A partial budget proposal released on Friday from the Trump administration lays out a long list of impacts to higher education across the country, aiming to get rid of diversity, equity and inclusion and taper its involvement in education.
The 46-page “skinny” budget isn’t finalized for the 2025-2026 fiscal year but will be in the coming weeks. It is up to Congress to determine how the federal money is used. It calls for $163 billion in cuts across the government.
At the same time as Trump cuts back on education, the administration is increasing in some areas like defense spending, adding a proposed $1 trillion to its budget.
“President Trump’s proposed budget puts students and parents above the bureaucracy,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a statement.
“The President’s Skinny Budget reflects funding levels for an agency that is responsibly winding down, shifting some responsibilities to the states, and thoughtfully preparing a plan to delegate other critical functions to more appropriate entities. It supports the President’s vision of expanding school choice and ensuring every American has access to an excellent education,” she said.
Charter schools are one of the only educational initiatives the federal government plans to funnel more funding into, increasing by $60 million.
Read more: ‘Willing to capitulate’: Cracks emerge in Harvard’s resistance to Trump over DEI
Here are a few of the ways higher education could be hit in the proposed budget:
Eliminating federal work study programs
The skinny budget calls federal work study programs a “handout to woke universities and a subsidy from Federal taxpayers, who can pay for their own employees.”
The budget aims to have the remaining funding from federal work study redistributed to institutions that serve low-income students and provide a “wage subsidy to gain career-oriented opportunities to improve long-term employment outcomes of students.”
Michael Hannigan, a Greenfield Community College student, mentioned during a hearing at the Joint Committee on Higher Education on Monday the importance of his federal work study to stay in school.
He returned to college at the age of 42 after years of working low-paying manual jobs, he said.
“Each week we read about new threats to students, especially those who have been historically shut out from higher education — students of color, first generation students, students with disabilities,” said Hannigan, who is the student senate president at the community college.
“I myself am a first-generation student and I rely on SNAP benefits and the federal work-study program to stay enrolled. When I hear about possible cuts to these programs, it makes my path to feel a lot less secure,” he said.
Cuts to science and research
The budget plan proposes cutting $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), more than one-third of its budget.
The cut comes in part due to NIH promoting “radical gender ideology” by funding studies on transgender youth on hormones, according to the administration.
The administration aims to eliminate funding for the National Institute on Minority and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and the National Institute of Nursing Research.
It would also cease research on “climate change, radical gender ideology and divisive racialism.”
“NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health,” the administration said in the proposed budget.
On top of that, Trump proposed cutting around half of the funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Read more: MIT sues federal science agency over cuts to ‘crucial research’
This week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it was among 13 research universities and three organizations suing NSF, after the agency’s efforts to slash indirect costs at grant-receiving institutions.
The lawsuit follows a Friday announcement from NSF stating that it would cut the rate of reimbursement to higher education institutions for “indirect costs” or overhead costs for institutions that receive grants to 15%.
The 15% maximum rate applies only to new awards on or after May 5, 2025, according to the announcement.
On top of the cuts to reimbursement rates, NSF told staff members at the end of April to stop awarding funding until further notice. NSF has terminated approximately 1,425 grants, according to Nature.
“Besides its destructive impact on research and training, this latest effort violates longstanding federal laws and regulations that govern grantmaking. We are seeking to prevent implementation of this poorly conceived and short-sighted policy, which will only hurt the American people and weaken the country. We look forward to making our case,” the organizations suing said in a statement.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Energy have similarly announced that they would cut “indirect costs” or overhead costs for institutions that receive grants.
However, those were halted by federal judges following lawsuits against it.
Continuing the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education
The budget makes steps to begin eliminating the U.S. Department of Education by walking back much of its funding by $12 billion.
The federal administration wants to reduce the department by $127 million or 30% for program administration.
The budget comes after Trump signed an executive order that begins the efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
Finalizing the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education is likely impossible without an act of Congress, which created the department in 1979.
However, despite needing Congressional intervention, Will Ragland at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, told MassLive that the Trump administration can effectively shut the department down by stripping it back until it barely has anyone working there and can’t operate.
The Trump administration has already been gutting the agency. Its workforce has been slashed in half and there have been deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on the nation’s academic progress.
All those at the regional Boston office of the U.S. Education Department were fired.
Read more: ‘The damage is so big’: How ending the Dept. of Ed. could impact Mass.
As part of the new budget, Trump is proposing to reduce the Office for Civil Rights, which protects students from discrimination, by 35% or $49 million.
This is a broader effort to “refocus away from DEI and Title IX transgender cases” and clear its backlog, according to the federal administration.
Trump also proposed to defund Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, which offer students between $100 to $4,000 per year for undergraduate students with “exceptional financial need,” according to the website.
The administration claims that the grants are given more frequently to families with higher incomes than lower incomes and are awarded more to private institutions than public colleges.
TRIO and Gear Up are also programs that are proposed to be cut, described as “a relic of the past,” by the administration.
The two programs help students from low-income backgrounds, first-generation college students and individuals with disabilities prepare for higher education, according to the U.S. Department of Education website.
“Today, the pendulum has swung and access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means,” the administration said.
The federal government also proposes cutting funding to English language learning programs, adult education programs, migrant education, subsidizing child care for parents in college and teacher training on topics such as DEI.
Eliminating agencies that fund arts, humanities
Trump proposes in the skinny budget to eliminate funding to arts and humanities agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Each of these fund programs to help people participate in the humanities and the arts.
The administration said that the cuts are “consistent with the President’s efforts to decrease the size of the Federal Government to enhance accountability, reduce waste and reduce unnecessary governmental entities,” according to the document.
