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Tag: federal money

  • Newsom threatens to cut state funding to universities that sign Trump’s political compact

    Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to cut “billions” in state funding, including to USC, from any California campus that signs a Trump administration compact and agrees to sweeping and largely conservative campus policies in exchange for priority access to federal funding.

    “If any California University signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding — including Cal Grants — instantly,” Newsom said. “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”

    The bold statement came less than a day after the White House asked the University of Southern California and eight other major universities throughout the country to shift to the right and agree to Trump’s views on gender identity, admissions, diversity and free speech among other areas — in exchange for more favorable access to federal research grants and additional funding.

    While USC is the only California university to be sent the Trump proposal, a White House official said universities sent the agreement were a first round among potentially several more campuses that could receive the request. All UC and CSU campuses — in addition to Stanford — are under federal civil rights investigations that could result in federal funding clawbacks.

    Universities were asked to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” committing them to adopt the White House’s conservative vision for America’s campuses. The letter, sent out Wednesday, also suggests colleges should align with Trump’s views on student discipline, college affordability and the importance of hard sciences over liberal arts.

    The request represents the latest tactic by the Trump administration to aggressively reshape universities — which he says are bastions of liberalism that are intolerant of Republicans — by leveraging federal funding to force campuses to adhere to his conservative ideals.

    Newsom’s response echoed a similarly forceful statement over a $1.2-billion Trump fine against UCLA for alleged civil rights violations in August, when he said UC should sue and not “bend the knee” — no suit by the university system has been filed. His quick swing back ratchets up his strident push against the Trump administration — including mocking Trump’s social media. Newsom’s statement Thursday threatening Cal Grants and other funding was issued in all-capital letters, mirroring the president’s social media style.

    Cal Grants, the state’s largest financial aid program to public and private universities, are awarded based on income. Students become eligible through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or California Dream Act Application. In 2024-25, $2.5 billion in Cal Grants were doled out.

    The compact would also severely restrict international student enrollment to 15% of a college’s undergraduate student body and no more than 5% could come from a single country, a provision that would hit hard at USC, where 26% of the fall 2025 freshman class is international. More than half of those students hailing from either China or India.

    Full-fee tuition from international students is a major source of revenue at USC, which has undertaken hundreds of layoffs this year amid budget troubles.

    In a statement released before the Newsom announcement, USC said only that it was “reviewing the administration’s letter.” Officials did not immediately respond to a renewed request for comment.

    “No self-respecting university should sign on to this proposed compact,” said state Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), who chairs the Assembly Education Committee. “Universities will never be able to live down a reputation of selling out their principals of academic freedom and free speech on these enticements of preferential treatment.”

    The proposal, which would change many policies at one of the nation’s largest and most prominent private universities, caught several USC deans and administrators off-guard after they learned of White House request from news reports, according to USC employees and staffers who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

    Parts of the compact are similar in language and ideology to a sweeping federal proposal sent in August to UCLA that offered to re-instate hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants to the campus if the University of California agreed to federal demands and pay a $1.2-billion fine for how UCLA responded to alleged antisemitism on campus.

    But the White House letter to USC and other campuses, including the University of Arizona, takes a different approach than the punitive actions against UCLA and other elite universities. Instead of offering to restore suspended government funding in exchange for campus policy overhauls, the government says it will dole out new money and give preference to the universities over others that do not agree to the terms.

    Signing on would give universities priority access to some federal grants, but government money would not be limited solely to those schools, according to a White House official. Colleges that agree would also have priority access to White House events and discussions with officials.

    The compact asks universities to accept the government’s definition of gender and apply it to campus bathrooms, locker rooms and women’s sports teams. It says colleges would stop considering race, gender and a wide range of other student demographics in the admissions process and to require undergraduate applicants to take the SAT or ACT.

    USC, since a 2023 Supreme Court decision, is not allowed to consider race in admissions, and public California universities have been barred from doing so under state law since 1997. USC is “test optional” in its application process and students can decide whether or not to submit scores.

    “It’s upsetting as a faculty member and a teacher and a product of higher education to see this administration trying to dismantle academic freedom and free speech in such a systematic way,” said Devin Griffiths, a USC associate professor of English and comparative literature. Griffiths said he would “push hard for our university to forcefully reject this and I would hope that there is space here for the universities that are targeted by this order to take a collective stand.”

    Sanjay Madhav, an associate professor of practice at the USC Viterbi engineering school, said the compact appeared to be “blatantly in violation of the First Amendment since it states that the federal government is going to give preference to universities that align with its political views.”

    In an email sent to colleagues Thursday and shared with The Times, USC Cinematic Arts school professor Howard Rodman summed up his position: “It is abundantly clear that either the universities stand together and refuse the gift of ‘prioritized grants,’ or higher education in the United States will become a wholly owned subsidiary of MAGA, LLC…. I would urge USC to remember that when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

    Liam Wady, a junior at USC, said students were openly talking about it as the news broke.

    “It’s a good balance of confusion and concern,” Wady said. He said he was involved in the pro-Palestinian protests at USC and was left feeling like the university failed to protect him. Now, he said he’s worried the university will go along with Trump’s compact.

    “I just wouldn’t be surprised if the school would end up adopting Trump’s political priorities just because of the way they treated us in the past,” Wady said.

    The 10-page proposed agreement was sent Wednesday to public and private universities, including some of the most selective institutions in the county. In addition to USC and the University of Arizona, it went to Vanderbilt, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, Brown University and the University of Virginia.

    It was not clear how these schools were selected or why, and whether similar offers might go out to other colleges.

    Some of the schools are in red states that have been more friendly to Trump’s higher education priorities. Texas officials endorsed the compact.

    Leaders of the Texas system were “honored” that the Austin campus was chosen to be a part of the compact and its “potential funding advantages,” according to a statement from Kevin Eltife, chair of the Board of Regents. “Today we welcome the new opportunity presented to us and we look forward to working with the Trump Administration on it,” he said.

    USC has largely maintained a low-profile stance and has avoided making public statements on the president’s higher education agenda.

    In April, when more than 220 university leaders signed onto an American Assn. of Colleges and Universities statement against “undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses,” former USC President Carol Folt said publicly that she declined to sign.

    In February, after the Department of Education released guidance opposing race and ethnicity-themed scholarships, graduations and other programs, USC closed down its diversity offices and renamed related websites while many other California universities refused to comply.

    USC also faces a difficult financial outlook. In a July campus letter, interim President Beong-Soo Kim said that a budget deficit surpassing $200 million coupled with federal funding challenges would require layoffs and other cost-cutting measures. More than 600 layoffs have hit the campus since then, according to Morning, Trojan, an independent outlet that monitors USC news.

    The administration has used its control of federal funding as leverage at several high-profile institutions, cutting off research money at UCLA, Harvard and Columbia as it has sought changes to the schools’ governance and policies.

    University of California leaders are negotiating with the Department of Justice over federal demands, although the urgency for talks has slowed after a federal judge ordered nearly all of the $584 million in suspended health and science research grants at the Los Angeles campus to be restored. Trump said this week that he was “close to finalizing” a deal with Harvard that would include it paying $500 million for a “giant trade school” run by the university.

    Schools that sign on would have to cap tuition for U.S. students for five years and the wealthiest campuses would not charge tuition at all for students pursuing “hard science programs.”

    On free speech, schools would have to commit to promoting a wide range of views on campus. That includes “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” according to the compact.

    Each school would have to commission an annual poll of students and faculty to evaluate the campuses’ adherence to the pact. The terms would be enforced by the Justice Department, with violators losing access to the compact’s benefits for no less than a year. Following violations bump the penalty to two years.

    “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below,” the compact said, “if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”

    Kaleem and Gutierrez are Times staff writers. Madhani reports for the Associated Press in Washington. Collin Binkley of the Associated Press also contributed to this story.

    Jaweed Kaleem, Melody Gutierrez, Aamer Madhani

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  • How a GOP Congress Could Roll Back Nationwide Freedoms

    How a GOP Congress Could Roll Back Nationwide Freedoms

    If Republicans win control of one or both congressional chambers this week, they will likely begin a project that could reshape the nation’s political and legal landscape: imposing on blue states the rollback of civil rights and liberties that has rapidly advanced through red states since 2021.

    Over the past two years, the 23 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature have approved the most aggressive wave of socially conservative legislation in modern times. In highly polarizing battles across the country, GOP-controlled states have passed laws imposing new restrictions on voting, banning or limiting access to abortion, retrenching LGBTQ rights, removing licensing and training requirements for concealed carry of firearms, and censoring how public-school teachers (and in some cases university professors and even private employers) can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation.

    With much less attention, Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced legislation to write each of these red-state initiatives into federal law. The practical effect of these proposals would be to require blue states to live under the restrictive social policies that have burned through red states since President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. “I think the days of fealty [to states’ rights] are nearing an end, and we are going to see the national Republicans in Congress adopting maximalist policy approaches,” Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, a group that advocates for stricter gun control, told me.

    Read: The double-negative election

    None of the proposals to nationalize the red-state social agenda could become law any time soon. Even if Republicans were to win both congressional chambers, they would not have the votes to overcome the inevitable Biden vetoes. Nor would Republicans, even if they controlled both chambers, have any incentive to consider repealing the Senate filibuster to pass this agenda until they know they have a president who would sign the resulting bills into law—something they can’t achieve before the 2024 election.

    But if Republicans triumph this week, the next two years could nonetheless become a crucial period in formulating a strategy to nationalize the red-state social-policy revolution. Particularly if Republicans win the House, they seem certain to explore which of these ideas can attract enough support in their caucus to clear the chamber. And the 2024 Republican presidential candidates are also likely to test GOP primary voters’ appetite for writing conservative social priorities into national law. Embracing such initiatives “may prove irresistible for a lot of folks trying to capture” the party’s socially conservative wing, Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me.

    It starts with abortion. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in September introduced a bill that would ban the procedure nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In the House, 167 Republicans have co-sponsored the “Life Begins at Conception Act,” which many legal analysts say would effectively ban all abortions nationwide.

    In elections, Senator Rick Scott of Florida has proposed legislation that would impose for federal elections nationwide many of the voting restrictions that have rapidly diffused across red states, including tougher voter-identification requirements, a ban on both unmonitored drop boxes and the counting of any mail ballots received after Election Day, and a prohibition on same-day and automatic voter registration.

    In education, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has proposed to federalize restrictions on how teachers can talk about race by barring any K–12 school that receives federal money from using “critical race theory” in instruction. Several Republicans (including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri) have introduced a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which would mandate parental access to school curriculum and library materials nationwide—a step toward building pressure for the kind of book bans spreading through conservative states and school districts. Nadine Farid Johnson, the Washington director for PEN America, a free-speech advocacy group, predicts that these GOP proposals “chipping away” at free speech are likely to expand beyond school settings into other areas affecting the general population, such as public libraries or private companies’ training policies. “This is not something that is likely to stop at the current arena, but to go much more broadly,” she told me.

    Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, along with several dozen co-sponsors, recently introduced a federal version of the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida pushed into law. Johnson’s bill is especially sweeping in its scope. It bars discussion of “sexually-oriented material,” including sexual orientation, with children 10 and younger, not only in educational settings, but in any program funded by the federal government, including through public libraries, hospitals, and national parks. The language is so comprehensive that it might even prevent “any federal law enforcement talking to a kid about a sexual assault or sexual abuse,” David Stacy, the government-affairs director at the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, told me.

    Read: Want to understand the red-state onslaught? Look at Florida.

    Johnson’s bill is only one of several Republican proposals to nationalize red-state actions on LGBTQ issues. During budget debates in both 2021 and 2022, Republican senators offered  amendments to establish a nationwide ban on transgender girls participating in school sports. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has introduced a bill (the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act”) that would set felony penalties for doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors. Cotton, in a variation on the theme, has proposed to allow any minor who receives gender-affirming surgery to sue the doctor for physical or emotional damages for the next 30 years.

    Meanwhile, Senator Steve Daines and Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina have introduced legislation requiring every state to accept a concealed-carry gun permit issued in any state—a mechanism for overriding blue-state limits on these permits. When Republicans controlled the House, they passed such a bill in 2017, but the implications of this idea have grown even more stark since then because so many red states have passed laws allowing residents to obtain concealed-carry permits without any background checks or training requirements.

    Ambler told me he expects that the NRA and congressional Republicans will eventually seek not only to preempt blue states and city limits on who can carry guns, but also to invalidate their restrictions on where they can do so, such as the New York State law, now facing legal challenge, barring guns from the subway.

    Brown, of the conservative EPPC, said it’s difficult to predict which of these proposals will gather the most momentum if Republicans win back one or both chambers. Some congressional Republicans, he said, may still be constrained by traditional GOP arguments favoring federalism. The strongest case for contravening that principle, he said, is in those instances that involve protecting what he calls “fundamental rights.” Graham’s national 15-week abortion ban can be justified on those grounds because “we are talking about, from my perspective, the life of an unborn baby, so having a federal ceiling on when states can’t encroach on protecting that fetus in the womb in the later stage of pregnancy makes a lot of sense to me.”

    In practice, though, Brown thinks that congressional Republicans may hesitate about passing a nationwide abortion ban, particularly with no hope of Biden signing it into law. He believes they are more likely to coalesce first around proposals to bar transgender girls from participating in sports and to prohibit gender-affirming surgery for minors, in part because those issues have proved “so galvanizing” for cultural conservatives in red states.

    Conor Friedersdorf: The constitutional case against a federal abortion ban

    Stacy, from the Human Rights Campaign, said that although Senate Republicans may be less enthusiastic about pursuing legislation restricting transgender rights, he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a GOP-controlled Congress advancing those ideas. “It’s hard to know how far a Republican majority in either chamber would go on these issues,” he told me. “But what we’ve seen again and again in the states is that when they can, they have moved in these directions. Even when you take a look at more moderate states, when they have the power to do these things, they move these things forward.” That precedent eventually may apply not just to LGBTQ issues, but to all the red-state initiatives some Republicans want to inscribe into national law.

    These approaching federal debates reframe the battle raging across the red states during the past few years as just the first act of what’s likely to become an extended struggle.

    This first act has played out largely within the framework of restoring states’ rights and local prerogatives. As I’ve written, the red-state moves on social issues amount to a systematic effort to reverse the “rights revolution” of the past six decades. Over that long period, the Supreme Court, Congress, and a succession of presidents nationalized more rights and reduced states’ leeway to abridge those rights, on issues including civil rights, contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

    Now the red states have moved to reverse that long trajectory toward a stronger national floor of rights by setting their own rules on abortion, voting, LGBTQ issues, classroom censorship, and book bans, among other issues. In that cause, they have been crucially abetted by the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, which has struck down or weakened previously nationally guaranteed rights (including abortion and voting access).

    But the proliferation of these congressional-Republican proposals to write the red-state rules into federal law suggests that this reassertion of states’ rights was just a way station toward restoring common national standards of civil rights and liberties—only in a much more restrictive and conservative direction. “All of these things have been building for years,” Alvin Tillery, the director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, told me. “It’s just that Mr. Trump gave them the idea they can succeed being more [aggressive] in the advocacy of these policies.”

    Like many students of the red-state social-policy eruption, Tillery believes that Republicans and social conservatives feel enormous urgency to write their cultural priorities into law before liberal-leaning Millennials and Generation Z become the electorate’s dominant force later this decade. “The future ain’t bright for them looking at young people, so they are acting in a much more muscular and authoritarian way now,” he said.

    With Republicans likely to win control of the House, and possibly the Senate, the next two years may become the off-Broadway stage of testing different strategies for imposing the red-state social regime on blue America. The curtain on the main event will rise the next time Republicans hold unified control of the White House and Congress—a day that may seem less a distant possibility if the GOP makes gains as big as those that now seem possible this week.

    Ronald Brownstein

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