Several prominent universities, including Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, made headlines in 2025 in a dizzying back-and-forth with the federal government. The Trump administration cut large amounts of research funding to universities. Some pushed back, and others hatched settlements to get the money restored.

So how have these confrontations between higher education and the White House played out over the past year, now that they have dropped out of the spotlight?

Amy Lieberman, education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Brendan Cantwell, a scholar of higher education at Michigan State University, to understand how the Trump administration is adopting a more subtle tactic to block funding to universities.

Where does Trump’s attempt to withdraw funding from universities stand?

Several universities entered into settlements with the Trump administration in 2025 – including the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Cornell University, Northwestern University and Brown University – to restore research funding the government pulled. We don’t really know how those deals are being enforced. They appear to be working, in the sense that the government has not complained and the schools have received the targeted funding that the government canceled.

In another case, Harvard University never entered into a deal with the Trump administration and instead sued the government in April 2025 to block a US$2.7 billion funding freeze. Federal courts restored Harvard’s funding, but we don’t have a lot of specific knowledge on how this funding was restored. The government appealed this ruling in December 2025.

In October, the administration also proposed an agreement, called the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, that would provide funding advantages for universities that agreed to change their admissions practices to cap the percentage of international students that they enroll, among other policy shifts.

There was almost universal skepticism and condemnation of this deal among schools, and it fell apart, aside from a few small schools not initially invited that said they would sign on.

What is your research focused on right now?

I am thinking about how the administration is shifting from making targeted deals with universities and more toward using legislative and rule-making processes to achieve its goals.

These deals with universities in 2025 were really unusual. I think they are going to become less and less effective for the administration, as they face losses in court. Universities have also realized that they could not agree to a deal with the administration and still prevail.

Now, we are seeing the administration impose its priorities in other ways, in part through President Donald Trump’s 2025 big tax and spending cuts and new rules at the Department of Education. This approach retains the Trump administration’s ideological preferences, but uses more normal routes.

Are they placing more limits on research funding, or what is the goal?

The Trump administration in 2025 wanted to reduce funding dramatically to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation – and to NASA, in particular. Congress rejected those requests and instead produced what was essentially a level funding picture for university research.

What isn’t clear is how much of the money appropriated by Congress is going to make its way into new grants for research. Much of the funding that Congress appropriated, so far, has not been released.

We know that in 2025, federal agencies made fewer grants than in past years. The grants the government did make tended to be a bit larger, and winning a grant became more competitive. This approach gives the administration more flexibility in funding the kinds of projects that it prefers.

In my assessment, it seems likely that the government will do the same again this year. The administration may also attempt to withhold a portion of the money that Congress appropriated for scientific research.

Over the course of the year, we are going to see how this plays out. Is the administration just dragging its feet, using whatever administrative levers it has to slow-walk things? Or, is it going to attempt to divert research funding to other priorities and now spend it in a way that Congress did not appropriate? We don’t really know. I do know that universities and scientific research organizations are very concerned about this possibility.

If this money doesn’t start to flow, we probably will see legal challenges from universities and scientific organizations.

How long does it take for delayed funding to become evident in research?

The effects are almost immediate and then build over time.

Some of the grants we expected to be awarded in the first two months of the year have not been awarded. In 2025, thousands of grants were canceled and some agencies made up to 25% fewer grants than they had awarded in prior years.

As the year goes on, unless the pace of awards increases, we can expect the total amount of money that goes out to researchers to be even lower than it was in 2025.

This is the bottom line: Congress continues to fund research, but all money is not making its way to researchers.

What does it look like as the Trump administration shifts its tactics?

One of the ways the administration seems like it will go after universities is by making it harder for students to qualify for student loans. The tax and spending cuts bill, for example, put caps on federal student loan borrowing at the graduate level.

This is more of a normal conservative idea; that the availability of student loans has encouraged universities to offer more low-quality programs at the undergraduate and graduate level which don’t help students. I think these conservative ideas with some mainstream appeal may be the focus of the administration moving forward, in addition to administrative foot-dragging.

Overall, I think that we may see less of these big, direct confrontations between the Trump administration and universities. It worked in the sense that they got some initial concessions from universities, but it is not really clear if those concessions amounted to a major victory for the administration.

The political boundaries of research are also becoming narrower. You can’t do climate research and expect to get federal funding right now.

I think that the federal government is going to continue to restrict money from universities. There is going to be this persistent, progressive shrinking of research funding. But the administration has either not been willing or able to impose a sudden collapse of university funding and bring schools to their knees.

Brendan Cantwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.