Trump U-turns on funding freeze affecting universities

The department of President Donald Trump’s White House responsible for the nation’s budget, the Office of Management and Budget, issued an order on Monday that froze trillions of dollars of federal grants, including many that affected colleges and universities.

However, college and university officials across the United States breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday when the order was rescinded.

The retraction came less than a day after a federal judge put an injunction on the original order that also froze funding for the National Institute of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, NASA, and thousands of other federally funded programmes, including Meals on Wheels.

While Monday’s memo stated that grants to individuals, such as student loans and Pell Grants (federal monies granted to the nation’s poorest college students), were exempt, at the online briefing hosted by the American Council on Education (ACE) officials were unsure if the order froze Federal Work Study funds, which flow through colleges, for example.

The 700-page spreadsheet on which government officials had been given less than two working weeks to indicate how these programmes aligned with executive orders, such as “Protecting the American People Against Invasion”, “Unleashing American Energy”, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing”, hardly clarified the issue, according to officials at ACE.

Nor did it appear that the Department of Education had advance warning about the freeze, they said.

According to CNN, it wasn’t just Democratic lawmakers who were critical of the President’s move.

Several Republicans indicated that they had been “deluge[d]” by outraged constituents. Ted Mitchell, ACE’s president, was scathing in his assessment of the original memo, calling it “institutional destruction.”