Fed Update: COGR News Digest

Council on Governmental Relations (COGR)

10/15/25The Atlantic

  The Logical End Point of Trump’s Higher-Education Agenda

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has attacked colleges and universities using such a bewildering range of tools—civil-rights investigations, research-funding recissions, student-loan cuts, visa bans—that it’s hard to keep track of what the White House is trying to reform or destroy. But the new higher-education compact  offered  to universities by the administration strongly suggests that Trump’s higher-education agenda, if successful, will result in a far less diverse academy, with fewer Black and Latino students. It will do this by demanding that colleges adopt an admissions system based purely on test scores and GPA—and accusing any institution that resists of illegal racial preferences

10/15/25Inside Higher Ed

  Most of Harvard’s Research Funding Has Been Restored

As of Tuesday, Harvard University had recouped most of the federal research funding it lost when the Trump administration froze its access to grants earlier this year, multiple  local news organizations   reported . 

10/14/25Inside Higher Ed

CSU Campuses Reel From Blow to HSI Funding

The Trump administration’s death blow to funds for minority-serving institutions is expected to cost the California State University system tens of millions of dollars.

10/14/25The New Yorker

  Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education

Over the past nine months, the Administration has waged an effective, unrelenting assault on higher education. D.E.I. programs have been dismantled nationwide….The Administration has also pledged to abolish the Department of Education altogether—a long-held goal among conservative activists, who believe education should be managed locally. “They can’t repeal the department,” James Kvaal, Biden’s Under-Secretary of Education, told me. “So they’re vandalizing it.

10/13/25

  China and the US have long collaborated in ‘open research.’ Some in Congress say that must change (AP) https://apnews.com/article/united-states-china-academic-research-congress-53ee311ea07f6ceccee4a7fe99f0857d

For many years, American and Chinese scholars worked shoulder to shoulder on cutting-edge technologies through open research, where findings are freely shared and accessible to all. But that openness, a long-standing practice celebrated for advancing knowledge, is raising alarms among some U.S. lawmakers.

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