thanks, Sarah, and we'll be back with you in a couple of weeks. Thanks everybody.
Sarah Spreitzer: Bye everybody.