After four weeks of suspension, universities and students have no choice
The government has been shut down for a month and Congress remains deadlocked. Students starve, veterans are abandoned, and vital research flounderes. The longer the shutdown drags on, the more damage it will do to higher education.
Most urgently, USDA will not use emergency funds to help pay for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Starting Saturday, more than a million college students who rely on SNAP for basic needs will lose access to this support. Mark Huelsman, director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for Basic Student Needs, said the situation would force students and colleges into an “impossible situation” and could cause many students to drop out.
The crisis extends beyond food insecurity to student support programs, with school closures putting veterans’ education in jeopardy. No one answered the GI Bill hotline, which thousands of veterans use each month to get information about tuition, eligibility and housing subsidies. VA regional office staff are furloughed, career counseling has ended and GI Bill applications have been postponed.
Universities are entering mitigation mode due to issues with direct services to students. Gap funds designed to serve institutions in this situation are declining. Inside higher education Reports emerged last week that institutions are limiting travel, research and job opportunities to preserve cash while hundreds of millions in research funding are on hold. A training program funded by a Labor Department grant is on hold because federal program officials don’t approve the next tranche of cash on the job.
Ironically, part of the reason Democrats are resisting government reopening is to protect higher education funding. Democrats are trying to prevent Republicans from clawing back approved funds through the rescission process, as they did with grants to public broadcasting and the U.S. Agency for International Development this summer. The risks to education funding that doesn’t align with White House priorities are real. The Department of Education has canceled or denied funding for at least 100 TRIO projects affecting more than 43,000 disadvantaged students in what may be illegal seizure actions. Last month, it reallocated $132 million in funding from minority-serving institutions to historically black colleges and universities and tribal colleges.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration — never one to let a good crisis go to waste — is using the shutdown to further weaken the Department of Education. Much of the department has been furloughed, and nearly 500 Education Department staff were laid off 10 days into the government shutdown. A federal judge this week blocked the layoffs indefinitely, but the government may challenge the ruling. If the layoffs occur, the department will have less than half the number of employees it had when it started in January. Offices that handle civil rights complaints, TRIO funding and special education would be destroyed.
The cuts set the stage for Education Minister Linda McMahon to reiterate her plans to close the sector. Two weeks into the shutdown, she posted on
“The Department of Education has taken additional steps to better reach America’s students and families and root out education bureaucracies that place unnecessary oversight burdens on states and educators,” she added.
Policy experts predict the shutdown will end around mid-November, when enough people will feel the pain of not getting paid and start complaining to senators and representatives. But colleges don’t pick up where they left off. The dramatic suspension of funding derails the educational journeys of disadvantaged students and stifles valuable scientific research. Staff cuts in the Department of Education will result in a loss of subject matter expertise and human resources. After nearly a year of government attacks on DEI, academic freedom, and research funding, higher education is already on the defensive and will struggle to recover from another blow.
