This framing conveniently ignores the question of whether the president should have the authority to single-handedly withhold funding for universities, broadly considered to be one of the foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century. While I think it's interesting and answers the specific question it raises, it's wild that the economist has just accepted that the president has dictatorial powers.
"Conveniently" is the wrong word to use here. "Conveniently ignores" implies that the author intentionally disregarded some known facts to make their argument look more persuasive. However, this is not the case here. The article's argument is that a reduction in government funding is very damaging even when it is small relative to the endowment size. This argument would not lose any of its power if the author covered the topic of whether the president has the power to withdraw funding.
(On a side note, the word "framing" is also the wrong word to use.)
One way to phrase your message correctly would be: "This article is about the impact of the president's decision, but I wish it also talked about whether the president has the authority to make that decision in the first place".
"Conveniently" also insinuates that the author discarded some arguments or facts that don't suit their narrative, because they would then have to think more, which is precisely what is inconvenient. It's quite an insult, actually.
There's a reason that court cases typically address standing before addressing the underlying question. It matters much more that you're taking on a case before you determine the case on the merits. If the case doesn't have standing it is not worth considering.
"Conveniently Ignoring" the standing question is frankly an admission of compliance to something that is not the law. Who cares "why people can't live without food" if someone is saying "let's starve the population." One question isn't worth platforming while the other is on the table.
This isn't law, its journalism, and frankly the article is well written and asks a good question -- why are these (extremely wealthy) universities finances so brittle?
The question is self-answering as soon as you read the first two sentences though.
> Columbia...has an endowment of roughly $15bn. Mr Trump’s administration withheld a mere $400m in federal funding.
With the best investing in the world, that $15bn might throw off 1 billion a year in perpetuity. $400m (a year) is a very serious chunk of the university's budget.
Exactly... Scaling the numbers down: It's as if a person has $1.5M net worth, and their investments produce $100K per year. They are also simply being handed $40K per year from someone they disagree with, but who otherwise reliably provides that income. Are they just going to turn that money down because of this ethical disagreement? A lot of people wouldn't.
Or alternatively, their investments from one account produce $100K per year, their investments from another account (non-Federal grants) produce an unknown amount, and they have a job (tuition payments) that produces another unknown amount. How significant is 40% of the 100K?
We don't know unless we fill in the unknown numbers. Knowing that the amount of federal aid being removed is 40% of an estimate of the amount produced by one source (the endowment) isn't enough information to answer the question. The right question is what percentage of their budget this represents.
From what I can tell, Harvard's actual annual budget is about $6.5B (https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/10/financial-report-fis...). A $400M shortfall is thus about 6% of their annual budget. Significant, but also something they could probably cover for the next decade or two by drawing down their endowment until they adjust.
It isn't law, but why does the principle exist in law? That's what I'm asking you to think about. Why would judges who have to make decisions about people's lives do this? Is there a good reason for it?
The word "dictatorial" doesn't apply here. What we're talking about is government funding being provided to private universities. And Congress hasn't appropriated specific amounts of money to specific universities. It has created a pool of funds and given the executive branch discretion to allocate those funds. The powers of the executive branch are invested in the president. See Article II, Section 1 ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.").
Congress, moreover, has enacted laws that use those funds as a hook to influence the behavior of private universities. Specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows the executive branch to deny federal funds to universities that discriminate on the basis of race. Now, it just so happens that, in 2023, Harvard university, among others, was found by the Supreme Court to have flagrantly violated that law: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/dear-colleague-letter-sffa...
There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law, where Congress has authorized the executive branch to do so. Indeed, I'm at a loss to understand who else you think has the power to do this, if not the President?
I'm guessing that what GP meant with "dictatorial" was along the lines of the power you describe being wielded in a specific manner.
To put it differently: a state of affairs where the Executive/President has those powers may not be dictatorial, but this specific instance of him making use of that discretion in this specific way might be.
> There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law
Hey now, wait a minute. Has the “violation of law” been established yet? There’s a pretty wide gulf between “I believe a violation of the law has occurred” and having the matter adjudicated.
You’re clearly an intelligent person; there’s no need to try to sneak bullshit in through the back door. Let the strength of your arguments and facts speak for themselves. And make sure they are actual facts.
> Has the “violation of law” been established yet? There’s a pretty wide gulf between “I believe a violation of the law has occurred” and having the matter adjudicated.
Didn't SFFA clearly establish that? The Supreme Court outright reversed the bench trial ruling, which had found that Harvard and UNC's programs comported with Title VI and the Equal Protection Clause.
You have a point that I should've said "was found to have violated" rather than "is in violation." Whether Harvard is still violating the law is debatable. But I'm not sure Title VI withholding can't be predicated on a recent violation.
Regardless, as you know, the government routinely uses the threat of legal action for suspected violations to coerce compliance. Virtually every FDA/SEC/CFTC/etc. enforcement action starts with a letter along the lines of: "you're in violation of the law, do X, Y, and Z, or else we'll take action."
It’s not reasonable to characterize SFFA as a finding of wrongdoing on Harvard’s part.
At the time, universities were adhering to existing law (Bakke and Grutter cases). The Court then overturned its own precedent and decided that what was once acceptable under its own law was no longer so. The text of the Equal Protection clause didn’t change; the only thing that changed was the Court’s interpretation of it.
So it’s not like Harvard was operating in bad faith or being malicious, which is the characterization suggested by your “violation” language. (Not to mention that every university in America that considered race in their admissions process, despite not being a named party to the suit, was similarly situated—probably most universities in the country.) And there’s no evidence to suggest that Harvard didn’t respond appropriately and in a timely fashion to the new law.
> It’s not reasonable to characterize SFFA as a finding of wrongdoing on Harvard’s part
As I understand it, that’s the legal effect of SFFA. SFFA sued Harvard seeking, among other things, a declaratory judgment that Harvard’s admissions policies violate Title VI. The district court ruled, after bench trial, that Harvard didn’t violate Title VI. The Supreme Court didn’t remand for further proceedings, it outright reversed. Meaning that it found that Harvard’s procedures did violate Title VI.
Bad faith or malice aren’t elements of a Title VI violation. And I don’t see any legal reason why an administration couldn’t hold Harvard’s discrimination against students—which happened, even if the Supreme Court changed its mind about whether it was permissible—against Harvard in allocating federal funding.
Of course, now that Harvard has decided to fight it, the administration will have to prove its belief: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/28/harvard-law-review-trump-ad.... That’s how these enforcement letters always pan out. Many targets fold to avoid litigation. Sometimes, a defendant fights it and the government has to initiate a formal enforcement action.
The DOJ, FDA, FTC, and SEC do stuff like this all the time. These agencies all lean very heavily on the threat of an enforcement action to enforce changes in private behavior without having to actually take entities to court.
> Meaning that it found that Harvard’s procedures did violate Title VI
Declaratory judgments aren't findings of wrongdoing. They're simply words (hence "declaratory") that describe a relationship between the parties of a case. Cases that end in declaratory judgements are also always civil in nature, so I don't believe they can be used to penalize the party later as if they had conducted a criminal act.
> I don’t see any legal reason why an administration couldn’t hold Harvard’s discrimination against students—which happened, even if the Supreme Court changed its mind about whether it was permissible—against Harvard in allocating federal funding.
That would actually be an interesting case. I find it difficult to believe that the Court would allow such an ex post facto application. The problem with this is that anyone who engaged in behavior that was lawful at the time, then subsequently deemed unlawful, could be subject to abrogation of benefits or other penalties. That said, in light of how the Court's makeup has changed in the past 20 years, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised if I turn out to be wrong. I would be very sad, though, because it would mean that nobody can be assured that their current conduct, even if lawful at the time, won't be held against them in the future if the law changes later.
> Harvard’s defiant response to SFFA provides a reasonable basis for the administration to believe it has continued to engage in discrimination
I don't think it does. I think Harvard is saying "we will continue to lawfully promote diversity however we can." There's no unlawful action being contemplated, described, or advocated in its response. Costco and Disney, BTW, do the same.
> now that Harvard has decided to fight [Trump’s investigation of Harvard Law Review’s publication policy], the administration will have to prove its belief
You're mixing up two different plot lines. We're discussing NSF and other Federal grant withdrawal resulting from Harvard's failure to implement discretionary measures Trump wants them to take relating to hiring, policy, and curriculum. This other story is about investigating Harvard Law Review, which was announced weeks after the grant rug pull. It seems pretty obvious that Trump is trying to find any angle he can to prevail in his war against the institution.
It seems like Harvard and those other universities might have been pushing the boundaries. Was the discrimination required or just allowed? The court for Grutter seemed to say it was "required" and for Bakke a "compelling state interest", but I might not understand the meaning of that properly. There are universities that don't discriminate (UC?) and they somehow get away with it. If you were running Harvard and trying your best to comply with the law, would you feel it's legally safer to discriminate or to not discriminate? The answer to that points to whether they were operating in bad faith or not.
Title VI seems to clearly say "don't discriminate" but again I might not understand how exceptions are allowed.
It's important to understand the context in which these laws and Constitutional amendments were written. They were designed and enacted after the Civil War (in the case of the Fourteenth Amendment) and the 1960s (Civil Rights Act, once we determined the Fourteenth Amendment was insufficient) to prevent Black people from being discriminated against. At the time, nobody, including the authors, considered these laws to be a shield to protect white and Asian people from discrimination. (At that time, there were hardly any Asians in the US anyway.)
So, from the 1960s until recently, the Court allowed universities to consider race in university admissions because it advanced a public policy that sought to improve the lot of Black people: the more Blacks could enter the ranks of the educated elite, the better off they would be in the long run, both socially and economically.
Over time, though, people whose admissions were rejected started to fight back: they felt that academic merit trumped all other considerations. After all, if they got better grades and aptitude test scores, weren't they more deserving of admission? The fights began, and over time, the Court chipped away at the acceptable use of race in admissions. Finally, in SFAA, the Court did away with them altogether.
As far as "pushing the boundaries" is concerned, actors will generally try to do whatever's in their best interest provided it's not illegal. There's no reward for maintaining a wide margin from legal boundaries when there's competition.
Is that how the law works? Because the Civil Rights Act was written with black people in mind, it only applies to black people even though the wording doesn't specify that? Surely it's quite an obvious omission that they would have written down if that's what they'd wanted. Is it a kind of trick law written to make people think other races are protected but due to how laws are interpreted, it was always known not to apply to them?
It is a fair criticism (some would say a defect) of our legal system that legislation is not always as explicit as we would like it to be. Take California's Penal Code 187(a) which defines murder as:
"(a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought."
It turns out that "malice aforethought" is a term of art that requires no actual malice and not much forethought.
Anyway, if you look at the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act (and courts frequently look to legislative history when interpreting statutes), you'll see that its backers in Congress were concerned about racial segregation, which at the time according to practice separated white people from everyone else (mostly Blacks).
If you’re not a textualist, there is a coherent reading that it only applies to American descendants of slaves. But that would mean that it doesn’t protect asians, hispanics, etc!
A logical and factual error made by proponents of affirmative action is to start with the premise that the civil rights laws were intended to help american descendants of slaves, but then extend them to other non-whites by categorizing them as “functionally black.” This is utterly incoherent, because black descendants of slaves and native americans are sociologically and economically distinct from other non-whites. Hispanics are just time-shifted Italians and Irish: low skill immigrants that economically assimilate within a few generations. By contrast, the gaps between black descendants of slaves and native Americans and other americans are not shrinking over time. They remain as large today as in 1965.
There’s a coherent version of affirmative action that gives a preference to descendants of slaves and native Americans but nobody else. But that bears no resemblance to the “diversity” based system that actually exists, which irrationally privileges Cubans over Bangladeshis because Indians are richer than Mexicans.
I’ve told you this time and time again that Bengalis who emigrated to this country before 1965 assimilated into the black community, but you completely refuse to listen to me.
At the time, nobody, including the authors, considered these laws to be a shield to protect white and Asian people from discrimination.
This is very much false, and can be easily refuted by reading what the lawmakers were saying as the law was being passed. For example, here's from the DoJ's memorandum, as quoted on the Senate floor by Senator Clark:
> "Finally, it has been asserted that title VII would impose a requirement for 'racial balance.' This is incorrect. There is no provision . . .
in title VII .. .that requires or authorizes any Federal agency or Federal
court to require preferential treatment for any individual or any group
for the purpose of achieving racial balance. . . . No employer is required to maintain any ratio of Negroes to whites .... On the contrary, any deliberate attempt to maintain a given balance would almost certainly run afoul of title VII because it would involve a failure or refusal to hire some individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. What title VII seeks to accomplish, what the civil rights bill seeks to accomplish is equal treatment for all."
This explicitly says that you cannot have a racial quota, because it would be against Title VII of the proposed Civil Rights Act, meaning that the lawmakers proposing the bill explicitly said that the Title VII will protect whites (and all other races) as well as blacks.
I respect your argument, and in my research, I found articles in support of your opinion.
Nevertheless, when the Supreme Court adjudicated the question in United Steelworks v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (1979), this is what they said:
"""Our conclusion is further reinforced by examination of the language and legislative history of 703 (j) of Title VII. Opponents of Title VII raised two related arguments against the bill. First, they argued that the Act would be interpreted to require employers with racially imbalanced work forces to grant preferential treatment to racial minorities in order to integrate. Second, they argued that employers with racially imbalanced work forces would grant preferential treatment to racial minorities, even if not required to do so by the Act. See 110 Cong. Rec. 8618-8619 (1964) (remarks of Sen. Sparkman). Had Congress meant to prohibit all race-conscious affirmative action; as respondent urges, it easily could have answered both objections by providing that Title VII would not require or permit racially preferential integration efforts. But Congress did not choose such a course. Rather, Congress added 703 (j) which addresses only the first objection. The section provides that nothing contained in Title VII "shall be interpreted to require any employer . . . to grant preferential treatment . . . to any group because of the race . . . of such . . . group on account of" a de facto racial imbalance in the employer's work force. The section does not state that "nothing in Title VII shall be interpreted to permit" voluntary affirmative efforts to correct racial imbalances. The natural inference is that Congress chose not to forbid all voluntary race-conscious affirmative action.
The reasons for this choice are evident from the legislative record. Title VII could not have been enacted into law without substantial support from legislators in both Houses who traditionally resisted federal regulation of private business. Those legislators demanded as a price for their support that "management prerogatives, and union freedoms . . . be left undisturbed to the greatest extent possible." H. R. Rep. No. 914, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 2, p. 29 (1963). Section 703 (j) was proposed by Senator Dirksen to allay any fears that the Act might be interpreted in such a way as to upset this compromise. The section was designed to prevent 703 of Title VII from being interpreted in such a way as to lead to undue "Federal Government interference with private businesses because of some Federal employee's ideas about racial balance or racial imbalance." 110 Cong. Rec. 14314 (1964) (remarks of Sen. Miller). 6 See also id., at 9881 (remarks of Sen. Allott); id., at 10520 (remarks of Sen. Carlson) id., at 11471 (remarks of Sen. Javits); id., at 12817 (remarks of Sen. Dirksen). Clearly, a prohibition against all voluntary, race-conscious, affirmative action efforts would disserve these ends. Such a prohibition would augment the powers of the Federal Government and diminish traditional management prerogatives while at the same time impeding attainment of the ultimate statutory goals. In view of this legislative history and in view of Congress' desire to avoid undue federal regulation of private businesses, use of the word "require" rather than the phrase "require or permit" in 703 (j) fortifies the conclusion that Congress did not intend to limit traditional business freedom to such a degree as to prohibit all voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action.
"""
America is a democracy, not a bureaucracy. The executive branch is governed by a single representative elected by the people. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the people didn't make a great choice this time but our constitutional republic is also one of the foundational pillars of american strength and trump being an idiot doesn't change that.
The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional. Some of the executive branch's appointee's have authority over him but only in specific circumstances (such as 25th amendment) and they're usually in agreement with him since he gets to appoint them anyways. Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
This is true only to the extent that Congress delegates its power to the executive. Per Article I of the Constitution, Congress has the plenary power of the purse.
So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
> So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
But the Congress never did that. You won't find an appropriations bill where Congress allocated $X to Harvard and $Y to Princeton, etc. In fact, it did the opposite. Under Title VI, it empowered the executive branch to withhold money based on civil rights violations. And regardless of your view on Presidential power vis-a-vis executive branch agencies, 42 USC 2000d-1 specifically subordinates federal agencies' rules, regulations, and orders pursuant to Title VI to the authority of the "President."
We’re in agreement here. That’s why I mentioned in the first sentence that Congress can delegate certain spending decisions. But it’s not the default behavior as the Constitution defaults to Congress having sole plenary authority.
Trump is not using Title VI to justify withholding federal funding. He's just withholding federal funding and his minions are coming up with the justification after the fact. And even then, it's insufficient, because Title VI requires an investigation and a fair amount of procedure.
This is one of the stupider things this administration does. They have the legal power to do lots of the things they're doing, but they are too incompetent to dot their is and cross their ts.
Who knew that driving off everyone who was good at their job would make the administration less competent?
>This is true only to the extent that Congress delegates its power to the executive.
Directly or indirectly the people of the United States have power over all three branches. One can easily make strong arguments that the problem here is both that Congress as abdicated its powers to the executive (rather than delegated), and that the people have ignored that Congress should retain those powers while focusing on the presidency as the important election to the exclusion of all others.
This has been going on for decades or longer.
>So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
Sure. Definitely means he can't spend it on something else. But how much wiggle room is in this? Does it say on which day, hour, and minute it must be spent? Sure, it's probably tied at least to the fiscal year (in which case it needs to be spent by September, one would suppose), but that's months away. Does allocating a budget imply that it needs to be spent at all? If some bureau or department fails to spend all of its budget, has the president somehow committed some treason-adjacent crime, or is that just thriftiness? Are these funds earmarked for specific universities? What if he just goes shopping for alternative recipients?
To say that he has no discretion at all is absurd, if that were the case then Congress would have mandated that these be automatic electronic bank transfers without any human intervention (or oversight). The nature of the job not only implies but practically demands some (if limited) discretion.
> If some bureau or department fails to spend all of its budget, has the president somehow committed some treason-adjacent crime, or is that just thriftiness?
Yes, he has. It is not the presidents power to judge whether the money he spent in defiance of congress is sufficient, it is congress that holds this power. If congress thinks they should spend less, they can settle this by changing the budget. What would you say if the next democratic president simply refused to spend a single dollar assigned to ICE to "be thrifty"?
Well, it’s unlikely to be “criminal” or “treason,” but it is unconstitutional. An aggrieved party can seek redress from the court to compel the executive to transfer the provisioned monies.
>What would you say if the next democratic president simply refused to spend a single dollar assigned to ICE to "be thrifty"?
I'd be thrilled. There's $6 billion that they spend on DEA every year that I'd be happy if it was just pocketed by Trump and spent on hookers or something. Normalize this, please.
The perverse incentives people will defend so that they can obey the letter (but not the spirit) of the law are downright bizarre. You're all getting everything you deserve, too bad I'm getting it with you.
In fact, when Congress passes a budget, it’s actually a law that must be executed by the executive. There are actually other laws against impoundment and against the executive changing the budget.
Trump is literally breaking the law but no one really cares to discuss that anymore since the gish gallop has be so quick this term.
AIUI Congress has not passed a budget in a long time. They pass "continuing resolutions" and they fund broad categories of spending and leave the details up to the funded entities (which then falls under the executive branch).
If Congress wants to fund something specific, they need to pass a law or budget that names that specific thing and how much they are appropriating. They aren't doing that.
Well, it's not that simple. Yes, Congress passes the bill saying that X billions of dollars have to be spent on universities, but that bill does not name every single university in US as beneficiary. That's what executive branch is for: to work out the details of how to implement the law passed by Congress.
So, Trump taking money from Harvard and giving it to say, a community college in Tampa is technically still correct implementation of the law. I mean, it all depends if he can defend his decision in court, because of course he cannot discriminate based on race, ethnicity, political affiliation etc.
It may not be unlawful, but institutions work best when there is stability of practice, even across leadership changes. Otherwise, you can’t do any long-range planning or undertake complex experiments or investments that could take years to bear fruit.
We used to have a shared sense of custom and mores that helped preserve this stability. But that seems to be out the window now, and regrettably so.
I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that Trump is breaking the law. I'm no expert in NSF funding, but Congress may well have delegated its authority over how the funds in the pool are to be allocated and distributed to the executive.
If someone has more knowledge to contribute, that'd be most welcome.
Clear example here is USAID. Congress has directed, as recently as March 2025, that a specific amount of funds be spent on the statutory goals of the US Agency for International Development. (I have not checked, but I am sure federal law also goes into some detail about what tasks USAID needs to perform.)
I do not imagine it is congruent with the law to simply fire all the staff and shut down USAID (or "merge" it into State).
The laws are all public and people are free to read that a few weeks ago, Congress directed the Executive to spend money as USAID for the statutory purposes behind USAID. That part is pretty clear.
With NSF grants, the question is whether the President can redistribute funding away from applicants affiliated with specific institutions he doesn’t like (my first approximation: probably).
With USAID, the question is whether the President has the authority to disband an entire Agency established and appropriated by Congress (22 U.S.C. 6563) (my first approximation: probably not).
Point taken. I was mostly addressing the larger question of whether the Executive is breaking the law wrt appropriations. Likely yes.
With science funding grants, the administration likely has latitude to make some changes, but the specifics of that latitude are going to be embedded in a thicket of overlapping statutes of different vintages.
Without going through all the specific statutes, I relied on the suggestion that if they are okay breaking the law around USAID funding passed in March, they likely are not going to find religion and adhere to laws governing science funding. But I guess anything's possible.
That is not a final word on the constitutionality of dissolving USAID, but it's an indication that the Court didn't believe plaintiffs had a high likelihood of success on the merits to justify the preliminary injunction.
The recent SCOTUS opinion that the President's official actions are not bound by the laws of man does provide a clear line of sight to really any action taken by the Executive branch. So it may not really even be productive to discuss limits on Executive power anymore.
That is in fact not what the Supreme Court said. It said that the President has immunity for “official acts,” just like Congress members and judges.
Say a judge dismisses an indictment of an accused murderer because the police didn’t have a proper search warrant. Then the accused murderer kills someone else. That could fall within the letter of “negligent homicide” laws, but the judge can’t be prosecuted for that because judges have absolute immunity for official acts.
Similarly, a red state prosecutor could have tried to prosecute Biden for something like negligent homicide on the theory that his opening of the boarder was a negligent act that resulted in deaths. Obviously you can’t do that, because the President has immunity for official acts. It would be completely insane if the President didn’t have immunity. President do lots of things which cause people to be killed, property to be destroyed, etc. You could prosecute those as crimes if you literally applied the criminal laws.
I agree with you here. I also think that (allegedly) ignoring federal statutes while reorganizing the government is pretty clearly an official act. So everything we are discussing is an official act.
If the Executive isn’t bound to follow federal appropriations laws, there’s no principled reason why he should have to follow other federal laws. And as you show, the president has full criminal immunity as well.
What other laws are there that might limit his conduct? I’m of the understanding that where we are now is the only potential check on Presidents going forward is impeachment and removal from office. It’s a blunt instrument, but apparently there are no other applicable mechanisms.
> What other laws are there that might limit his conduct? I’m of the understanding that where we are now is the only potential check on Presidents going forward is impeachment and removal from office. It’s a blunt instrument, but apparently there are no other applicable mechanisms.
The primary check on the President is elections, not “the law.” Secondarily, there’s impeachment, and Congress’s power of the purse. Those are the main checks on the executive.
We have this 20th century conception of “the rule of law,” where we imagine this neutral, independent “justice system” as the base layer on top of which the elected branches operate. Like the lowest level of an operating system kernel. But if you look at the debates at the constitutional convention, and read the federalist papers and anti-federalist papers, that’s not the system the founders actually created. The founders didn’t trust anyone to neutrally enforce the law. You won’t find anywhere in those primary sources where the founders envisioned some “rule of law” where private litigants use the court to micromanage executive policy.
Instead, what we have is a game of rock-paper-scissors, where no branch is assumed to be “independent” and no branch is a “base layer of the operating system.” Courts can declare the law, but can’t force the President to do something. But if the President doesn’t listen to the court, he can be voted out of office, or impeached, or Congress can withhold funding for the administration. That is a complete system of checks and balances as it is.
> You won’t find anywhere in those primary sources where the founders envisioned some “rule of law” where private litigants use the court to micromanage executive policy.
Marbury vs Madison established the judiciaries authority to review actions of the executive. That was in 1803.
Regarding rule of law, in that opinion:
> When the heads of the departments of the Government are the political or confidential officers of the Executive, merely to execute the will of the President, or rather to act in cases in which the Executive possesses a constitutional or legal discretion, nothing can be more perfectly clear than that their acts are only politically examinable. But where a specific duty is assigned by law, and individual rights depend upon the performance of that duty, it seems equally clear that the individual who considers himself injured has a right to resort to the laws of his country for a remedy.
1) Isn’t part of the founding sources I mentioned. It was quite controversial at the time.
2) Stands for exactly the opposite of what you’re arguing. Marbury goes to great lengths to disclaim any authority over executive policymaking and discretion, and limit courts to compelling executive officers to act only when the duties are specifically assigned by law and ministerial:
> This is not a proceeding which may be varied if the judgment of the Executive shall suggest one more eligible, but is a precise course accurately marked out by law, and is to be strictly pursued. It is the duty of the Secretary of State to conform to the law, and in this he is an officer of the United States, bound to obey the laws. He acts, in this respect, as has been very properly stated at the bar, under the authority of law, and not by the instructions of the President. It is a ministerial act which the law enjoins on a particular officer for a particular purpose.
And even after determining that delivery of the already executed commission is a ministerial act, the Court went out of its way to invoke a jurisdictional escape hatch to avoid actually enjoining an executive officer. A fair application of Marbury would preclude the sweeping powers courts have asserted to micromanage executive action in response to private litigation.
In Marbury, the court ruled that Marbury had already been appointed when the previous president signed his commission, and the only thing that remained was the purely ministerial act of the secretary of state delivering the signed letter that was sitting in the president’s desk. But even then, the Court found a way to avoid compelling the secretary of state to actually deliver the commission! How would the Marbury court view the prospect of a district court ordering the president to turn around military planes being used to deport an admitted El Salvadoran citizen? Or district courts ordering the President to reach out to a foreign country’s president to demand the return of that foreign country’s citizen! The Marbury court wouldn’t have dreamed of it!
What Marbury stands for is that the judicial branch can declare the legality of laws and executive actions, but should bend over backwards to avoid actually compelling the executive to perform any action.
> The primary check on the President is elections, not “the law.” Secondarily, there’s impeachment, and Congress’s power of the purse.
Right, that's where this discussion started. What we are looking at right now is the erosion of that second piece, Congress's power of the purse. The Constitutional checks and balances (not the 20th-century stuff you detail) doesn't work as well without this key Article I power. I have not seen it explained under what principle this power of Congress has been arrogated instead to the Executive.
It wasn’t done based on principle but laziness. Congress undoubtedly has the power to leave some particulars of how to spend money up to the President. But Congress has abused that power to basically provide the executive with giant slush funds with only the vaguest directions as to how to use that money. Congress can take that power back at any time.
You're not wrong. If the President does not follow a federal law, he is not performing an official act, and he is not immune from criminal liability.
If he chooses to continue to ignore the law, the solution isn't the courts. It's the Second Amendment, which was added to the Bill of Rights as a check on exactly this (though the Founders intended for it to be exercised through the States' militias, not the citizens directly, based on the text of the first half of the amendment).
Before resorting to violence, the remedy is to impeach and convict the President, and, failing that, elect a replacement President. Only if the incumbent fails to cede authority should further consideration be taken.
And, to be honest, I’m not really sure that a bunch of unorganized wingnuts that slobber all over their big-man toys are going to prevail over the National Guard, if the latter remain loyal to the President, and a lot of innocent lives will probably be lost due to militia incompetence.
Biden didn't ignore immigration law. He executed it. He arrested more immigrants than Trump did during his first term. Republicans simply disagreed about how he was executing the laws because they wanted political talking points (and notably at Trump's urging, shot down a number of proposed immigration reforms that would have reduced illegal immigration, cut down on the asylum loophole, and make it easier to deport immigrants with criminal records...Laken Riley was killed by an illegal immigrant who was still in the country because Republicans blocked the laws that would have deported him.).
Trump isn't following the laws at all. He's simply issuing "executive orders" without regard to the powers or limitations of the executive as stated by the Constitution or the U.S. Code. Almost every single one of his executive orders during his second term violates a Constitutional prohibition in some way, and now that the initial shock to the system is over you're seeing judges overturn almost all of his orders...Even judges appointed by Trump during his first term are starting to overturn his executive orders.
So Trump's response was to call for the arrest of these judges. And to hint that violence would be appropriate way of removing them from.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If Trump gets killed by a mob this term, it's going to be because he kept suggesting that violence was the way to deal with his opponents.
There are all kinds of laws that limit president's conduct, but the point is that there is no way to actually enforce these laws, other than voluntary compliance by the president and his government, and impeachment by legislature. This is by design, that's how the separation of powers works.
Why do you assume that the person you're responding to is "jumping to conclusions." Feels like you're just ignoring what they have to say in the guise of "asking for more knowledge" when you don't actually know if they don't have the knowledge because of your own lack of expertise.
> Why do you assume that the person you're responding to is "jumping to conclusions.”
Because they said “Trump is literally breaking the law.” That hasn’t been established yet.
I happen to be an attorney as well as a hacker, and I worked in a Federal district court, so perhaps give me the benefit of the doubt that I just might know what I’m talking about. If you have legitimate questions of your own, I’d be happy to try to answer them.
This is an open question. The judicial branch has authority, on paper. But without means of enforcing that authority, it cannot truly constrain the executive.
Congress has a jail, sure. But I and the comment I was responding to were regarding the judiciary.
To put a finer point on it: if the president orders somebody to do something in violation of federal law, and then pardons them, can the law be enforced?
Congress’s big hammer is impeachment. The smaller hammer is refusing to fund his administration. Between that and elections, that’s plenty of ways to keep the president in check.
Read the RFCP. ArtIII judges can absolutely empower people other than USMS to carry out legal orders such as service of process and enforcement of contempt orders.
okay but that's not my point. The point is that their rulings are supposed to be based on their interpretations of the relevant laws, and that judges are not supposed to issue rulings solely on the basis that they don't like what the government is doing even if it is obviously stupid. The OP's basis for why the president shouldn't be allowed to do this was that publicly funded universities are "foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century".
I wouldn't be surprised if trump has in some way violated statute in relation to freedom of speech or academic independence but unless somebody makes a compelling argument that he has, he is a representative of the people operating under the authority granted to him as president, and being a wreckless fool doesn't change that.
I don't particularly like what he's been doing in his second term so far but in online discourse I've seen this worrying trend recently where people think that unelected bureaucrats who were hired because other unelected bureaucrats liked their resumes should be able to hamstring the president and overrule him (i think the strangest thing i've seen was people opining that the CIA should be getting involved). I think it's important to remember that the checks and balances in the US constitution are between the three branches of the federal government, and most of the big bureaus/departments/etc are under the executive branch which he is the sole executive of for the next four years.
And we have laws that say that the government cannot make obviously stupid decisions in a lot of domains. For example, a number of challenges to DOGE's activities have been under the Administrative Procedure Act, which limits how the government is able to make changes to regulation and staffing.
The mechanism that Trump is using to deny funding for the universities he hates is through statute. Courts can conclude that this action does not match the statute.
> I don't particularly like what he's been doing in his second term so far but in online discourse I've seen this worrying trend recently where people think that unelected bureaucrats who were hired because other unelected bureaucrats liked their resumes should be able to hamstring the president and overrule him
I'm very sorry, but this is the law. This is not just vibes. If you do not like this, then advocate for changing the law. But you are doing the precise thing that you are insisting that others are doing here.
> The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional.
That omits a crucial issue that many amazingly overlook: The bar isn't constitutional but legal. Congress makes the laws, not the President. The President is bound by those laws, and in fact their job is to enforce the laws that Congress makes. They cannot do things unless empowered by the law.
If a presidential candidate promises to break the law in his campaign, that does not give him the authority to break the law. We are a constitutional republic and the constitution must be followed.
It's quite clear that the current President does not give a damn about the constitution, know anything about it, or have any compunction about blatant violation of the constitution.
> Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
> > Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
> This is factually wrong.
It’s literally the first sentence of Article II! “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Article II doesn’t even talk about an “executive branch.” It assigns powers and responsibilities to the President.
It’s an extremely easy to understand structure that has been obfuscated during the 20th century. The constitutional actors are: the President, the 100 senators and 435 Congressmen, the 9 Justices, and Article III judges. They hold all the powers of their respective offices.
Can Congress appoint employees to be part of the Supreme Court, and provide for them to exercise judicial powers independently of the Justices? Of course not! Can Congress delegate to a staff of employees the power to make laws independently of the Congressmen? No! Obviously not! That would be absurd.
That’s not exactly what they held. They held that the President is immune from prosecution for official acts. Prosecutorial immunity doesn’t mean his conduct is not unlawful; it means he can’t be criminally prosecuted for it. That distinction is important because it doesn’t prevent courts from issuing injunctions. And, as stated by others, the immunity is extended only to official acts. What constitutes an official act isn’t super clear yet, but I think it’s safe to assume that golfing isn’t an official act.
The Roberts court invented the official acts immunity out of whole cloth for the sole purpose of keeping Trump out of jail. They're quite capable of interpreting everything he does as an official act.
Sort of. He would still be breaking the law, it’s just that if it’s an ‘official act’ then the judiciary can’t do anything about it, just Congress via impeachment.
I think that opinion would have been less controversial if the President hadn’t openly advertised his intent to violate the law repeatedly. It’s not like the courts are rendered powerless if the President violates the law; any judgments they render are still binding on the parties, even if they require the parties act in ways contrary to the executive’s interpretation of the law. That still means something as long people continue to respect the judiciary. The dangerous game we’re playing is finding out whether that respect will continue.
It also would have been much less controversial that, when asked, the Trump lawyer during oral arguments specifically dodged the question if the president can deploy Seal Team 6 to kill a political opponent. That choice is very telling as to what the next steps probably are, and none of them are good for this country.
The majority’s response to that is far more compelling than the dissent’s Seal Team Six hypothetical:
> The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.” Post, at 18 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); see post, at 26, 29–30; post, at 8–9, 10, 12, 16, 20–21 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next. For instance, Section 371—which has been charged in this case—is a broadly worded criminal statute that can cover “‘any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of Government.’” United States v. Johnson, 383 U. S. 169, 172 (1966) (quoting Haas v. Henkel, 216 U. S. 462, 479 (1910)). Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration, or environmental laws).
Look at section 371! If President didn’t have immunity for official acts, Trump could easily have relied on that broad statute to prosecute him for opening the border and thus “impairing” the function of ICE. Our criminal laws are breathtakingly broad in their wording, and a contrary ruling from the Supreme Court would’ve meant that the Presidency would become subordinate to prosecutors.
> If President didn’t have immunity for official acts, Trump could easily have relied on that broad statute to prosecute him for opening the border and thus “impairing” the function of ICE
Trump still wants to do this and the court will let him because you have to be incredibly naive or willingly ignorant to think that that this Supreme Court will apply the laws equally without regard to political party.
> t would’ve meant that the Presidency would become subordinate to prosecutors
Oh no, the President would have to follow the same laws as everyone else, how horrible!/s
> Oh no, the President would have to follow the same laws as everyone else, how horrible
“Laws” aren’t magic. If you could just have “laws” and trust prosecutors to enforce them fairly and neutrally, then the entire constitutional structure, with three branches and checks and balances, is pointless. You would just have prosecutors as basically the government’s “microkernel” and then the other three branches on top.
The framers didn’t create that system because they understood that you can’t trust prosecutors either—they’re political too! Our system is designed like a game of rock-paper-scissors, where the checks on each branch come from the other branches, not prosecutors enforcing “the law.”
Prosecutors enforce the laws by prosecuting. That's the function of the executive branch. It's in the name - EXECUTIVE branch.
The check on prosecutorial power lies both with the Judicial branch and, in cases of a jury trial, the People. Prosecutors are not judge, jury, and executioner.
The Legislative branch gets a say by writing, passing, repealing, or amending laws.
So the three branches check each other, no need to "just trust me, bro" with prosecutors.
If the President cannot faithfully execute the laws without BREAKING them then that either means the Judicial branch should strike down the laws that are preventing that or the Legislative branch should pass laws that contain a carve out for the President. The President is not above the law, so the half-measure of the Supreme Court deciding that they are in official acts is both ahistoric and enabling despotism.
> Prosecutors are not judge, jury, and executioner.
In practice they are. Criminal laws are written extremely broadly. And as they say, prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich. Then all it takes is putting the case in front of a favorable jury: trying a republican in new york city or a democrat in rural iowa. In that way, a handful of people can undo the will of the electorate.
The framers would have easily understood this. At the time, the states were trying to kill the federal government. You think they envisioned say a Virginia prosecutor trying the federal president before a Virginia judge and jury?
This is a fair question, but it's being asked a lot already.
Let's imagine that completely legitimate circumstances lead to the US Government stopping the stream of grants to the Ivy League universities. How would they cope, given their enormous endowments that generate significant interest? This question is asked much less, and the answer is much less obvious. Hence the value of TFA.
Additionally, the follow-on questions are irrelevant. There are a million better questions to ask on the other side of this as well, before we ask why someone can't live without the money that they've been acquiring entirely above board and legally. "Why does the gov't think it has the authority to do this?"
Why do we need to have theoretical debates about legitimate circumstances, when there are real debates about illegitimate circumstances happening? having this irrelevant follow-on discussion is doing the gov't's work for them.
In a different setting I can see asking this question, but there is no need to ask this question while the circumstances are clearly illegitimate.
What's the point of such an abstract question? The university's goals and expected resolution for the problem would always depend critically on why the stream of grants stopped.
When a large institution is faced with uncertainty about the future, it’s both feasible and prudent to make plans that account for multiple future outcomes. In this case, it makes sense to do both of the following:
1) Fight the administration in the legal system.
2) Plan for the case where some of those legal fights are lost.
What does it mean, concretely, to plan for that case? It doesn't sound like there's any risk of a scenario where, like, Columbia can't pay maintenance staff and all the buildings flood. If the US government freezes them out of grant funding, then the research funded by those grants won't be funded any longer - there's no careful planning you can do to make that less true.
At some level, someone needs to have discretion on which grants to award and not award. You can call it "dictatorial", but I don't see how it's any less dictatorial if the decision-maker is some faceless, unaccountable bureaucrat vs a President that is accountable to voters. Surely, grants were being denied before for other reasons.
>Surely, grants were being denied before for other reasons.
Were they being denied? It might well be the case that grants were never denied except when the grant spigot ran dry waiting for the next year. I don't necessarily believe that is the case, but is there some evidence that it doesn't work like that?
If the funds are disbursed from the public Treasury, it is very much a political decision. You can put some intermediary bureaucrats to create a face of objectivity, but it's a political decision at it's core.
Funds duly allocated by the Legislature, which means they must be spent in service of what the Legislature allocated them for. Presidents cannot impound funds since the Impoundment Control Act, so either they need to spend them or convince Congress to change that allocation.
We can argue about the basis for terminating the grants until the cows come home, but this administration through DOGE has made it clear that they're not otherwise going to be spending this money, which is something the president cannot do.
Clawing back and terminating grants without due process is what dictators do; it's the opposite of what supporting and defending the Constitution is.
Snark aside, Yes I do. Congress if fully capable of being specific when it wants to and delegating to the executive when it doesn't. For example they required the A10 airplane to continue to operate. They didn't specify the caliber of bullets to use.
Process matters, everything else is to a first approximation merely platitudes. What's the difference between faceless bureaucrats making these decisions vs the president? It's the difference between rule of law vs dictatorship. Faceless bureaucrats have to follow policy defined by Congress and the President. If the person making the policy is the same person making the decision, and especially when the "policy" is whatever their fancy is, that's not rule of law. America was founded on the principle, "a government of law, not of men".
Moreover, faceless bureaucrats risk criminal and financial punishments for things like self-dealing. The president faces no such risk. And when they're a lame duck, they (theoretically) face zero risk, period.
Bureaucracies are slow. They're costly. Like democracy generally, they're inefficient. They're worthwhile because, at least as far as government is concerned, they're a necessary element to maintain rule of law and avoiding dictatorship. The solution to government bureaucracy isn't to remove the bureaucracy, it's to remove the government involvement. Otherwise, you're just inviting dictatorship. This has happened countless times. When the people get upset about perceived government ineffectiveness and its democratic institutions are too slow to respond (e.g. gridlocked Congress), there are two routes: privatization (i.e. reducing the role of government, not merely something like syndicalism) or dictatorship.
What's the difference between Donald Trump's rise to power and approach to governance, versus Huge Chavez's? Not much. The parallels are amazing. Both came to power promising radical overhauls of perceived sclerotic institutions, including broken legislatures. Like Trump, Chavez was a media whore who spent most of his time talking on television, making impossible promises and blaming everyone and everything else for his own failures. (Castro was like this, too.) They both spout so much B.S. that most people can't even keep up; they just start taking them at their word, which is why Chavez was popular until the day he died. His successor has zero charisma; the policies haven't changed, but now people hate the exact same kind of government they had during Chavez, but have no power to change it. That's what happens when you choose government of men rather than government of law.
Do you honestly think Trump is individually reviewing grants?
Trump with help of various groups makes political appointees who either individually oversee grant reviews or administrate individuals that do. These people are just as faceless and unaccountable as with any other president ...
The difference here is that Congress who is much more accountable to voters deliberated and wrote laws authorizing various funding which is being completely overridden by the branch of government that is supposed to carry out the law.
It is dictatorial, not because one person gets to make the decision, but because the US constitution delineates the powers of the gov't, to which the President does not have this power. I really do not understand why this is such a hard concept for many people here to grasp. The separation of powers is such a fundamental aspect of our government that I am astounded to see you miss this point. When any one branch usurps the power of another branch it is the *EXACT* kind of tyranny the constitution was created to avoid.
What was happening before this year? Surely, congress was not the one approving and awarding these grants. It was a member of the executive agency. Trump didn't declare any power that wasn't already being exercised by the executive.
You don't go and decide a case on the merits when you've thrown it out on standing.
Addressing the other question is a pre-requisite to considering the one included in this piece. And given that they are ignoring the presumable answer to the other question, they have not justified the existence of this article.
if you want to go that way, you're conveniently ignoring if congress should have the authority to allocate funds to nonprofits that aren't part of the government under the enumerated uses in article I section 8.
Yeeep. This is the only thing worth knowing about this whole mess. The people trust their reps to handle the money, and the reps are the only people who are supposed to be able to manage that money.
Yet here we have tacit acceptance that the president can fuck with citizens' money just because he's in his feels about something. Absolute clownery.
A few other commenters have alluded to it, but Obama's 2011 (and then 2014/2016) "Dear Colleague" letters are critical to understanding what's going on here. As FIRE tells it:
In April 2011, the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) established new mandates requiring colleges and universities receiving federal funding to dramatically reduce students’ due process rights. Under the new regulations, announced in a letter from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, colleges and universities were required to employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard—a 50.01%, “more likely than not” evidentiary burden—when adjudicating student complaints concerning sexual harassment or sexual violence. The regulations further required that if a university judicial process allows the accused student to appeal a verdict, it must allow the accusing student the right to appeal as well, resulting in a type of “double jeopardy” for the accused. Additionally, OCR’s letter failed to recognize that truly harassing conduct (as defined by the law) is distinct from protected speech. Institutions that did not comply with OCR’s new regulations faced federal investigation and a potential loss of federal funding.
The innovation in these letters was realizing OCR could just come to a new understanding of what civil rights law required, then tell universities that since this is what civil rights law means, following the guidance would be a mandate for institutions to receive federal funding. So now Trump's come in and reinterpreted civil rights law once again.
At this point probably a supermajority of the country thinks this innovative idea for enacting ad-hoc nationwide policy changes has been abused by one or more administrations, but I haven't heard anyone seriously working on a generalized solution. Everyone's mostly given up on Congress and just hopes their team can take control of the magic pen.
Certainly one could argue if evidence of widespread racism by specific institutions should face punishment by the executive. It is entirely reasonable to believe that we should turn the cheek to institutional racism so that we can get good research out of it.
This question was not raised when the Obama administration dictated procedures and evidentiary standards to universities in cases of sexual assault, with threats of being found liable under Title IX for noncompliance. Well it was raised by some on the right, and then dismissed because, you know, the right, and who wants to defend campus rapists anyway? Those Duke University lacrosse kids should have hung -- even if they didn't actually rape that girl, they might have... or they might have raped some other girl.
When Orange Man exercises a power he presumes to have, it's "dictatorial", but when "Pen and a Phone" Obama exercised that same power -- together with the people, follow where Obama leads.
Obama threatened, but did not make good on those threats. Trump is threatening and actively withholding funds even to Columbia which bent the knee, because these are institutions which are seen as political enemies by the administration.
Because the left never cared about the rules, except to circumvent them when in power and to use them as a way to prevent the other side from making meaningful progress when not.
Because to them, the "right person" is doing it for the "right reasons". Same as the Obama supporters, really. It's like, do we live in a constitutional republic with consistent rules the government is expected to follow, or is it "for my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law"?
One is complying with actual statutory law, the other is just ad hoc vengeance. You might not like it but one is an approach actually consistent with the constitutional order of power in this country and the other isn't. I'm so exhausted with this "tit for tat" bs. At best, it's a tacit admission that it is wrong and you don't care.
This unlimited relativism is bizarre. If Trump invaded Canada, is his argument that Roosevelt invaded Germany? There is a difference between one and the other.
What does the Duke lacrosse case have to do with it?
To show that these questions have been asked before, and when the social issue at stake is one that leftists champion, very very few on the left are willing to stand up to presidential authority in any way.
When the same exact power is used in a way that leftists by fiat deem "bad", there is no limit of the amount of pettiness, name calling, obstruction, and general ill will they will put to use to stop the president from doing something. in this case, it is to uphold Civil Rights law against a clear and ongoing violation.
This poster should have realized though that the way to win in politics hasn't been "debating the left" or crying "what if the roles were reversed?!" for some time now. Thats the way to be a principled loser, and be called all sorts of names in the process.
baseless attacks, like calling every republican a Nazi for the last 30 years seems to have worked quite well. Proclaiming your victimhood w.r.t. an abstract "patriarchy" has also lead to significant gains in political influence.
Duke lacrosse what the epitome of “Guilty because male”… which made the wind turn around and you have a situation to deal with now. All of this because people don’t want the left’s “Guilty because male” or “because [race]” solution, and they made it known through the ballots.
For those who don’t know: Under Title IX, in summary, accusers of rape have all rights for their case to be treated by internal boards in the uni, which means no due trial with merits or proof, which is blatantly unconstitutional but the left didn’t care at the time. Oh yeah and not only seizing the girl’s phone as evidence is forbidden too, but even showing the man’s phone with the conversation with the girl, because it would impede on the girl’s privacy. So some poor Lacrosse players got accused, adulthoods were already ruined, the women admitted to lying, and this is the case with probably all accused without due process during the 2013-2025 period.
The sexual assault allegations against Duke lacrosse players were headed for criminal court. They are unresolved because powerful people prevented them and their alleged victim from having a day in court, evidence and arguments being heard from both sides, and a jury rendering a verdict. Instead their parents did everything possible to keep it out of court (why?).
What you describe is that they are unresolved - there was no evidence, verdict. That was all suppressed, including by attacking the prosecutor. Why not clear their names in court?
Prosecutors in every other circumstance wield almost unchecked power - except when the children of the powerful might end up in court. Name another prosecutor treated in this way.
I don't know it was egregious; I think that was the media blitz by powerful people trying to shut them down.
Regardless, it happens all the time everywhere - witholding evidence, fabricated evidence, forced confessions, black site torture, endless harassment, etc. etc. What this DA allegedly did was relatively nothing.
Why are you citing the these institutions' contribution to the 20th century? We are 25 years past the 20th century, 35 years since the end of the Cold War (which was the spiritual end of the 20th century).
What have these elite institutions contributed to the 1990+ world order?
But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads.
SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college.
Obviously what he is doing is punitive.
BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.
Federally-funded academic science often looks like:
1. The university + government fund/run a project
2. Project creates new knowledge (cool!)
3. The government gets a pretty awesome license to use that knowledge
4. The government more often than not gives that knowledge away (or offers great accessible licensing), so that
5. Private industry can adapt, apply and commercialize the knowledge, driving new GDP growth and opportunities for improving life, etc.
Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.
It's that last step - 5 - which I think is a missing piece of the discussion. A lot of private company pharma and medical research is often doing the 'last mile' work that started in university research programs. Stuff that looks promising is picked up and commercialized, but there's usually significant work the research people have done before big commercial players take it to market. They're not doing all their research from scratch - they're taking the best bits funded by our government research programs and bringing them to market. Cutting university research will damage the private sector pretty quickly.
It even goes beyond the concrete research that eventually gets commercialized. One pharma startup I am familiar with has much of its research-related leadership and board staffed with very successful current or former academic researchers who used to run their own labs or even departments. We cannot shift skill acquisition like that over night to private industry.
On #3 "government gets a pretty awesome license" seems disingenuous. From what I've witnessed some specific agencies get to use that license in a rather limited way. It's often not broadly available to the public and commercial rights tend to be reserved to the University. Is that actually what most people would think of as "pretty awesome?"
On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that?
On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?
Under the Bayh-Dole Act state universities do the exact same thing. They patent their research and license it to private companies. Their discoveries are no more or less open to the public than with private universities.
> By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.
I don't know precisely, but I would assume the universities take about 50% to 60% of the granted research funding as administrative overhead, and only what remains goes to the actual research.
This is somewhat disingenuous. Something like half of the grant is handed over to the University as overhead. Much of that is legit to cover things like labs but a lot of it goes to a cover a massive amount of administrative bloat.
Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.
That's not how facilities work or are accounted for.
Facilities are common to all of the university. It doesn't make sense to force this individual requirement on each grant when the University has hundreds of ways it is using a given building or lab equipment.
Are you thinking "facility" == "building" and "rooms"?
The lab equipment is constantly evolving, needs repair, maintenance, on-site training. Perhaps you are thinking of a lab bench that is going to last the lifetime of the building and I am thinking of a computer server, 3D scanner, 3D printer, MRI machine (small lab system), etc.
My son has taken second year organic chemistry classes that had more computer hardware and software than I ever had in my electrical engineering/computer
science classes in the early 1990s. The software might be open source, or might have ongoing software license fees. While those specific teaching labs should be paid for through tuition, imagine similar or more advanced versions in the research labs.
facility is intentionally broad. I think the point being that all of those things are being provided by the University to many researchers/students/professors.
The point is that separating out what gets allocated where, when there are so many things that might have multiple uses, is a pointless task if you're trying to reverse engineer how much money should be given to individual research teams to account for it. The University already has the systems in place to manage the overhead. There's no reason to do more work to try and get to the same result.
This is what accountants do. They match expenses to income. It shouldn't be that hard.
J. Random Professor is using lab #12 for his group. Apportion the overall building expenses by square foot to his grant budgets, or something along those lines.
When I was a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Computer Science research grant proposals included budgets for overhead. This was often, if I recall correctly, 10% of the overall equipment and salary budget. This was deemed a tax collected by the department and used to:
- pay IT staff salaries
- pay IT hardware and service costs (storage, communication)
- etc
Other costs on the research grant would include:
- hardware purchases: personal computers, specialized equipment, compute and storage servers
- graduate student and postdoctoral student salaries
- travel costs to conferences for students
- consumables (if any)
Again, in Canada, there are various types of research grants. For example, the "Research Tools and Instruments grants program" will pay the entire cost of the equipment. This includes: shipping, customs fees, warranty/service contracts, software licensing, on-site training.
Note that travel, salary and benefits, consumables, renovations, lab infrastructure are not allowed.
For other types of grants the institution's "tax rate" is usually specified by the Department of Research, and can be as high as 25%. UBC hides it's rates behind a portal, but Simon Fraser University has a description of them: https://www.sfu.ca/research/researcher-resources/fund-my-res...
I won't speak to the amount of "administrative bloat" that universities have experienced during my two decades post graduation. While it exists, a tax rate of 25% seems quite reasonable when you consider the overall costs of research at a university compared to equivalent commercial office/lab space.
The numbers you are suggesting do indeed seem reasonable, and if those were the overheads being used, they would probably be justified. But I think current overheads are often much higher. Here for example is a recent article saying that the proposed 15% cap on overhead for NIH grants would be disastrous for universities like Harvard that currently have a 69% negotiated overhead rate: https://deliprao.substack.com/p/understanding-nihs-15-overhe...
To be fair, I'm not sure if that author is using the same definition that you are. In the article, they clarify that a 69% rate means that a $1,000,000 grant has an extra $690,000 paid to Harvard. Still, the idea that the rates should be the same for all institutions and should be closer to the numbers you remember certainly seems worth considering.
> But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
The funding at issue is research funding, not educational funding, and it goes to both kinds of universities (vastly more, in aggregate, to state universities than Ivies.)
> Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
If research funding is used as a lever to establish political control, those things literally do not matter, since whatever universities survive will simply be tools of totalitarian indoctrination by the regime.
Multiple people pointing this out, and absolutely right.
Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?
Also, pragmatically, it's a system that has yielded incredible ROI since WW2, in terms of new industries, new companies, jobs, science, economic gains, productivity gains, and national security. The US university system is the envy of the entire world, and it's being targeted for dismantling by very petty, cruel, and incompetent people.
Because we want the same scientists who do, or recently did, advanced research to teach students? Because we want students to be involved in actual real genuine cutting-edge research? I suppose this is the logic.
As a student back in the day I worked in a university lab, and it was pretty interesting to play a role in solving problems that don't have answers in the end of a textbook.
We did so because having all laboratories be government run was inefficient so in WW2 we decided to split the costs with private and public universities who will maintain labs, equipment, and the federal government will pay directly for the research.
Many of the "good" universities in general seem more focused on prestige and acceptance rates than they do educating the masses. The Ivies could significantly expand the sizes of their student bodies (and to their credit they do make some content accessible online), but they don't because a lot of the value of a Harvard education is the exclusivity and the social network it gets you into.
And therein lies why a lot of Trump's base has a massive problem with them.
To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.
Oh absolutely agreed, the GOP is anti-education however you slice it.
In a less partisan world, it would be nice to see a version of this that was more about efficient allocation of education dollars rather than an attack on education.
Universities have two roles: education and research. The funding is overwhelmingly for research and it's going to those that provide the best return on investment. Should cancer research funding go to your local community college?
Educating the best and brightest is also of special value, but that is beside the point.
I disagree -- the funding isn't ROI based at all. Heck NIH doesn't even really audit how well the funds were spent, how could they? They don't even really assess if the research had impact, save for counting journal articles and impact factors, which are in themselves poor proxies for quality of work (and easily gamed).
The feds are funding research, which elite schools have the best faculty and scholars who are conducting the very best research. May as well as why are VC’s funding promising startups instead of less promising ones, when those promising ones have already wealthy founders who have exited their previous venture.
> All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many
What a weird comparison. Yes, picking a group of universities that comprises 64 campuses is going to have more students than a group with a small fraction of that.
This framing is a little strange, since these universities serve multiple purposes. Much of this funding is for scientific research, which is somewhat distinct from the undergraduate teaching mission.
Comparing tuition is silly, IMO. Lots of people don't pay full-price at private universities, and nobody who is in-state pays the full-price for public universities.
If you care about efficiency, then divide the budget by the number of students.
Harvard has a budget of about $9B, which is about 4-5x larger on a per-student basis than a few public universities I compared (I couldn't find the SUNY budget with 30s of searching, you are welcome to provide that info if you have it).
So far, the funding in question is research grants. There's an argument that research is more effective at the universities that have concentrated the best researchers.
What about private research institutes? They don’t really educate anyone, not in the way that people think of when they say education. Why must all funds only go to public organizations?
Why should the government pay for research? Because the private sector can some times move faster than a public research lab. They may have different capabilities. They have different strengths. They may be more efficient in certain situations. Why is this surprising to you?
Yes, complementing an observation that there are many funding sources that aren't the Federal Government
From my conversations with people, this university funding topic is a mere proxy for their disdain with Trump on every topic, in a fairly incoherent rehash of random headlines. Have found very few people willing to discuss how universities are funded like this article is.
The last 75 years of interacting with the federal government and proletariat will be a footnote in these school’s half millenium history. It won’t even be controversial. Non-upper class people won’t be using them to get into corporations, a mere happenstance of the last 75 years and not what these universities view themselves as. Non-upper class people won’t be worried about how many of them are in, and what criteria is involved, and how fair. And the Federal government won’t be using their one avenue of funding to bother them about it. 75 out of 400, and then 1,000 years. A footnote. Probably laughed about.
“Remember when we had $50bn from daytrading tax free and got the US government to pay for our toys every year until a total populist uprising occurred at the expense of the entire nation. Other People’s Money! Rowing club later?”
It's unfortunate that a rational discussion could not be had before the cuts were made. I can see a scenario where you and I and many others agree with cuts to many organizations.
Bureaucratic organizations and special interests there are entrenched. The people managing some of these endowments are getting annual compensations competitive with the best hedge funds. If we had a rational discussion they'd just work to run out the clock and keep the status quo.
The Ivies do a hell of a lot more for 'The Club' than for the people not in it.
(To be clear, I don't think giving Trump the authority to pull hundreds of millions in funding if they teach things he doesn't like, or allow anti-genocide protests etc, is in any way a solution to the above issue.)
> BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
At this point the notion of the actual issue as in: "how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education" is barely a factor in it. It's just about pitting poor people against other poor people and a handful of rich nepo-babies who are so insulated from the consequences of our system they might as well not be considered to be part of it.
For anyone interested, college used to be nearly in totality funded by the state, not per student, but via the grant system. Our parents will talk about "working their way through college" working as waitstaff, because that was once an achievable thing: to work while you studied and pay your tuition, and graduate with little if any debt, and go on to do all sorts of things my generation struggles to do, like buy a home and a car, and not a run down refrigerator box and an old wreck from the side of the road that barely runs, no. They got to buy good homes, at fair prices, and cars that were if not new, really close to it.
Then as with everything Reagan fucked it up, the "no more free lunch" lobby got to add another notch to their bedpost as they set about destroying yet another fucking thing funded with public money that was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing to pass yet another goddamn tax cut and worsen the ability of America to compete on the global stage.
> Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
That can't happen in a vacuum, though.
50 years ago, there was a far narrower gap between the two groups. Now it's expanding. That "no more free lunch" crowd was that "educated coastal elite" of the time. Remember, Reagan was elected governor of California twice.
RE: our parents working their way through college, I think two things happened at least, yes.
Reagan gutted education spending.
But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).
Plus all the discussion about the bloating of college non-teaching administrative staffing.
> But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).
Which can also be blamed on Reagan specifically and the larger "trickle down" movement he inspired, which gutted protections for unionized labor and badmouthed unions in general so they became a dirty word in American politics, only very recently finally getting back at least some credibility.
That old meme comes to mind where someone is like "my hobby is putting Reagan's face on graphs of economic data the year he got elected" and watching everything just go completely tits up after that point.
Funnily enough, when the law was passed giving the president the authority to meddle in university governance, Reagan vetoed it. And the left, in congress and the senate, forced it through.
This author presumably understands but buries the lede that for an endowment of $15 billion a university would typically only spend 5%, or $750 million, annually.
So "a mere $400m" is over half of the annual funds from the endowment (not including tuition income and donations) that might be available to a university with such an endowment.
It should be relatively obvious that spending into the principal of an endowment is not a sustainable practice over the long-term for universities that are operating at the scale of centuries.
At a scale of centuries, monetary units themselves become highly unstable. On this time scale it was recently that people thought deflation was good for the economy, and that spending 5% every year would be reckless.
Public schools in the US get a relatively small fraction of their budget from state funding. The distinction between public and private is not as large or substantial as one might imagine.
For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.
This is the double edge sword of moving away from voluntary transaction in the market and towards government-imposed funding. The government takes away your ability to choose what to fund, holds the purse, then smacks the purse at you filled with the weight of your own money.
The government, with laws as written, has more restrictions on when it can pull money than private parties, due to its legal obligation to be content-of-speech-neutral. We are discovering that United Stares law is meaningless.
Law everywhere is meaningless unless “we have to follow the law” is a cultural norm. This is why norms are more fundamental and more important than laws.
You are discovering this. It wasn't that long ago when the national guard took tuition money away from Kent State in the form of executing their students for free speech.
Federal law is insanely complex. It's written by humans in an abstract legislative process so there's not even a guarantee that it won't conflict with _itself_. We have, several times, added laws to the register that were later determined to be in conflict with the Constitution itself.
It's not as simple as that, either. Every research grant comes with an "overhead" charge on top that goes to the university admin, which can be something like 60%.
And moreover, it's not just the research grants that are being threatened, as seen in TFA. There's also the massive subsidy in the form of tax exemption. No other hedge funds receive that kind of preferred tax treatment. Only universities.
So I have a rare disease. The only treatment is surgery. However, there is an ongoing study on a promising treatment at an elite university for a very effective and simple drug-based treatment. That type of research funding is absolutely being threatened. So, yes, it really is that simple.
If only Trump were trying to force universities to be more efficient with their spending. However, both of us clearly know that is not what is going on here.
Yes, about half is skimmed off the top by the university, called 'overhead'. This is used to fund everything, from research-essential things like paying for heat and maintaining buildings, to less obvious but still research-essential things like IP lawyers to deal with contracts and campus security. However, SOME of the overhead will end up supporting things that are 'contentious' like DEI enforcement or whatever.
I keep seeing this presented as if the money were being given away, but isn't it more accurate to describe it as payment for services (e.g. access to research facilities)?
It is part of the political reality that we live in. Whichever party is currently in power, will inevitably use that power to promote ideas that are favorable to them and to dissuade ideas that they are opposed to.
The same people who are whining about the Trump administration abusing their power by doing these things; were cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle.
This is why we have to be very careful when crafting laws. Before passing it because we want our party to use it to help us, we have to imagine what would happen when the opposing party tries to use this law against us.
The last part is accurate, but equating the two is a bit of stretch. The democrats went out their way to do everything by the book. They also generally took the time to understand the systems they were working with.
The current presidency went in with the assumption that everything was wasteful, and didn't take the time to understand what they were cutting. Hence, emergency rehires, judicial blocks on firing, etc.
The amount of noise about it was the same, but the root causes and support are far from equivical.
Biden had the bureaucracy on his side (it’s well known that government employees are largely left-Democrats), so he was able to collaborate with it. In his first term, Trump learned that insiders were good at preventing him from accomplishing his goals when he ‘played by the rules’, so now he’s just ignored ‘the system’.
Insiders have plainly ignored the law in the past when it was convenient, (see all the agencies which violated notice-and-comment rule-making in the Obama years,) we’ve just never seen anyone ignore the administrative agencies to this degree before.
>In his first term, Trump learned that insiders were good at preventing him from accomplishing his goals when he ‘played by the rules’, so now he’s just ignored ‘the system’.
This seems obviously what happened, and it may be because of the unprecedented non-consecutive second term. I don't know if Trump's ideology has changed between this term and his previous one, but his tactics certainly have. He clearly came into this term with a plan to do a blitzkreig [unfortunate reference], to make changes at a rate and degree that would cut through all the bureaucratic obstacles he faced the first term.
And it seems mostly successful. The opposition, including many of the employees of the executive branch themselves, were mostly caught off guard. Over the last few weeks, it seems like they are finally starting to form a responsive strategy, and are pushing back more effectively through courts and public opinions. I expect much of this initial push to moderate, such as the tariffs, the funding cuts, but still with lasting changes. Of course, if any of the changes are found to be unlawful, they will get reversed. But that will potentially take years.
Biden's multiple student loan forgivness attempts come to mind? He might have been handing out money, as opposed to taking it away like Trump. But the underlying issues are the same: he did it unilaterally using executive order, and the courts had to get involved because there were concerns about constitutionality.
If the executive branch has the authority to determine where money is spent, then it seems obvious to me that it also has the authority to determine where it isn't spent. If you think of the president as an executive "CEO", then the current CEO can change the decisions of the previous CEO... This is in fact what we're voting for in the presidential election -- "how" to run the daily business of country. New CEO, new goals, new policies, etc.
The complete disregard for our immigration laws was probably the biggest thing, even though there were a number of things that came close.
Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them.
The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.
Something more closely related to Trump's current actions against universities, was Biden's war on energy. Pipelines canceled. Lands and leases locked up. Taxes and regulations designed to reduce energy production.
> Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them.
The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.
> Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them.
The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.
Asserted without evidence, dismissed without evidence.
I'm not aware of mass cancelling of research grants under Biden in the same way Trump is doing. The Trump to Biden transition took place during my PhD, and I never heard a peep about anything similar. Now all I hear about is cancelled grants.
Under Biden, many grants did have to appeal to liberal sensibilities to be selected, but he didn't order all grants that didn't focus on DEI cancelled in 2021. I'm not even sure if "inclusion" was added to the NSF's list of "broader impacts" under Biden or well before him.
Reality is something that exists regardless of what you think. Politics is what you make it; you don't 'live in it'; it's yours.
> Whichever party is currently in power, will inevitably use that power to promote ideas that are favorable to them and to dissuade ideas that they are opposed to.
No prior president of either party has done anything like what Trump does, and you know it. Do you think nobody will notice if you make some rhetorical argument?
Yeah, sorry I didn't make it clear enough that I was agreeing with you. The endowment's assets are likely mostly/all pledged as security for margin trading, in which case there may be few/no assets left which could serve as collateral for borrowing that will fund payouts.
Or just use the endowment directly. Quick napkin math says that Harvard could make tuition free for all undergrads for 26 years with what they current have. Originally this money was meant to be spent on education but they just let it grow forever. Some of their hedge fund managers are approaching 8-figure annual compensation packages and I can't help but assume this is part of what has corrupted the university. Citadel LLC has $65 billion AUM, while Harvard has $53 billion while getting special tax-exemptions.
I can't speak for other universities, but Jewish students have no reason to feel endangered at Cornell.
Some crazy Asian student wrote death threats to Jewish students and was kicked out. [1] When the lid blew off in Gaza all our sports events went clear bag, which was a hassle to me as a sports photographer. Security cameras popped up all over the engineering school over a weekend, contrast that to any blue collar projects in my building which always go on for months or years. The encampment on the arts quad was polite, nobody could say they were deprived of an education by it. Students who disrupted a job fair were suspended and ultimately reported.
[1] Black students, gay students, women, etc. can't say that they get this kind of service from public safety.
> Jewish students have no reason to feel endangered at Cornell.
Have you spoken with Jewish students? Do you have first-hand knowledge? It's a stereotype of our blindness to dismiss other people's concerns, especially over safety and discrimination.
Let's be real, this is a Maoist attempt to supress the intelligencia. The anti-Semitism angle is just a thin veneer to sell it publicly. This is why, after Columbia accepted the first set of demands, the admin immediately came back with a second set of demands
Not withholding cancer research because two countries on the other side of the planet can't get along and make it everyone else's problem shouldn't be difficult either.
Many Jewish students did participate in the protests, a well-known organized example being Jewish Voice for Peace.
Regardless, the status quo always attacks the tactics of challengers in a similar way. Of course the status quo, support for Israel in this case, doesn't use those tactics - they don't need to! They already have the power structure and their desired policies; they don't need to change anything.
The same patterns of the status quo and challenger happens in politics, social issues, international relations, warfare, etc. The status quo says, 'they're disrupting things, not following the rules'. That's because the rules were written by and for the status quo.
We already know you think it's the other side's fault. You could have have left out the second part of your comment if you were actually agreeing instead of letting us know again your opinion on who should be blamed.
Turns out both Jewish and Muslim students are getting harassed, which isn't surprising at all to anyone paying attention... this was also true before the current israel/palestine conflict
Is there a specific section you are referring to? It seems to back up their point throughout the document - i.e. on page 262 "Over a half of Muslim student respondents, a quarter of Jewish student respondents and a bit under a half of MENA student respondents do not feel physically safe on campus"
> In virtually every category, Jewish students reported more negative experiences than their Christian or atheist/agnostic peers, though Muslim students reported even greater negative experiences than Jewish students. It is not the goal of this Task Force, nor of the parallel Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias, to engage in a contest to prove which group has suffered more.
I believe you can protest whatever, even things that are not real (like the so called genocide, where the population actually grows). There should of course be limits to your protest: violence against people you disagree with should never be an option.
PS: if you can stop the war by returning all the hostages, it's not a genocide.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
People need to understand how the pharmacology pipeline works.
The Federal government provides funds for research. That research finds novel compounds and new treatments. The product of that resaerch then gets transferred to private companies who commercialize it and then make massive profits from it.
Generally speaking, drug companies don't research with one exception: patent extension. A given compound will be patented and then the patent owner will have a monopoly over that for a number of years, supposedly because there'd be no investment otherwise, but that patent will ultimately expire. Except... it doesn't really. It's why over a century later we're still dealing with insulin patents. "Patent extension" is the process where you make a small change to a molecule or a delivery system and then get a new patent, refusing to sell the old. And it can be hard for someone else to produce a generic for many reasons.
Now I have a lot of problems with this system:
1. Any form of patent extension should be illegal, basically;
2. The institutions who actually come up with this should share in the profits. After all, it's the government paying for it;
3. We give a monopoly to these companies in the US where it's illegal to import the exact same product from overseas, which leads to something costing $800 in the US and $5 in France.
But given this is the system we're stuck with, cutting off funding makes absolutely no sense. Why?
1. It's going to dramatically impact drug companies negatively in the future as their supply of new products dries up;
2. It's antoerh element of soft power where the US can use the power to produce certain medicines to influence other countries. Think about what happens if China becomes the source for the world's medicines (personally, i'd be a fan but the purveyors of this policy most definitely are not).
Government research has given us things like the Internet and mRNA vaccines. This is so unbelievably shortsighted.
And why are they doing it? Well, the party of Free Speech is punishing institutions because some of their students made factually correct but mean statements about Israel.
private schools shouldn't be getting public money. shocking people disagree. yes they do research that benefits the public. so does Meta and Google, who don't get public money. public money should go to public schools.
especially considering that the PIs who do the work in the private school scenario effectively boost the private school's clout with public money, but these private schools do not increase accessibility by opening up admission further.
that said, trump is also doing this for the wrong reasons, sadly.
> private schools shouldn't be getting public money. shocking people disagree. yes they do research that benefits the public. so does Meta and Google, who don't get public money. public money should go to public schools.
Those two are not the same. Research funded by Meta/Google doesn't benefit the public in the same way as research in Ivies (and non-Ivies).
Sure, and if there were a law proposed in Congress to restrict federal research funding to public institutions and bar all private institutions, we could debate the merits of that.
That is not, however, what is happening. Institutions, without regard to whether they are public or private, are having research funding used as a lever to secure adherence to the political ideology of the ruling party, unilaterally by the executive branch.
The attempt to make this a debate about public vs private institutions is a distraction from and cover for that.
it would solve themselves. all of the good PIs at the good private schools would go to the good public schools. there's no actual inherent reason why private schools are bad like you're implying.
I'm skeptical of the idea that money and fix any problem, and that there are no inherent differences.
Setting that aside, why do you think it is even desirable to limit funding to public institutions in the first place?
Seems like you're starting from this position and moving backwards.
If Public schools are superior, why haven't they already out competed private institutions? They have a pretty huge advantage from additional tax revenue.
Meta and Google absolutely do get public money, for another commonly known example, every single one of Elon Musk's companies have gotten significant funding paid for through our taxes — government contracts, subsidies, grants, you name it
don't really disagree, but also this is a "get money out of politics" level change — next to impossible because there are piles of money to be made by the people in charge
See https://archive.ph/GkGWE
This framing conveniently ignores the question of whether the president should have the authority to single-handedly withhold funding for universities, broadly considered to be one of the foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century. While I think it's interesting and answers the specific question it raises, it's wild that the economist has just accepted that the president has dictatorial powers.
"Conveniently" is the wrong word to use here. "Conveniently ignores" implies that the author intentionally disregarded some known facts to make their argument look more persuasive. However, this is not the case here. The article's argument is that a reduction in government funding is very damaging even when it is small relative to the endowment size. This argument would not lose any of its power if the author covered the topic of whether the president has the power to withdraw funding.
(On a side note, the word "framing" is also the wrong word to use.)
One way to phrase your message correctly would be: "This article is about the impact of the president's decision, but I wish it also talked about whether the president has the authority to make that decision in the first place".
"Conveniently" also insinuates that the author discarded some arguments or facts that don't suit their narrative, because they would then have to think more, which is precisely what is inconvenient. It's quite an insult, actually.
There's a reason that court cases typically address standing before addressing the underlying question. It matters much more that you're taking on a case before you determine the case on the merits. If the case doesn't have standing it is not worth considering.
"Conveniently Ignoring" the standing question is frankly an admission of compliance to something that is not the law. Who cares "why people can't live without food" if someone is saying "let's starve the population." One question isn't worth platforming while the other is on the table.
This isn't law, its journalism, and frankly the article is well written and asks a good question -- why are these (extremely wealthy) universities finances so brittle?
The question is self-answering as soon as you read the first two sentences though.
> Columbia...has an endowment of roughly $15bn. Mr Trump’s administration withheld a mere $400m in federal funding.
With the best investing in the world, that $15bn might throw off 1 billion a year in perpetuity. $400m (a year) is a very serious chunk of the university's budget.
Exactly... Scaling the numbers down: It's as if a person has $1.5M net worth, and their investments produce $100K per year. They are also simply being handed $40K per year from someone they disagree with, but who otherwise reliably provides that income. Are they just going to turn that money down because of this ethical disagreement? A lot of people wouldn't.
Or alternatively, their investments from one account produce $100K per year, their investments from another account (non-Federal grants) produce an unknown amount, and they have a job (tuition payments) that produces another unknown amount. How significant is 40% of the 100K?
We don't know unless we fill in the unknown numbers. Knowing that the amount of federal aid being removed is 40% of an estimate of the amount produced by one source (the endowment) isn't enough information to answer the question. The right question is what percentage of their budget this represents.
From what I can tell, Harvard's actual annual budget is about $6.5B (https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/10/financial-report-fis...). A $400M shortfall is thus about 6% of their annual budget. Significant, but also something they could probably cover for the next decade or two by drawing down their endowment until they adjust.
It isn't law, but why does the principle exist in law? That's what I'm asking you to think about. Why would judges who have to make decisions about people's lives do this? Is there a good reason for it?
Yes there is.
Perhaps the commenter did not read the article and only reacted to the HN title.
The word "dictatorial" doesn't apply here. What we're talking about is government funding being provided to private universities. And Congress hasn't appropriated specific amounts of money to specific universities. It has created a pool of funds and given the executive branch discretion to allocate those funds. The powers of the executive branch are invested in the president. See Article II, Section 1 ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.").
Congress, moreover, has enacted laws that use those funds as a hook to influence the behavior of private universities. Specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows the executive branch to deny federal funds to universities that discriminate on the basis of race. Now, it just so happens that, in 2023, Harvard university, among others, was found by the Supreme Court to have flagrantly violated that law: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/dear-colleague-letter-sffa...
There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law, where Congress has authorized the executive branch to do so. Indeed, I'm at a loss to understand who else you think has the power to do this, if not the President?
I'm guessing that what GP meant with "dictatorial" was along the lines of the power you describe being wielded in a specific manner.
To put it differently: a state of affairs where the Executive/President has those powers may not be dictatorial, but this specific instance of him making use of that discretion in this specific way might be.
> There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law
Hey now, wait a minute. Has the “violation of law” been established yet? There’s a pretty wide gulf between “I believe a violation of the law has occurred” and having the matter adjudicated.
You’re clearly an intelligent person; there’s no need to try to sneak bullshit in through the back door. Let the strength of your arguments and facts speak for themselves. And make sure they are actual facts.
> Has the “violation of law” been established yet? There’s a pretty wide gulf between “I believe a violation of the law has occurred” and having the matter adjudicated.
Didn't SFFA clearly establish that? The Supreme Court outright reversed the bench trial ruling, which had found that Harvard and UNC's programs comported with Title VI and the Equal Protection Clause.
You have a point that I should've said "was found to have violated" rather than "is in violation." Whether Harvard is still violating the law is debatable. But I'm not sure Title VI withholding can't be predicated on a recent violation.
Regardless, as you know, the government routinely uses the threat of legal action for suspected violations to coerce compliance. Virtually every FDA/SEC/CFTC/etc. enforcement action starts with a letter along the lines of: "you're in violation of the law, do X, Y, and Z, or else we'll take action."
It’s not reasonable to characterize SFFA as a finding of wrongdoing on Harvard’s part.
At the time, universities were adhering to existing law (Bakke and Grutter cases). The Court then overturned its own precedent and decided that what was once acceptable under its own law was no longer so. The text of the Equal Protection clause didn’t change; the only thing that changed was the Court’s interpretation of it.
So it’s not like Harvard was operating in bad faith or being malicious, which is the characterization suggested by your “violation” language. (Not to mention that every university in America that considered race in their admissions process, despite not being a named party to the suit, was similarly situated—probably most universities in the country.) And there’s no evidence to suggest that Harvard didn’t respond appropriately and in a timely fashion to the new law.
> It’s not reasonable to characterize SFFA as a finding of wrongdoing on Harvard’s part
As I understand it, that’s the legal effect of SFFA. SFFA sued Harvard seeking, among other things, a declaratory judgment that Harvard’s admissions policies violate Title VI. The district court ruled, after bench trial, that Harvard didn’t violate Title VI. The Supreme Court didn’t remand for further proceedings, it outright reversed. Meaning that it found that Harvard’s procedures did violate Title VI.
Bad faith or malice aren’t elements of a Title VI violation. And I don’t see any legal reason why an administration couldn’t hold Harvard’s discrimination against students—which happened, even if the Supreme Court changed its mind about whether it was permissible—against Harvard in allocating federal funding.
Moreover, Harvard’s defiant response to SFFA provides a reasonable basis for the administration to believe it has continued to engage in discrimination: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/06/harvard-unite...
Of course, now that Harvard has decided to fight it, the administration will have to prove its belief: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/28/harvard-law-review-trump-ad.... That’s how these enforcement letters always pan out. Many targets fold to avoid litigation. Sometimes, a defendant fights it and the government has to initiate a formal enforcement action.
The DOJ, FDA, FTC, and SEC do stuff like this all the time. These agencies all lean very heavily on the threat of an enforcement action to enforce changes in private behavior without having to actually take entities to court.
> Meaning that it found that Harvard’s procedures did violate Title VI
Declaratory judgments aren't findings of wrongdoing. They're simply words (hence "declaratory") that describe a relationship between the parties of a case. Cases that end in declaratory judgements are also always civil in nature, so I don't believe they can be used to penalize the party later as if they had conducted a criminal act.
> I don’t see any legal reason why an administration couldn’t hold Harvard’s discrimination against students—which happened, even if the Supreme Court changed its mind about whether it was permissible—against Harvard in allocating federal funding.
That would actually be an interesting case. I find it difficult to believe that the Court would allow such an ex post facto application. The problem with this is that anyone who engaged in behavior that was lawful at the time, then subsequently deemed unlawful, could be subject to abrogation of benefits or other penalties. That said, in light of how the Court's makeup has changed in the past 20 years, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised if I turn out to be wrong. I would be very sad, though, because it would mean that nobody can be assured that their current conduct, even if lawful at the time, won't be held against them in the future if the law changes later.
> Harvard’s defiant response to SFFA provides a reasonable basis for the administration to believe it has continued to engage in discrimination
I don't think it does. I think Harvard is saying "we will continue to lawfully promote diversity however we can." There's no unlawful action being contemplated, described, or advocated in its response. Costco and Disney, BTW, do the same.
> now that Harvard has decided to fight [Trump’s investigation of Harvard Law Review’s publication policy], the administration will have to prove its belief
You're mixing up two different plot lines. We're discussing NSF and other Federal grant withdrawal resulting from Harvard's failure to implement discretionary measures Trump wants them to take relating to hiring, policy, and curriculum. This other story is about investigating Harvard Law Review, which was announced weeks after the grant rug pull. It seems pretty obvious that Trump is trying to find any angle he can to prevail in his war against the institution.
It seems like Harvard and those other universities might have been pushing the boundaries. Was the discrimination required or just allowed? The court for Grutter seemed to say it was "required" and for Bakke a "compelling state interest", but I might not understand the meaning of that properly. There are universities that don't discriminate (UC?) and they somehow get away with it. If you were running Harvard and trying your best to comply with the law, would you feel it's legally safer to discriminate or to not discriminate? The answer to that points to whether they were operating in bad faith or not.
Title VI seems to clearly say "don't discriminate" but again I might not understand how exceptions are allowed.
It's important to understand the context in which these laws and Constitutional amendments were written. They were designed and enacted after the Civil War (in the case of the Fourteenth Amendment) and the 1960s (Civil Rights Act, once we determined the Fourteenth Amendment was insufficient) to prevent Black people from being discriminated against. At the time, nobody, including the authors, considered these laws to be a shield to protect white and Asian people from discrimination. (At that time, there were hardly any Asians in the US anyway.)
So, from the 1960s until recently, the Court allowed universities to consider race in university admissions because it advanced a public policy that sought to improve the lot of Black people: the more Blacks could enter the ranks of the educated elite, the better off they would be in the long run, both socially and economically.
Over time, though, people whose admissions were rejected started to fight back: they felt that academic merit trumped all other considerations. After all, if they got better grades and aptitude test scores, weren't they more deserving of admission? The fights began, and over time, the Court chipped away at the acceptable use of race in admissions. Finally, in SFAA, the Court did away with them altogether.
As far as "pushing the boundaries" is concerned, actors will generally try to do whatever's in their best interest provided it's not illegal. There's no reward for maintaining a wide margin from legal boundaries when there's competition.
Is that how the law works? Because the Civil Rights Act was written with black people in mind, it only applies to black people even though the wording doesn't specify that? Surely it's quite an obvious omission that they would have written down if that's what they'd wanted. Is it a kind of trick law written to make people think other races are protected but due to how laws are interpreted, it was always known not to apply to them?
It is a fair criticism (some would say a defect) of our legal system that legislation is not always as explicit as we would like it to be. Take California's Penal Code 187(a) which defines murder as:
"(a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought."
It turns out that "malice aforethought" is a term of art that requires no actual malice and not much forethought.
Anyway, if you look at the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act (and courts frequently look to legislative history when interpreting statutes), you'll see that its backers in Congress were concerned about racial segregation, which at the time according to practice separated white people from everyone else (mostly Blacks).
If you’re not a textualist, there is a coherent reading that it only applies to American descendants of slaves. But that would mean that it doesn’t protect asians, hispanics, etc!
A logical and factual error made by proponents of affirmative action is to start with the premise that the civil rights laws were intended to help american descendants of slaves, but then extend them to other non-whites by categorizing them as “functionally black.” This is utterly incoherent, because black descendants of slaves and native americans are sociologically and economically distinct from other non-whites. Hispanics are just time-shifted Italians and Irish: low skill immigrants that economically assimilate within a few generations. By contrast, the gaps between black descendants of slaves and native Americans and other americans are not shrinking over time. They remain as large today as in 1965.
There’s a coherent version of affirmative action that gives a preference to descendants of slaves and native Americans but nobody else. But that bears no resemblance to the “diversity” based system that actually exists, which irrationally privileges Cubans over Bangladeshis because Indians are richer than Mexicans.
I’ve told you this time and time again that Bengalis who emigrated to this country before 1965 assimilated into the black community, but you completely refuse to listen to me.
At the time, nobody, including the authors, considered these laws to be a shield to protect white and Asian people from discrimination.
This is very much false, and can be easily refuted by reading what the lawmakers were saying as the law was being passed. For example, here's from the DoJ's memorandum, as quoted on the Senate floor by Senator Clark:
> "Finally, it has been asserted that title VII would impose a requirement for 'racial balance.' This is incorrect. There is no provision . . . in title VII .. .that requires or authorizes any Federal agency or Federal court to require preferential treatment for any individual or any group for the purpose of achieving racial balance. . . . No employer is required to maintain any ratio of Negroes to whites .... On the contrary, any deliberate attempt to maintain a given balance would almost certainly run afoul of title VII because it would involve a failure or refusal to hire some individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. What title VII seeks to accomplish, what the civil rights bill seeks to accomplish is equal treatment for all."
This explicitly says that you cannot have a racial quota, because it would be against Title VII of the proposed Civil Rights Act, meaning that the lawmakers proposing the bill explicitly said that the Title VII will protect whites (and all other races) as well as blacks.
I respect your argument, and in my research, I found articles in support of your opinion.
Nevertheless, when the Supreme Court adjudicated the question in United Steelworks v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (1979), this is what they said:
"""Our conclusion is further reinforced by examination of the language and legislative history of 703 (j) of Title VII. Opponents of Title VII raised two related arguments against the bill. First, they argued that the Act would be interpreted to require employers with racially imbalanced work forces to grant preferential treatment to racial minorities in order to integrate. Second, they argued that employers with racially imbalanced work forces would grant preferential treatment to racial minorities, even if not required to do so by the Act. See 110 Cong. Rec. 8618-8619 (1964) (remarks of Sen. Sparkman). Had Congress meant to prohibit all race-conscious affirmative action; as respondent urges, it easily could have answered both objections by providing that Title VII would not require or permit racially preferential integration efforts. But Congress did not choose such a course. Rather, Congress added 703 (j) which addresses only the first objection. The section provides that nothing contained in Title VII "shall be interpreted to require any employer . . . to grant preferential treatment . . . to any group because of the race . . . of such . . . group on account of" a de facto racial imbalance in the employer's work force. The section does not state that "nothing in Title VII shall be interpreted to permit" voluntary affirmative efforts to correct racial imbalances. The natural inference is that Congress chose not to forbid all voluntary race-conscious affirmative action.
The reasons for this choice are evident from the legislative record. Title VII could not have been enacted into law without substantial support from legislators in both Houses who traditionally resisted federal regulation of private business. Those legislators demanded as a price for their support that "management prerogatives, and union freedoms . . . be left undisturbed to the greatest extent possible." H. R. Rep. No. 914, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 2, p. 29 (1963). Section 703 (j) was proposed by Senator Dirksen to allay any fears that the Act might be interpreted in such a way as to upset this compromise. The section was designed to prevent 703 of Title VII from being interpreted in such a way as to lead to undue "Federal Government interference with private businesses because of some Federal employee's ideas about racial balance or racial imbalance." 110 Cong. Rec. 14314 (1964) (remarks of Sen. Miller). 6 See also id., at 9881 (remarks of Sen. Allott); id., at 10520 (remarks of Sen. Carlson) id., at 11471 (remarks of Sen. Javits); id., at 12817 (remarks of Sen. Dirksen). Clearly, a prohibition against all voluntary, race-conscious, affirmative action efforts would disserve these ends. Such a prohibition would augment the powers of the Federal Government and diminish traditional management prerogatives while at the same time impeding attainment of the ultimate statutory goals. In view of this legislative history and in view of Congress' desire to avoid undue federal regulation of private businesses, use of the word "require" rather than the phrase "require or permit" in 703 (j) fortifies the conclusion that Congress did not intend to limit traditional business freedom to such a degree as to prohibit all voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action. """
America is a democracy, not a bureaucracy. The executive branch is governed by a single representative elected by the people. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the people didn't make a great choice this time but our constitutional republic is also one of the foundational pillars of american strength and trump being an idiot doesn't change that.
The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional. Some of the executive branch's appointee's have authority over him but only in specific circumstances (such as 25th amendment) and they're usually in agreement with him since he gets to appoint them anyways. Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
This is true only to the extent that Congress delegates its power to the executive. Per Article I of the Constitution, Congress has the plenary power of the purse.
So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
> So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
But the Congress never did that. You won't find an appropriations bill where Congress allocated $X to Harvard and $Y to Princeton, etc. In fact, it did the opposite. Under Title VI, it empowered the executive branch to withhold money based on civil rights violations. And regardless of your view on Presidential power vis-a-vis executive branch agencies, 42 USC 2000d-1 specifically subordinates federal agencies' rules, regulations, and orders pursuant to Title VI to the authority of the "President."
We’re in agreement here. That’s why I mentioned in the first sentence that Congress can delegate certain spending decisions. But it’s not the default behavior as the Constitution defaults to Congress having sole plenary authority.
Right, under Title VI.
Trump is not using Title VI to justify withholding federal funding. He's just withholding federal funding and his minions are coming up with the justification after the fact. And even then, it's insufficient, because Title VI requires an investigation and a fair amount of procedure.
This is one of the stupider things this administration does. They have the legal power to do lots of the things they're doing, but they are too incompetent to dot their is and cross their ts.
Who knew that driving off everyone who was good at their job would make the administration less competent?
>This is true only to the extent that Congress delegates its power to the executive.
Directly or indirectly the people of the United States have power over all three branches. One can easily make strong arguments that the problem here is both that Congress as abdicated its powers to the executive (rather than delegated), and that the people have ignored that Congress should retain those powers while focusing on the presidency as the important election to the exclusion of all others.
This has been going on for decades or longer.
>So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
Sure. Definitely means he can't spend it on something else. But how much wiggle room is in this? Does it say on which day, hour, and minute it must be spent? Sure, it's probably tied at least to the fiscal year (in which case it needs to be spent by September, one would suppose), but that's months away. Does allocating a budget imply that it needs to be spent at all? If some bureau or department fails to spend all of its budget, has the president somehow committed some treason-adjacent crime, or is that just thriftiness? Are these funds earmarked for specific universities? What if he just goes shopping for alternative recipients?
To say that he has no discretion at all is absurd, if that were the case then Congress would have mandated that these be automatic electronic bank transfers without any human intervention (or oversight). The nature of the job not only implies but practically demands some (if limited) discretion.
> If some bureau or department fails to spend all of its budget, has the president somehow committed some treason-adjacent crime, or is that just thriftiness?
Yes, he has. It is not the presidents power to judge whether the money he spent in defiance of congress is sufficient, it is congress that holds this power. If congress thinks they should spend less, they can settle this by changing the budget. What would you say if the next democratic president simply refused to spend a single dollar assigned to ICE to "be thrifty"?
Well, it’s unlikely to be “criminal” or “treason,” but it is unconstitutional. An aggrieved party can seek redress from the court to compel the executive to transfer the provisioned monies.
>What would you say if the next democratic president simply refused to spend a single dollar assigned to ICE to "be thrifty"?
I'd be thrilled. There's $6 billion that they spend on DEA every year that I'd be happy if it was just pocketed by Trump and spent on hookers or something. Normalize this, please.
The perverse incentives people will defend so that they can obey the letter (but not the spirit) of the law are downright bizarre. You're all getting everything you deserve, too bad I'm getting it with you.
In fact, when Congress passes a budget, it’s actually a law that must be executed by the executive. There are actually other laws against impoundment and against the executive changing the budget.
Trump is literally breaking the law but no one really cares to discuss that anymore since the gish gallop has be so quick this term.
AIUI Congress has not passed a budget in a long time. They pass "continuing resolutions" and they fund broad categories of spending and leave the details up to the funded entities (which then falls under the executive branch).
If Congress wants to fund something specific, they need to pass a law or budget that names that specific thing and how much they are appropriating. They aren't doing that.
It really does seem like Congress has wanted a dictatorial executive for a while doesn’t it? I wasn’t aware they had shirked their duty for so long.
There are many situations where Congress has actually specified in detail where the money should go. These are also being ignored.
Well, it's not that simple. Yes, Congress passes the bill saying that X billions of dollars have to be spent on universities, but that bill does not name every single university in US as beneficiary. That's what executive branch is for: to work out the details of how to implement the law passed by Congress.
So, Trump taking money from Harvard and giving it to say, a community college in Tampa is technically still correct implementation of the law. I mean, it all depends if he can defend his decision in court, because of course he cannot discriminate based on race, ethnicity, political affiliation etc.
Why can’t he discriminate on political affiliation?
Because our system would fall apart every 4 years when a different party started diverting money to their cronies.
How corrupt do you want a nation to be?
But it is not illegal!! Morals or ethics do not necessarily determine if it is legal.
It may not be unlawful, but institutions work best when there is stability of practice, even across leadership changes. Otherwise, you can’t do any long-range planning or undertake complex experiments or investments that could take years to bear fruit.
We used to have a shared sense of custom and mores that helped preserve this stability. But that seems to be out the window now, and regrettably so.
I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that Trump is breaking the law. I'm no expert in NSF funding, but Congress may well have delegated its authority over how the funds in the pool are to be allocated and distributed to the executive.
If someone has more knowledge to contribute, that'd be most welcome.
Clear example here is USAID. Congress has directed, as recently as March 2025, that a specific amount of funds be spent on the statutory goals of the US Agency for International Development. (I have not checked, but I am sure federal law also goes into some detail about what tasks USAID needs to perform.)
I do not imagine it is congruent with the law to simply fire all the staff and shut down USAID (or "merge" it into State).
The laws are all public and people are free to read that a few weeks ago, Congress directed the Executive to spend money as USAID for the statutory purposes behind USAID. That part is pretty clear.
The situations are a little different.
With NSF grants, the question is whether the President can redistribute funding away from applicants affiliated with specific institutions he doesn’t like (my first approximation: probably).
With USAID, the question is whether the President has the authority to disband an entire Agency established and appropriated by Congress (22 U.S.C. 6563) (my first approximation: probably not).
Point taken. I was mostly addressing the larger question of whether the Executive is breaking the law wrt appropriations. Likely yes.
With science funding grants, the administration likely has latitude to make some changes, but the specifics of that latitude are going to be embedded in a thicket of overlapping statutes of different vintages.
Without going through all the specific statutes, I relied on the suggestion that if they are okay breaking the law around USAID funding passed in March, they likely are not going to find religion and adhere to laws governing science funding. But I guess anything's possible.
> I do not imagine it is congruent with the law to simply fire all the staff and shut down USAID (or "merge" it into State).
The Fourth Circuit allowed the administration to proceed: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/28/appeals-court-usaid...
That is not a final word on the constitutionality of dissolving USAID, but it's an indication that the Court didn't believe plaintiffs had a high likelihood of success on the merits to justify the preliminary injunction.
The recent SCOTUS opinion that the President's official actions are not bound by the laws of man does provide a clear line of sight to really any action taken by the Executive branch. So it may not really even be productive to discuss limits on Executive power anymore.
That is in fact not what the Supreme Court said. It said that the President has immunity for “official acts,” just like Congress members and judges.
Say a judge dismisses an indictment of an accused murderer because the police didn’t have a proper search warrant. Then the accused murderer kills someone else. That could fall within the letter of “negligent homicide” laws, but the judge can’t be prosecuted for that because judges have absolute immunity for official acts.
Similarly, a red state prosecutor could have tried to prosecute Biden for something like negligent homicide on the theory that his opening of the boarder was a negligent act that resulted in deaths. Obviously you can’t do that, because the President has immunity for official acts. It would be completely insane if the President didn’t have immunity. President do lots of things which cause people to be killed, property to be destroyed, etc. You could prosecute those as crimes if you literally applied the criminal laws.
I agree with you here. I also think that (allegedly) ignoring federal statutes while reorganizing the government is pretty clearly an official act. So everything we are discussing is an official act.
If the Executive isn’t bound to follow federal appropriations laws, there’s no principled reason why he should have to follow other federal laws. And as you show, the president has full criminal immunity as well.
What other laws are there that might limit his conduct? I’m of the understanding that where we are now is the only potential check on Presidents going forward is impeachment and removal from office. It’s a blunt instrument, but apparently there are no other applicable mechanisms.
> What other laws are there that might limit his conduct? I’m of the understanding that where we are now is the only potential check on Presidents going forward is impeachment and removal from office. It’s a blunt instrument, but apparently there are no other applicable mechanisms.
The primary check on the President is elections, not “the law.” Secondarily, there’s impeachment, and Congress’s power of the purse. Those are the main checks on the executive.
We have this 20th century conception of “the rule of law,” where we imagine this neutral, independent “justice system” as the base layer on top of which the elected branches operate. Like the lowest level of an operating system kernel. But if you look at the debates at the constitutional convention, and read the federalist papers and anti-federalist papers, that’s not the system the founders actually created. The founders didn’t trust anyone to neutrally enforce the law. You won’t find anywhere in those primary sources where the founders envisioned some “rule of law” where private litigants use the court to micromanage executive policy.
Instead, what we have is a game of rock-paper-scissors, where no branch is assumed to be “independent” and no branch is a “base layer of the operating system.” Courts can declare the law, but can’t force the President to do something. But if the President doesn’t listen to the court, he can be voted out of office, or impeached, or Congress can withhold funding for the administration. That is a complete system of checks and balances as it is.
> You won’t find anywhere in those primary sources where the founders envisioned some “rule of law” where private litigants use the court to micromanage executive policy.
Marbury vs Madison established the judiciaries authority to review actions of the executive. That was in 1803.
Regarding rule of law, in that opinion:
> When the heads of the departments of the Government are the political or confidential officers of the Executive, merely to execute the will of the President, or rather to act in cases in which the Executive possesses a constitutional or legal discretion, nothing can be more perfectly clear than that their acts are only politically examinable. But where a specific duty is assigned by law, and individual rights depend upon the performance of that duty, it seems equally clear that the individual who considers himself injured has a right to resort to the laws of his country for a remedy.
Marbury versus Madison:
1) Isn’t part of the founding sources I mentioned. It was quite controversial at the time.
2) Stands for exactly the opposite of what you’re arguing. Marbury goes to great lengths to disclaim any authority over executive policymaking and discretion, and limit courts to compelling executive officers to act only when the duties are specifically assigned by law and ministerial:
> This is not a proceeding which may be varied if the judgment of the Executive shall suggest one more eligible, but is a precise course accurately marked out by law, and is to be strictly pursued. It is the duty of the Secretary of State to conform to the law, and in this he is an officer of the United States, bound to obey the laws. He acts, in this respect, as has been very properly stated at the bar, under the authority of law, and not by the instructions of the President. It is a ministerial act which the law enjoins on a particular officer for a particular purpose.
And even after determining that delivery of the already executed commission is a ministerial act, the Court went out of its way to invoke a jurisdictional escape hatch to avoid actually enjoining an executive officer. A fair application of Marbury would preclude the sweeping powers courts have asserted to micromanage executive action in response to private litigation.
In Marbury, the court ruled that Marbury had already been appointed when the previous president signed his commission, and the only thing that remained was the purely ministerial act of the secretary of state delivering the signed letter that was sitting in the president’s desk. But even then, the Court found a way to avoid compelling the secretary of state to actually deliver the commission! How would the Marbury court view the prospect of a district court ordering the president to turn around military planes being used to deport an admitted El Salvadoran citizen? Or district courts ordering the President to reach out to a foreign country’s president to demand the return of that foreign country’s citizen! The Marbury court wouldn’t have dreamed of it!
What Marbury stands for is that the judicial branch can declare the legality of laws and executive actions, but should bend over backwards to avoid actually compelling the executive to perform any action.
> The primary check on the President is elections, not “the law.” Secondarily, there’s impeachment, and Congress’s power of the purse.
Right, that's where this discussion started. What we are looking at right now is the erosion of that second piece, Congress's power of the purse. The Constitutional checks and balances (not the 20th-century stuff you detail) doesn't work as well without this key Article I power. I have not seen it explained under what principle this power of Congress has been arrogated instead to the Executive.
It wasn’t done based on principle but laziness. Congress undoubtedly has the power to leave some particulars of how to spend money up to the President. But Congress has abused that power to basically provide the executive with giant slush funds with only the vaguest directions as to how to use that money. Congress can take that power back at any time.
You would think the Andrew Johnson trial would have buried impeachment as a tactic, like in the UK.
You're not wrong. If the President does not follow a federal law, he is not performing an official act, and he is not immune from criminal liability.
If he chooses to continue to ignore the law, the solution isn't the courts. It's the Second Amendment, which was added to the Bill of Rights as a check on exactly this (though the Founders intended for it to be exercised through the States' militias, not the citizens directly, based on the text of the first half of the amendment).
Before resorting to violence, the remedy is to impeach and convict the President, and, failing that, elect a replacement President. Only if the incumbent fails to cede authority should further consideration be taken.
And, to be honest, I’m not really sure that a bunch of unorganized wingnuts that slobber all over their big-man toys are going to prevail over the National Guard, if the latter remain loyal to the President, and a lot of innocent lives will probably be lost due to militia incompetence.
So we should’ve used the 2A because Biden ignored immigration law?
Biden didn't ignore immigration law. He executed it. He arrested more immigrants than Trump did during his first term. Republicans simply disagreed about how he was executing the laws because they wanted political talking points (and notably at Trump's urging, shot down a number of proposed immigration reforms that would have reduced illegal immigration, cut down on the asylum loophole, and make it easier to deport immigrants with criminal records...Laken Riley was killed by an illegal immigrant who was still in the country because Republicans blocked the laws that would have deported him.).
Trump isn't following the laws at all. He's simply issuing "executive orders" without regard to the powers or limitations of the executive as stated by the Constitution or the U.S. Code. Almost every single one of his executive orders during his second term violates a Constitutional prohibition in some way, and now that the initial shock to the system is over you're seeing judges overturn almost all of his orders...Even judges appointed by Trump during his first term are starting to overturn his executive orders.
So Trump's response was to call for the arrest of these judges. And to hint that violence would be appropriate way of removing them from.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If Trump gets killed by a mob this term, it's going to be because he kept suggesting that violence was the way to deal with his opponents.
There are all kinds of laws that limit president's conduct, but the point is that there is no way to actually enforce these laws, other than voluntary compliance by the president and his government, and impeachment by legislature. This is by design, that's how the separation of powers works.
These is a different way of stating my point that the President is not bound by laws, only politics.
Take a read of the constitution?
Why do you assume that the person you're responding to is "jumping to conclusions." Feels like you're just ignoring what they have to say in the guise of "asking for more knowledge" when you don't actually know if they don't have the knowledge because of your own lack of expertise.
https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Po...
> Why do you assume that the person you're responding to is "jumping to conclusions.”
Because they said “Trump is literally breaking the law.” That hasn’t been established yet.
I happen to be an attorney as well as a hacker, and I worked in a Federal district court, so perhaps give me the benefit of the doubt that I just might know what I’m talking about. If you have legitimate questions of your own, I’d be happy to try to answer them.
> The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional.
This is not true. They can also stop him if what he is doing is illegal. Statute can absolutely constrain the executive.
> Statute can absolutely constrain the executive.
This is an open question. The judicial branch has authority, on paper. But without means of enforcing that authority, it cannot truly constrain the executive.
> This is an open question.
It's not. Statute has constrained the executive for all of American history.
Congress has a jail. He's already refused to answer to a subpoena. They can arrest him any time they want.
Congress has a jail, sure. But I and the comment I was responding to were regarding the judiciary.
To put a finer point on it: if the president orders somebody to do something in violation of federal law, and then pardons them, can the law be enforced?
Congress’s big hammer is impeachment. The smaller hammer is refusing to fund his administration. Between that and elections, that’s plenty of ways to keep the president in check.
Read the RFCP. ArtIII judges can absolutely empower people other than USMS to carry out legal orders such as service of process and enforcement of contempt orders.
okay but that's not my point. The point is that their rulings are supposed to be based on their interpretations of the relevant laws, and that judges are not supposed to issue rulings solely on the basis that they don't like what the government is doing even if it is obviously stupid. The OP's basis for why the president shouldn't be allowed to do this was that publicly funded universities are "foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century".
I wouldn't be surprised if trump has in some way violated statute in relation to freedom of speech or academic independence but unless somebody makes a compelling argument that he has, he is a representative of the people operating under the authority granted to him as president, and being a wreckless fool doesn't change that.
I don't particularly like what he's been doing in his second term so far but in online discourse I've seen this worrying trend recently where people think that unelected bureaucrats who were hired because other unelected bureaucrats liked their resumes should be able to hamstring the president and overrule him (i think the strangest thing i've seen was people opining that the CIA should be getting involved). I think it's important to remember that the checks and balances in the US constitution are between the three branches of the federal government, and most of the big bureaus/departments/etc are under the executive branch which he is the sole executive of for the next four years.
And we have laws that say that the government cannot make obviously stupid decisions in a lot of domains. For example, a number of challenges to DOGE's activities have been under the Administrative Procedure Act, which limits how the government is able to make changes to regulation and staffing.
The mechanism that Trump is using to deny funding for the universities he hates is through statute. Courts can conclude that this action does not match the statute.
> I don't particularly like what he's been doing in his second term so far but in online discourse I've seen this worrying trend recently where people think that unelected bureaucrats who were hired because other unelected bureaucrats liked their resumes should be able to hamstring the president and overrule him
I'm very sorry, but this is the law. This is not just vibes. If you do not like this, then advocate for changing the law. But you are doing the precise thing that you are insisting that others are doing here.
> The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional.
That omits a crucial issue that many amazingly overlook: The bar isn't constitutional but legal. Congress makes the laws, not the President. The President is bound by those laws, and in fact their job is to enforce the laws that Congress makes. They cannot do things unless empowered by the law.
If a presidential candidate promises to break the law in his campaign, that does not give him the authority to break the law. We are a constitutional republic and the constitution must be followed.
It's quite clear that the current President does not give a damn about the constitution, know anything about it, or have any compunction about blatant violation of the constitution.
> Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
This is factually wrong.
> > Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
> This is factually wrong.
It’s literally the first sentence of Article II! “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Article II doesn’t even talk about an “executive branch.” It assigns powers and responsibilities to the President.
It’s an extremely easy to understand structure that has been obfuscated during the 20th century. The constitutional actors are: the President, the 100 senators and 435 Congressmen, the 9 Justices, and Article III judges. They hold all the powers of their respective offices.
Can Congress appoint employees to be part of the Supreme Court, and provide for them to exercise judicial powers independently of the Justices? Of course not! Can Congress delegate to a staff of employees the power to make laws independently of the Congressmen? No! Obviously not! That would be absurd.
The executive branch isn’t any different.
> We are a constitutional republic and the constitution must be followed.
Also the law must be followed.
> If a presidential candidate promises to break the law in his campaign, that does not give him the authority to break the law.
The Supreme Court ruled otherwise.
That’s not exactly what they held. They held that the President is immune from prosecution for official acts. Prosecutorial immunity doesn’t mean his conduct is not unlawful; it means he can’t be criminally prosecuted for it. That distinction is important because it doesn’t prevent courts from issuing injunctions. And, as stated by others, the immunity is extended only to official acts. What constitutes an official act isn’t super clear yet, but I think it’s safe to assume that golfing isn’t an official act.
The Roberts court invented the official acts immunity out of whole cloth for the sole purpose of keeping Trump out of jail. They're quite capable of interpreting everything he does as an official act.
Sort of. He would still be breaking the law, it’s just that if it’s an ‘official act’ then the judiciary can’t do anything about it, just Congress via impeachment.
I think that opinion would have been less controversial if the President hadn’t openly advertised his intent to violate the law repeatedly. It’s not like the courts are rendered powerless if the President violates the law; any judgments they render are still binding on the parties, even if they require the parties act in ways contrary to the executive’s interpretation of the law. That still means something as long people continue to respect the judiciary. The dangerous game we’re playing is finding out whether that respect will continue.
It also would have been much less controversial that, when asked, the Trump lawyer during oral arguments specifically dodged the question if the president can deploy Seal Team 6 to kill a political opponent. That choice is very telling as to what the next steps probably are, and none of them are good for this country.
The majority’s response to that is far more compelling than the dissent’s Seal Team Six hypothetical:
> The dissents’ positions in the end boil down to ignoring the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Court’s precedent and instead fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President “feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.” Post, at 18 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.); see post, at 26, 29–30; post, at 8–9, 10, 12, 16, 20–21 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next. For instance, Section 371—which has been charged in this case—is a broadly worded criminal statute that can cover “‘any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of Government.’” United States v. Johnson, 383 U. S. 169, 172 (1966) (quoting Haas v. Henkel, 216 U. S. 462, 479 (1910)). Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration, or environmental laws).
Look at section 371! If President didn’t have immunity for official acts, Trump could easily have relied on that broad statute to prosecute him for opening the border and thus “impairing” the function of ICE. Our criminal laws are breathtakingly broad in their wording, and a contrary ruling from the Supreme Court would’ve meant that the Presidency would become subordinate to prosecutors.
> If President didn’t have immunity for official acts, Trump could easily have relied on that broad statute to prosecute him for opening the border and thus “impairing” the function of ICE
Trump still wants to do this and the court will let him because you have to be incredibly naive or willingly ignorant to think that that this Supreme Court will apply the laws equally without regard to political party.
> t would’ve meant that the Presidency would become subordinate to prosecutors
Oh no, the President would have to follow the same laws as everyone else, how horrible!/s
> Oh no, the President would have to follow the same laws as everyone else, how horrible
“Laws” aren’t magic. If you could just have “laws” and trust prosecutors to enforce them fairly and neutrally, then the entire constitutional structure, with three branches and checks and balances, is pointless. You would just have prosecutors as basically the government’s “microkernel” and then the other three branches on top.
The framers didn’t create that system because they understood that you can’t trust prosecutors either—they’re political too! Our system is designed like a game of rock-paper-scissors, where the checks on each branch come from the other branches, not prosecutors enforcing “the law.”
Prosecutors enforce the laws by prosecuting. That's the function of the executive branch. It's in the name - EXECUTIVE branch.
The check on prosecutorial power lies both with the Judicial branch and, in cases of a jury trial, the People. Prosecutors are not judge, jury, and executioner.
The Legislative branch gets a say by writing, passing, repealing, or amending laws.
So the three branches check each other, no need to "just trust me, bro" with prosecutors.
If the President cannot faithfully execute the laws without BREAKING them then that either means the Judicial branch should strike down the laws that are preventing that or the Legislative branch should pass laws that contain a carve out for the President. The President is not above the law, so the half-measure of the Supreme Court deciding that they are in official acts is both ahistoric and enabling despotism.
> Prosecutors are not judge, jury, and executioner.
In practice they are. Criminal laws are written extremely broadly. And as they say, prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich. Then all it takes is putting the case in front of a favorable jury: trying a republican in new york city or a democrat in rural iowa. In that way, a handful of people can undo the will of the electorate.
The framers would have easily understood this. At the time, the states were trying to kill the federal government. You think they envisioned say a Virginia prosecutor trying the federal president before a Virginia judge and jury?
> The President is not above the law.
But not every legal wrong has a legal remedy!
There are many other democracies, and most do not have this problem. Yours is just an exceptionally poorly-designed one.
> people didn't make a great choice
Choices. Congress can overturn any president's order, but they do nothing.
> America is a democracy, not a bureaucracy
What a turn of phrase! Love it.
This is a fair question, but it's being asked a lot already.
Let's imagine that completely legitimate circumstances lead to the US Government stopping the stream of grants to the Ivy League universities. How would they cope, given their enormous endowments that generate significant interest? This question is asked much less, and the answer is much less obvious. Hence the value of TFA.
What is "a lot"? The question is pertinent.
Additionally, the follow-on questions are irrelevant. There are a million better questions to ask on the other side of this as well, before we ask why someone can't live without the money that they've been acquiring entirely above board and legally. "Why does the gov't think it has the authority to do this?"
Why do we need to have theoretical debates about legitimate circumstances, when there are real debates about illegitimate circumstances happening? having this irrelevant follow-on discussion is doing the gov't's work for them.
In a different setting I can see asking this question, but there is no need to ask this question while the circumstances are clearly illegitimate.
What's the point of such an abstract question? The university's goals and expected resolution for the problem would always depend critically on why the stream of grants stopped.
When a large institution is faced with uncertainty about the future, it’s both feasible and prudent to make plans that account for multiple future outcomes. In this case, it makes sense to do both of the following:
1) Fight the administration in the legal system.
2) Plan for the case where some of those legal fights are lost.
What does it mean, concretely, to plan for that case? It doesn't sound like there's any risk of a scenario where, like, Columbia can't pay maintenance staff and all the buildings flood. If the US government freezes them out of grant funding, then the research funded by those grants won't be funded any longer - there's no careful planning you can do to make that less true.
A practical turn: can, say, Harvard or Yale answer: "Screw you, government, I don't need your money, go away!"?
At some level, someone needs to have discretion on which grants to award and not award. You can call it "dictatorial", but I don't see how it's any less dictatorial if the decision-maker is some faceless, unaccountable bureaucrat vs a President that is accountable to voters. Surely, grants were being denied before for other reasons.
>Surely, grants were being denied before for other reasons.
Were they being denied? It might well be the case that grants were never denied except when the grant spigot ran dry waiting for the next year. I don't necessarily believe that is the case, but is there some evidence that it doesn't work like that?
> At some level, someone needs to have discretion on which grants to award and not award
Then that person should not be a politician or political appointee who judges on the merits and not on the votes it will bring.
If the funds are disbursed from the public Treasury, it is very much a political decision. You can put some intermediary bureaucrats to create a face of objectivity, but it's a political decision at it's core.
Funds duly allocated by the Legislature, which means they must be spent in service of what the Legislature allocated them for. Presidents cannot impound funds since the Impoundment Control Act, so either they need to spend them or convince Congress to change that allocation.
We can argue about the basis for terminating the grants until the cows come home, but this administration through DOGE has made it clear that they're not otherwise going to be spending this money, which is something the president cannot do.
Clawing back and terminating grants without due process is what dictators do; it's the opposite of what supporting and defending the Constitution is.
Do you understand that Congress has the power of the purse and the President does not?
Snark aside, Yes I do. Congress if fully capable of being specific when it wants to and delegating to the executive when it doesn't. For example they required the A10 airplane to continue to operate. They didn't specify the caliber of bullets to use.
Ah, the so-called benevolent dictator. The magical philosopher king to deliver us all from tyranny.
Process matters, everything else is to a first approximation merely platitudes. What's the difference between faceless bureaucrats making these decisions vs the president? It's the difference between rule of law vs dictatorship. Faceless bureaucrats have to follow policy defined by Congress and the President. If the person making the policy is the same person making the decision, and especially when the "policy" is whatever their fancy is, that's not rule of law. America was founded on the principle, "a government of law, not of men".
Moreover, faceless bureaucrats risk criminal and financial punishments for things like self-dealing. The president faces no such risk. And when they're a lame duck, they (theoretically) face zero risk, period.
Bureaucracies are slow. They're costly. Like democracy generally, they're inefficient. They're worthwhile because, at least as far as government is concerned, they're a necessary element to maintain rule of law and avoiding dictatorship. The solution to government bureaucracy isn't to remove the bureaucracy, it's to remove the government involvement. Otherwise, you're just inviting dictatorship. This has happened countless times. When the people get upset about perceived government ineffectiveness and its democratic institutions are too slow to respond (e.g. gridlocked Congress), there are two routes: privatization (i.e. reducing the role of government, not merely something like syndicalism) or dictatorship.
What's the difference between Donald Trump's rise to power and approach to governance, versus Huge Chavez's? Not much. The parallels are amazing. Both came to power promising radical overhauls of perceived sclerotic institutions, including broken legislatures. Like Trump, Chavez was a media whore who spent most of his time talking on television, making impossible promises and blaming everyone and everything else for his own failures. (Castro was like this, too.) They both spout so much B.S. that most people can't even keep up; they just start taking them at their word, which is why Chavez was popular until the day he died. His successor has zero charisma; the policies haven't changed, but now people hate the exact same kind of government they had during Chavez, but have no power to change it. That's what happens when you choose government of men rather than government of law.
Do you honestly think Trump is individually reviewing grants?
Trump with help of various groups makes political appointees who either individually oversee grant reviews or administrate individuals that do. These people are just as faceless and unaccountable as with any other president ...
The difference here is that Congress who is much more accountable to voters deliberated and wrote laws authorizing various funding which is being completely overridden by the branch of government that is supposed to carry out the law.
It is dictatorial, not because one person gets to make the decision, but because the US constitution delineates the powers of the gov't, to which the President does not have this power. I really do not understand why this is such a hard concept for many people here to grasp. The separation of powers is such a fundamental aspect of our government that I am astounded to see you miss this point. When any one branch usurps the power of another branch it is the *EXACT* kind of tyranny the constitution was created to avoid.
What was happening before this year? Surely, congress was not the one approving and awarding these grants. It was a member of the executive agency. Trump didn't declare any power that wasn't already being exercised by the executive.
The Economist has articles on that subject already. They do their homework. Here's just one:
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/04/24/who-will-...
You don't go and decide a case on the merits when you've thrown it out on standing.
Addressing the other question is a pre-requisite to considering the one included in this piece. And given that they are ignoring the presumable answer to the other question, they have not justified the existence of this article.
if you want to go that way, you're conveniently ignoring if congress should have the authority to allocate funds to nonprofits that aren't part of the government under the enumerated uses in article I section 8.
In what way is what you raised a genuine question of constitutional law?
Yeeep. This is the only thing worth knowing about this whole mess. The people trust their reps to handle the money, and the reps are the only people who are supposed to be able to manage that money.
Yet here we have tacit acceptance that the president can fuck with citizens' money just because he's in his feels about something. Absolute clownery.
A few other commenters have alluded to it, but Obama's 2011 (and then 2014/2016) "Dear Colleague" letters are critical to understanding what's going on here. As FIRE tells it:
In April 2011, the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) established new mandates requiring colleges and universities receiving federal funding to dramatically reduce students’ due process rights. Under the new regulations, announced in a letter from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, colleges and universities were required to employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard—a 50.01%, “more likely than not” evidentiary burden—when adjudicating student complaints concerning sexual harassment or sexual violence. The regulations further required that if a university judicial process allows the accused student to appeal a verdict, it must allow the accusing student the right to appeal as well, resulting in a type of “double jeopardy” for the accused. Additionally, OCR’s letter failed to recognize that truly harassing conduct (as defined by the law) is distinct from protected speech. Institutions that did not comply with OCR’s new regulations faced federal investigation and a potential loss of federal funding.
The innovation in these letters was realizing OCR could just come to a new understanding of what civil rights law required, then tell universities that since this is what civil rights law means, following the guidance would be a mandate for institutions to receive federal funding. So now Trump's come in and reinterpreted civil rights law once again.
At this point probably a supermajority of the country thinks this innovative idea for enacting ad-hoc nationwide policy changes has been abused by one or more administrations, but I haven't heard anyone seriously working on a generalized solution. Everyone's mostly given up on Congress and just hopes their team can take control of the magic pen.
https://www.thefire.org/cases/us-department-educations-offic...
They're not ignoring it: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/04/03/donald-tr...
Certainly one could argue if evidence of widespread racism by specific institutions should face punishment by the executive. It is entirely reasonable to believe that we should turn the cheek to institutional racism so that we can get good research out of it.
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This question was not raised when the Obama administration dictated procedures and evidentiary standards to universities in cases of sexual assault, with threats of being found liable under Title IX for noncompliance. Well it was raised by some on the right, and then dismissed because, you know, the right, and who wants to defend campus rapists anyway? Those Duke University lacrosse kids should have hung -- even if they didn't actually rape that girl, they might have... or they might have raped some other girl.
When Orange Man exercises a power he presumes to have, it's "dictatorial", but when "Pen and a Phone" Obama exercised that same power -- together with the people, follow where Obama leads.
Obama threatened, but did not make good on those threats. Trump is threatening and actively withholding funds even to Columbia which bent the knee, because these are institutions which are seen as political enemies by the administration.
If the carrot is no different than the stick, then why chase carrots?
But why are those on the right that objected to Obama not objecting to Trump?
Because the left never cared about the rules, except to circumvent them when in power and to use them as a way to prevent the other side from making meaningful progress when not.
Because double standards.
Because to them, the "right person" is doing it for the "right reasons". Same as the Obama supporters, really. It's like, do we live in a constitutional republic with consistent rules the government is expected to follow, or is it "for my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law"?
One is complying with actual statutory law, the other is just ad hoc vengeance. You might not like it but one is an approach actually consistent with the constitutional order of power in this country and the other isn't. I'm so exhausted with this "tit for tat" bs. At best, it's a tacit admission that it is wrong and you don't care.
This unlimited relativism is bizarre. If Trump invaded Canada, is his argument that Roosevelt invaded Germany? There is a difference between one and the other.
What does the Duke lacrosse case have to do with it?
To show that these questions have been asked before, and when the social issue at stake is one that leftists champion, very very few on the left are willing to stand up to presidential authority in any way.
When the same exact power is used in a way that leftists by fiat deem "bad", there is no limit of the amount of pettiness, name calling, obstruction, and general ill will they will put to use to stop the president from doing something. in this case, it is to uphold Civil Rights law against a clear and ongoing violation.
This poster should have realized though that the way to win in politics hasn't been "debating the left" or crying "what if the roles were reversed?!" for some time now. Thats the way to be a principled loser, and be called all sorts of names in the process.
There is no comparable president on the left, or from any part of the political spectrum.
> Thats the way to be a principled loser, and be called all sorts of names in the process.
Your argument is baseless attacks and your victimhood. Is there anything substantive that supports your claims?
baseless attacks, like calling every republican a Nazi for the last 30 years seems to have worked quite well. Proclaiming your victimhood w.r.t. an abstract "patriarchy" has also lead to significant gains in political influence.
I think you have had too much Kool-aid today.
Duke lacrosse what the epitome of “Guilty because male”… which made the wind turn around and you have a situation to deal with now. All of this because people don’t want the left’s “Guilty because male” or “because [race]” solution, and they made it known through the ballots.
For those who don’t know: Under Title IX, in summary, accusers of rape have all rights for their case to be treated by internal boards in the uni, which means no due trial with merits or proof, which is blatantly unconstitutional but the left didn’t care at the time. Oh yeah and not only seizing the girl’s phone as evidence is forbidden too, but even showing the man’s phone with the conversation with the girl, because it would impede on the girl’s privacy. So some poor Lacrosse players got accused, adulthoods were already ruined, the women admitted to lying, and this is the case with probably all accused without due process during the 2013-2025 period.
And Title IX is still enforced.
The sexual assault allegations against Duke lacrosse players were headed for criminal court. They are unresolved because powerful people prevented them and their alleged victim from having a day in court, evidence and arguments being heard from both sides, and a jury rendering a verdict. Instead their parents did everything possible to keep it out of court (why?).
They aren't unresolved. They were dropped by the state. The initial prosecutor was disbarred and (briefly) went to jail for his misconduct.
What you describe is that they are unresolved - there was no evidence, verdict. That was all suppressed, including by attacking the prosecutor. Why not clear their names in court?
Prosecutors in every other circumstance wield almost unchecked power - except when the children of the powerful might end up in court. Name another prosecutor treated in this way.
Name another one that has acted so egregiously.
I don't know it was egregious; I think that was the media blitz by powerful people trying to shut them down.
Regardless, it happens all the time everywhere - witholding evidence, fabricated evidence, forced confessions, black site torture, endless harassment, etc. etc. What this DA allegedly did was relatively nothing.
So Trump can defy the constitutional order because of how Duke bungled a case of rape accusations? I don't follow that.
Why are you citing the these institutions' contribution to the 20th century? We are 25 years past the 20th century, 35 years since the end of the Cold War (which was the spiritual end of the 20th century).
What have these elite institutions contributed to the 1990+ world order?
Tons of research in the sciences, including medicine.
So nothing that required them to maintain a one-sided, antagonistic political stance?
I am not a fan of the orange man.
But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college.
Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.
Federally-funded academic science often looks like:
Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.It's that last step - 5 - which I think is a missing piece of the discussion. A lot of private company pharma and medical research is often doing the 'last mile' work that started in university research programs. Stuff that looks promising is picked up and commercialized, but there's usually significant work the research people have done before big commercial players take it to market. They're not doing all their research from scratch - they're taking the best bits funded by our government research programs and bringing them to market. Cutting university research will damage the private sector pretty quickly.
It even goes beyond the concrete research that eventually gets commercialized. One pharma startup I am familiar with has much of its research-related leadership and board staffed with very successful current or former academic researchers who used to run their own labs or even departments. We cannot shift skill acquisition like that over night to private industry.
On #3 "government gets a pretty awesome license" seems disingenuous. From what I've witnessed some specific agencies get to use that license in a rather limited way. It's often not broadly available to the public and commercial rights tend to be reserved to the University. Is that actually what most people would think of as "pretty awesome?"
On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that?
On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?
Yeah, my experience is the patent gets licenced to some private entity that then squeezes a profit of it. The public sure doesn’t “benefit”.
I’d prefer to see such funding going to state universities, not private ones.
Under the Bayh-Dole Act state universities do the exact same thing. They patent their research and license it to private companies. Their discoveries are no more or less open to the public than with private universities.
The public benefits by access to treatments that wouldn't exist had the research not been done.
On the other hand I agree that research funded by tax dollars should not be patented and should be available to all.
> By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.
I don't know precisely, but I would assume the universities take about 50% to 60% of the granted research funding as administrative overhead, and only what remains goes to the actual research.
This is somewhat disingenuous. Something like half of the grant is handed over to the University as overhead. Much of that is legit to cover things like labs but a lot of it goes to a cover a massive amount of administrative bloat.
Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.
The overhead is what makes research possible. How do you do research without a lab, or a building?
>Much of that is legit to cover things like labs
You include expenses for lab and facilities in your grant budget rather than as "overhead" ?
That's not how facilities work or are accounted for.
Facilities are common to all of the university. It doesn't make sense to force this individual requirement on each grant when the University has hundreds of ways it is using a given building or lab equipment.
Are you thinking "facility" == "building" and "rooms"?
The lab equipment is constantly evolving, needs repair, maintenance, on-site training. Perhaps you are thinking of a lab bench that is going to last the lifetime of the building and I am thinking of a computer server, 3D scanner, 3D printer, MRI machine (small lab system), etc.
My son has taken second year organic chemistry classes that had more computer hardware and software than I ever had in my electrical engineering/computer science classes in the early 1990s. The software might be open source, or might have ongoing software license fees. While those specific teaching labs should be paid for through tuition, imagine similar or more advanced versions in the research labs.
facility is intentionally broad. I think the point being that all of those things are being provided by the University to many researchers/students/professors.
The point is that separating out what gets allocated where, when there are so many things that might have multiple uses, is a pointless task if you're trying to reverse engineer how much money should be given to individual research teams to account for it. The University already has the systems in place to manage the overhead. There's no reason to do more work to try and get to the same result.
This is what accountants do. They match expenses to income. It shouldn't be that hard.
J. Random Professor is using lab #12 for his group. Apportion the overall building expenses by square foot to his grant budgets, or something along those lines.
Antedote:
When I was a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Computer Science research grant proposals included budgets for overhead. This was often, if I recall correctly, 10% of the overall equipment and salary budget. This was deemed a tax collected by the department and used to:
- pay IT staff salaries - pay IT hardware and service costs (storage, communication) - etc
Other costs on the research grant would include:
- hardware purchases: personal computers, specialized equipment, compute and storage servers - graduate student and postdoctoral student salaries - travel costs to conferences for students - consumables (if any)
Again, in Canada, there are various types of research grants. For example, the "Research Tools and Instruments grants program" will pay the entire cost of the equipment. This includes: shipping, customs fees, warranty/service contracts, software licensing, on-site training.
https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ResearchPortal-PortailDeRecher...
Note that travel, salary and benefits, consumables, renovations, lab infrastructure are not allowed.
For other types of grants the institution's "tax rate" is usually specified by the Department of Research, and can be as high as 25%. UBC hides it's rates behind a portal, but Simon Fraser University has a description of them: https://www.sfu.ca/research/researcher-resources/fund-my-res...
I won't speak to the amount of "administrative bloat" that universities have experienced during my two decades post graduation. While it exists, a tax rate of 25% seems quite reasonable when you consider the overall costs of research at a university compared to equivalent commercial office/lab space.
The numbers you are suggesting do indeed seem reasonable, and if those were the overheads being used, they would probably be justified. But I think current overheads are often much higher. Here for example is a recent article saying that the proposed 15% cap on overhead for NIH grants would be disastrous for universities like Harvard that currently have a 69% negotiated overhead rate: https://deliprao.substack.com/p/understanding-nihs-15-overhe...
To be fair, I'm not sure if that author is using the same definition that you are. In the article, they clarify that a 69% rate means that a $1,000,000 grant has an extra $690,000 paid to Harvard. Still, the idea that the rates should be the same for all institutions and should be closer to the numbers you remember certainly seems worth considering.
>Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.
That's what they're cutting.
That is disingenuous. People absolutely want to cut all University research without regard as to what it for.
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Just to be clear, you are aware that universities are composed of more than just the sciences right?
Do you also think that biology professors should strike and protest because the first year painting classes don't utilize the scientific method?
The fact that gender studies is a liberal arts degree kind of gives away that it's not pretending to be a science.
> But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
The funding at issue is research funding, not educational funding, and it goes to both kinds of universities (vastly more, in aggregate, to state universities than Ivies.)
> Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
If research funding is used as a lever to establish political control, those things literally do not matter, since whatever universities survive will simply be tools of totalitarian indoctrination by the regime.
The feds aren’t funding ivies for the purpose of education, they’re funding researchers who happen to work at the ivies to do research.
Multiple people pointing this out, and absolutely right.
Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?
This was recently discussed on Hacker News about two weeks ago.
See this blog post by Steve Blank talking about the rise of research universities and why the USA is a science powerhouse. https://steveblank.com/2025/04/15/how-the-u-s-became-a-scien...
And the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360
Also, pragmatically, it's a system that has yielded incredible ROI since WW2, in terms of new industries, new companies, jobs, science, economic gains, productivity gains, and national security. The US university system is the envy of the entire world, and it's being targeted for dismantling by very petty, cruel, and incompetent people.
> why do we collocate research and teaching?
Because we want the same scientists who do, or recently did, advanced research to teach students? Because we want students to be involved in actual real genuine cutting-edge research? I suppose this is the logic.
As a student back in the day I worked in a university lab, and it was pretty interesting to play a role in solving problems that don't have answers in the end of a textbook.
"Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?"
Because you need a second generation of researchers.
We did so because having all laboratories be government run was inefficient so in WW2 we decided to split the costs with private and public universities who will maintain labs, equipment, and the federal government will pay directly for the research.
Many of the "good" universities in general seem more focused on prestige and acceptance rates than they do educating the masses. The Ivies could significantly expand the sizes of their student bodies (and to their credit they do make some content accessible online), but they don't because a lot of the value of a Harvard education is the exclusivity and the social network it gets you into.
And therein lies why a lot of Trump's base has a massive problem with them.
To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.
It isn't about that efficiency. I teach at a community college and my state's republican supermajority just cut our budget by 10%.
Oh absolutely agreed, the GOP is anti-education however you slice it.
In a less partisan world, it would be nice to see a version of this that was more about efficient allocation of education dollars rather than an attack on education.
Universities have two roles: education and research. The funding is overwhelmingly for research and it's going to those that provide the best return on investment. Should cancer research funding go to your local community college?
Educating the best and brightest is also of special value, but that is beside the point.
I disagree -- the funding isn't ROI based at all. Heck NIH doesn't even really audit how well the funds were spent, how could they? They don't even really assess if the research had impact, save for counting journal articles and impact factors, which are in themselves poor proxies for quality of work (and easily gamed).
What makes you say all that? Grants are hard to get, highly competitive with difficult standards.
The feds are funding research, which elite schools have the best faculty and scholars who are conducting the very best research. May as well as why are VC’s funding promising startups instead of less promising ones, when those promising ones have already wealthy founders who have exited their previous venture.
Most of the money is research grants, not for training undergrads.
> All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many
What a weird comparison. Yes, picking a group of universities that comprises 64 campuses is going to have more students than a group with a small fraction of that.
This framing is a little strange, since these universities serve multiple purposes. Much of this funding is for scientific research, which is somewhat distinct from the undergraduate teaching mission.
Comparing tuition is silly, IMO. Lots of people don't pay full-price at private universities, and nobody who is in-state pays the full-price for public universities.
If you care about efficiency, then divide the budget by the number of students.
Harvard has a budget of about $9B, which is about 4-5x larger on a per-student basis than a few public universities I compared (I couldn't find the SUNY budget with 30s of searching, you are welcome to provide that info if you have it).
So far, the funding in question is research grants. There's an argument that research is more effective at the universities that have concentrated the best researchers.
There’s also an argument that public funds should go to public schools.
What about private research institutes? They don’t really educate anyone, not in the way that people think of when they say education. Why must all funds only go to public organizations?
why should the government pay for that? If people want to do private research thats up to them
Why should the government pay for research? Because the private sector can some times move faster than a public research lab. They may have different capabilities. They have different strengths. They may be more efficient in certain situations. Why is this surprising to you?
What does it matter if they are faster? The pertinent question is if private research has a direct public benefit
Yes, complementing an observation that there are many funding sources that aren't the Federal Government
From my conversations with people, this university funding topic is a mere proxy for their disdain with Trump on every topic, in a fairly incoherent rehash of random headlines. Have found very few people willing to discuss how universities are funded like this article is.
The last 75 years of interacting with the federal government and proletariat will be a footnote in these school’s half millenium history. It won’t even be controversial. Non-upper class people won’t be using them to get into corporations, a mere happenstance of the last 75 years and not what these universities view themselves as. Non-upper class people won’t be worried about how many of them are in, and what criteria is involved, and how fair. And the Federal government won’t be using their one avenue of funding to bother them about it. 75 out of 400, and then 1,000 years. A footnote. Probably laughed about.
“Remember when we had $50bn from daytrading tax free and got the US government to pay for our toys every year until a total populist uprising occurred at the expense of the entire nation. Other People’s Money! Rowing club later?”
Top US state schools have a lot of really good researchers.
And those researchers at state schools will tell you that many of the Ivys, and other elite schools such as MIT and Caltech, are better.
Some state schools are among the elite, such as Berkeley, of course, and UCLA, Michigan ... depending on how large your 'elite' is.
It's unfortunate that a rational discussion could not be had before the cuts were made. I can see a scenario where you and I and many others agree with cuts to many organizations.
Bureaucratic organizations and special interests there are entrenched. The people managing some of these endowments are getting annual compensations competitive with the best hedge funds. If we had a rational discussion they'd just work to run out the clock and keep the status quo.
Universities are research institutions with loss leading teaching operations on the side.
It's one of the only ways people can still get into "The Club" without having a lineage of wealthy connections.
Not a selling point.
The Ivies do a hell of a lot more for 'The Club' than for the people not in it.
(To be clear, I don't think giving Trump the authority to pull hundreds of millions in funding if they teach things he doesn't like, or allow anti-genocide protests etc, is in any way a solution to the above issue.)
Funding teaching is not the same as funding research. Some of the best research talent is concentrated in the Ivies.
> BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
At this point the notion of the actual issue as in: "how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education" is barely a factor in it. It's just about pitting poor people against other poor people and a handful of rich nepo-babies who are so insulated from the consequences of our system they might as well not be considered to be part of it.
For anyone interested, college used to be nearly in totality funded by the state, not per student, but via the grant system. Our parents will talk about "working their way through college" working as waitstaff, because that was once an achievable thing: to work while you studied and pay your tuition, and graduate with little if any debt, and go on to do all sorts of things my generation struggles to do, like buy a home and a car, and not a run down refrigerator box and an old wreck from the side of the road that barely runs, no. They got to buy good homes, at fair prices, and cars that were if not new, really close to it.
Then as with everything Reagan fucked it up, the "no more free lunch" lobby got to add another notch to their bedpost as they set about destroying yet another fucking thing funded with public money that was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing to pass yet another goddamn tax cut and worsen the ability of America to compete on the global stage.
> Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
That can't happen in a vacuum, though.
50 years ago, there was a far narrower gap between the two groups. Now it's expanding. That "no more free lunch" crowd was that "educated coastal elite" of the time. Remember, Reagan was elected governor of California twice.
RE: our parents working their way through college, I think two things happened at least, yes.
Reagan gutted education spending.
But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).
Plus all the discussion about the bloating of college non-teaching administrative staffing.
> But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).
Which can also be blamed on Reagan specifically and the larger "trickle down" movement he inspired, which gutted protections for unionized labor and badmouthed unions in general so they became a dirty word in American politics, only very recently finally getting back at least some credibility.
That old meme comes to mind where someone is like "my hobby is putting Reagan's face on graphs of economic data the year he got elected" and watching everything just go completely tits up after that point.
For the curious, the graphs in question: https://daughternumberthree.blogspot.com/2020/01/graphing-re...
Oh man I didn't know there was a full blog post too!
Awhile ago, a graph showed tuition tightly and negatively correlated to government funding.
How credulous do you have to be to attribute education funding to a president from 40 years ago?
By my count, roughly 75% of the US electorate were (or could have been) educated in the last 40 years.
Funnily enough, when the law was passed giving the president the authority to meddle in university governance, Reagan vetoed it. And the left, in congress and the senate, forced it through.
This author presumably understands but buries the lede that for an endowment of $15 billion a university would typically only spend 5%, or $750 million, annually. So "a mere $400m" is over half of the annual funds from the endowment (not including tuition income and donations) that might be available to a university with such an endowment.
It should be relatively obvious that spending into the principal of an endowment is not a sustainable practice over the long-term for universities that are operating at the scale of centuries.
At a scale of centuries, monetary units themselves become highly unstable. On this time scale it was recently that people thought deflation was good for the economy, and that spending 5% every year would be reckless.
Public schools in the US get a relatively small fraction of their budget from state funding. The distinction between public and private is not as large or substantial as one might imagine.
For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.
"Free speech" is when the President unilaterally withholds research grants from universities, based on statements made by students (not faculty)?
This is the double edge sword of moving away from voluntary transaction in the market and towards government-imposed funding. The government takes away your ability to choose what to fund, holds the purse, then smacks the purse at you filled with the weight of your own money.
The government, with laws as written, has more restrictions on when it can pull money than private parties, due to its legal obligation to be content-of-speech-neutral. We are discovering that United Stares law is meaningless.
Law everywhere is meaningless unless “we have to follow the law” is a cultural norm. This is why norms are more fundamental and more important than laws.
You are discovering this. It wasn't that long ago when the national guard took tuition money away from Kent State in the form of executing their students for free speech.
Federal law is insanely complex. It's written by humans in an abstract legislative process so there's not even a guarantee that it won't conflict with _itself_. We have, several times, added laws to the register that were later determined to be in conflict with the Constitution itself.
This is why courts exist.
This is also why libertarians exist.
I'm not sure this is a "free market choices" problem. Some institutions like education should be funded by government, in part or in whole.
The government threatening to take away that funding based on "taste" is more of a problem of authoritarianism.
Göttingen and Berlin were arguably the best universities in the world in 1930.
They were not in 1940.
For physics and math that might be true. But Copenhagen was also very important.
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The POTUS should not have this authority obviously, BUT
As "Ivies" grew their endowments at hundreds of percent faster than their student bodies, they became essentially hedge funds that do some education.
They might also be happy for an excuse to implement some of these policies and have the administration as scapegoat.
Yes some of them have said as much...
To be clear: It's not as simple as funding for these schools being taken away.
What's being threatened is funding for research being done at these schools. That's a huge difference.
It's not as simple as that, either. Every research grant comes with an "overhead" charge on top that goes to the university admin, which can be something like 60%.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/02/10/lies-damn-lies-and-un...
And moreover, it's not just the research grants that are being threatened, as seen in TFA. There's also the massive subsidy in the form of tax exemption. No other hedge funds receive that kind of preferred tax treatment. Only universities.
So I have a rare disease. The only treatment is surgery. However, there is an ongoing study on a promising treatment at an elite university for a very effective and simple drug-based treatment. That type of research funding is absolutely being threatened. So, yes, it really is that simple.
If only Trump were trying to force universities to be more efficient with their spending. However, both of us clearly know that is not what is going on here.
Does the admin of the school get any of this money today or is it entirely allocated to the individual researchers?
Yes, about half is skimmed off the top by the university, called 'overhead'. This is used to fund everything, from research-essential things like paying for heat and maintaining buildings, to less obvious but still research-essential things like IP lawyers to deal with contracts and campus security. However, SOME of the overhead will end up supporting things that are 'contentious' like DEI enforcement or whatever.
I keep seeing this presented as if the money were being given away, but isn't it more accurate to describe it as payment for services (e.g. access to research facilities)?
From the HN guidelines:
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It is part of the political reality that we live in. Whichever party is currently in power, will inevitably use that power to promote ideas that are favorable to them and to dissuade ideas that they are opposed to.
The same people who are whining about the Trump administration abusing their power by doing these things; were cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle.
This is why we have to be very careful when crafting laws. Before passing it because we want our party to use it to help us, we have to imagine what would happen when the opposing party tries to use this law against us.
The last part is accurate, but equating the two is a bit of stretch. The democrats went out their way to do everything by the book. They also generally took the time to understand the systems they were working with.
The current presidency went in with the assumption that everything was wasteful, and didn't take the time to understand what they were cutting. Hence, emergency rehires, judicial blocks on firing, etc.
The amount of noise about it was the same, but the root causes and support are far from equivical.
Biden had the bureaucracy on his side (it’s well known that government employees are largely left-Democrats), so he was able to collaborate with it. In his first term, Trump learned that insiders were good at preventing him from accomplishing his goals when he ‘played by the rules’, so now he’s just ignored ‘the system’.
Insiders have plainly ignored the law in the past when it was convenient, (see all the agencies which violated notice-and-comment rule-making in the Obama years,) we’ve just never seen anyone ignore the administrative agencies to this degree before.
>In his first term, Trump learned that insiders were good at preventing him from accomplishing his goals when he ‘played by the rules’, so now he’s just ignored ‘the system’.
This seems obviously what happened, and it may be because of the unprecedented non-consecutive second term. I don't know if Trump's ideology has changed between this term and his previous one, but his tactics certainly have. He clearly came into this term with a plan to do a blitzkreig [unfortunate reference], to make changes at a rate and degree that would cut through all the bureaucratic obstacles he faced the first term.
And it seems mostly successful. The opposition, including many of the employees of the executive branch themselves, were mostly caught off guard. Over the last few weeks, it seems like they are finally starting to form a responsive strategy, and are pushing back more effectively through courts and public opinions. I expect much of this initial push to moderate, such as the tariffs, the funding cuts, but still with lasting changes. Of course, if any of the changes are found to be unlawful, they will get reversed. But that will potentially take years.
> cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle
What is the #1 thing you consider "a similar thing from an opposite angle?"
Biden's multiple student loan forgivness attempts come to mind? He might have been handing out money, as opposed to taking it away like Trump. But the underlying issues are the same: he did it unilaterally using executive order, and the courts had to get involved because there were concerns about constitutionality.
If the executive branch has the authority to determine where money is spent, then it seems obvious to me that it also has the authority to determine where it isn't spent. If you think of the president as an executive "CEO", then the current CEO can change the decisions of the previous CEO... This is in fact what we're voting for in the presidential election -- "how" to run the daily business of country. New CEO, new goals, new policies, etc.
The complete disregard for our immigration laws was probably the biggest thing, even though there were a number of things that came close.
Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them.
The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.
Something more closely related to Trump's current actions against universities, was Biden's war on energy. Pipelines canceled. Lands and leases locked up. Taxes and regulations designed to reduce energy production.
> Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them. The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.
> Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them. The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.
Asserted without evidence, dismissed without evidence.
I'm not aware of mass cancelling of research grants under Biden in the same way Trump is doing. The Trump to Biden transition took place during my PhD, and I never heard a peep about anything similar. Now all I hear about is cancelled grants.
Under Biden, many grants did have to appeal to liberal sensibilities to be selected, but he didn't order all grants that didn't focus on DEI cancelled in 2021. I'm not even sure if "inclusion" was added to the NSF's list of "broader impacts" under Biden or well before him.
> the political reality that we live in
Reality is something that exists regardless of what you think. Politics is what you make it; you don't 'live in it'; it's yours.
> Whichever party is currently in power, will inevitably use that power to promote ideas that are favorable to them and to dissuade ideas that they are opposed to.
No prior president of either party has done anything like what Trump does, and you know it. Do you think nobody will notice if you make some rhetorical argument?
No prior president did anything like Biden did either. Only hyper-partisans will claim that only one side does radical things.
> No prior president did anything like Biden did either.
I think you are just saying stuff. Biden was pretty conventional compared to prior Presidents. Trump is much, much different.
As I understand it, billionaires take out loans with their stock/investments as collateral to get cash without selling said assets.
Why can't universities do the same? Or is my understanding of billionaire money shenanigans incorrect?
Universities can and they do:
https://public.com/bonds/screener?issuerSymbol=PDFHV
The yield on ~20 year Harvard bonds seems to be about one percentage point higher than the yield on 20 year treasuries.
Those are standard, unsecured bonds. They're not loans against anything in the endowment.
Right, and the endowment already uses leverage, so many of the endowment's assets will already serve as security for loans.
Sure, but that's margin trading. These bonds have nothing to do with the endowment.
Yeah, sorry I didn't make it clear enough that I was agreeing with you. The endowment's assets are likely mostly/all pledged as security for margin trading, in which case there may be few/no assets left which could serve as collateral for borrowing that will fund payouts.
Or just use the endowment directly. Quick napkin math says that Harvard could make tuition free for all undergrads for 26 years with what they current have. Originally this money was meant to be spent on education but they just let it grow forever. Some of their hedge fund managers are approaching 8-figure annual compensation packages and I can't help but assume this is part of what has corrupted the university. Citadel LLC has $65 billion AUM, while Harvard has $53 billion while getting special tax-exemptions.
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I can't speak for other universities, but Jewish students have no reason to feel endangered at Cornell.
Some crazy Asian student wrote death threats to Jewish students and was kicked out. [1] When the lid blew off in Gaza all our sports events went clear bag, which was a hassle to me as a sports photographer. Security cameras popped up all over the engineering school over a weekend, contrast that to any blue collar projects in my building which always go on for months or years. The encampment on the arts quad was polite, nobody could say they were deprived of an education by it. Students who disrupted a job fair were suspended and ultimately reported.
[1] Black students, gay students, women, etc. can't say that they get this kind of service from public safety.
> Jewish students have no reason to feel endangered at Cornell.
Have you spoken with Jewish students? Do you have first-hand knowledge? It's a stereotype of our blindness to dismiss other people's concerns, especially over safety and discrimination.
Let's be real, this is a Maoist attempt to supress the intelligencia. The anti-Semitism angle is just a thin veneer to sell it publicly. This is why, after Columbia accepted the first set of demands, the admin immediately came back with a second set of demands
Not withholding cancer research because two countries on the other side of the planet can't get along and make it everyone else's problem shouldn't be difficult either.
I agree 100% - I would point out that it's not the Jewish students who set "encampments".
Many Jewish students did participate in the protests, a well-known organized example being Jewish Voice for Peace.
Regardless, the status quo always attacks the tactics of challengers in a similar way. Of course the status quo, support for Israel in this case, doesn't use those tactics - they don't need to! They already have the power structure and their desired policies; they don't need to change anything.
The same patterns of the status quo and challenger happens in politics, social issues, international relations, warfare, etc. The status quo says, 'they're disrupting things, not following the rules'. That's because the rules were written by and for the status quo.
We already know you think it's the other side's fault. You could have have left out the second part of your comment if you were actually agreeing instead of letting us know again your opinion on who should be blamed.
Turns out both Jewish and Muslim students are getting harassed, which isn't surprising at all to anyone paying attention... this was also true before the current israel/palestine conflict
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-reports-antisemiti...
you should read this: https://www.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/FINAL-Har...
Is there a specific section you are referring to? It seems to back up their point throughout the document - i.e. on page 262 "Over a half of Muslim student respondents, a quarter of Jewish student respondents and a bit under a half of MENA student respondents do not feel physically safe on campus"
I have, maybe you should
> In virtually every category, Jewish students reported more negative experiences than their Christian or atheist/agnostic peers, though Muslim students reported even greater negative experiences than Jewish students. It is not the goal of this Task Force, nor of the parallel Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias, to engage in a contest to prove which group has suffered more.
> Asking to stop harassing Jewish students is not an "assault".
Quite the strawman
I believe what’s under discussion is a students right to protest the US governments involvement in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
I believe you can protest whatever, even things that are not real (like the so called genocide, where the population actually grows). There should of course be limits to your protest: violence against people you disagree with should never be an option.
PS: if you can stop the war by returning all the hostages, it's not a genocide.
both sides have hostages, and every country in the world besides the US and Israel call it one, in case you missed that
1 year old children as hostages?
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Couldn't the same be said of people making accusations of antisemitism? Trump et. al. are hardly in good faith.
People need to understand how the pharmacology pipeline works.
The Federal government provides funds for research. That research finds novel compounds and new treatments. The product of that resaerch then gets transferred to private companies who commercialize it and then make massive profits from it.
Generally speaking, drug companies don't research with one exception: patent extension. A given compound will be patented and then the patent owner will have a monopoly over that for a number of years, supposedly because there'd be no investment otherwise, but that patent will ultimately expire. Except... it doesn't really. It's why over a century later we're still dealing with insulin patents. "Patent extension" is the process where you make a small change to a molecule or a delivery system and then get a new patent, refusing to sell the old. And it can be hard for someone else to produce a generic for many reasons.
Now I have a lot of problems with this system:
1. Any form of patent extension should be illegal, basically;
2. The institutions who actually come up with this should share in the profits. After all, it's the government paying for it;
3. We give a monopoly to these companies in the US where it's illegal to import the exact same product from overseas, which leads to something costing $800 in the US and $5 in France.
But given this is the system we're stuck with, cutting off funding makes absolutely no sense. Why?
1. It's going to dramatically impact drug companies negatively in the future as their supply of new products dries up;
2. It's antoerh element of soft power where the US can use the power to produce certain medicines to influence other countries. Think about what happens if China becomes the source for the world's medicines (personally, i'd be a fan but the purveyors of this policy most definitely are not).
Government research has given us things like the Internet and mRNA vaccines. This is so unbelievably shortsighted.
And why are they doing it? Well, the party of Free Speech is punishing institutions because some of their students made factually correct but mean statements about Israel.
pharma does plenty of research outside of patent extension.
I feel things like Universities and Hospitals are some of the most questionable non-profits in existence.
They operate and appear as for profits businesses to most people.
There are no owners (shareholders) getting dividends, is the major difference.
private schools shouldn't be getting public money. shocking people disagree. yes they do research that benefits the public. so does Meta and Google, who don't get public money. public money should go to public schools.
especially considering that the PIs who do the work in the private school scenario effectively boost the private school's clout with public money, but these private schools do not increase accessibility by opening up admission further.
that said, trump is also doing this for the wrong reasons, sadly.
> private schools shouldn't be getting public money. shocking people disagree. yes they do research that benefits the public. so does Meta and Google, who don't get public money. public money should go to public schools.
Those two are not the same. Research funded by Meta/Google doesn't benefit the public in the same way as research in Ivies (and non-Ivies).
This is the government paying for a service.
Should a private cement company get public money for delivering cement?
> This is the government paying for a service.
a service public schools can do.
Sure, and if there were a law proposed in Congress to restrict federal research funding to public institutions and bar all private institutions, we could debate the merits of that.
That is not, however, what is happening. Institutions, without regard to whether they are public or private, are having research funding used as a lever to secure adherence to the political ideology of the ruling party, unilaterally by the executive branch.
The attempt to make this a debate about public vs private institutions is a distraction from and cover for that.
Public works departments can deliver the cement. It’s more efficient to have the cement hauler do so.
not as well. Grants are a competitive process.
When building a highway, the government should put out notice and buy the best offering.
Im not sure why you would want government buying sub-par research just because it comes from a public school
it would solve themselves. all of the good PIs at the good private schools would go to the good public schools. there's no actual inherent reason why private schools are bad like you're implying.
I'm skeptical of the idea that money and fix any problem, and that there are no inherent differences.
Setting that aside, why do you think it is even desirable to limit funding to public institutions in the first place?
Seems like you're starting from this position and moving backwards.
If Public schools are superior, why haven't they already out competed private institutions? They have a pretty huge advantage from additional tax revenue.
private schools were first that's pretty much it.
Meta and Google definitely get a ton of public money.
they shouldn't.
What about private research institutes which do no education of undergraduates? What do you base your pronouncement on?
Meta and Google absolutely do get public money, for another commonly known example, every single one of Elon Musk's companies have gotten significant funding paid for through our taxes — government contracts, subsidies, grants, you name it
those also shouldn't - at least without the government getting an equity stake.
don't really disagree, but also this is a "get money out of politics" level change — next to impossible because there are piles of money to be made by the people in charge