The Trump administration will cut a federal program that provides funding to colleges and universities with large Hispanic student populations, as well as numerous other discretionary grants designed to support minority serving institutions of higher education, RealClearPolitics is first to report.
It is the result of recent legal wrangling and the latest in Trumps ongoing crusade to overhaul academia.
The Department of Justice previously declined to defend the Hispanic-Serving Institutions program against a legal challenge brought by Tennessee and Students for Fair Admissions. The longstanding federal initiative, HSI, has made additional grants available to colleges where more than 25% of the student body is Hispanic. But in a July letter to Congress, the DOJ deemed that effort a discriminatory and unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendments Due Process Clause.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon agrees with that assessment, and now the Department of Education intends to broaden the aperture by ending HSI funding, as well as at least half a dozen major education grants that determine eligibility by race.
“To further our commitment to ending discrimination in all forms across federally supported programs, the department will no longer award Minority-Serving Institution grants that illegally restrict eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas,” McMahon said in a statement.
Added the education secretary: “The Department looks forward to working with Congress to reenvision these programs to support institutions that serve underprepared or under-resourced students without relying on race quotas and will continue fighting to ensure that students are judged as individuals, not prejudged by their membership of a racial group.”
A senior administration official, who declined to speak on the record, clarified that the change would not affect historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which do not rely on racial quotas as part of admissions.
The Education Department has already singled out seven major federal grant programs intended to help minority students at Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Asian American, and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions.
The administration believes programs that restricted eligibility on racial lines violated the Constitution and served as a vehicle for advancing so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The administration expects $350 million in annual savings from the cuts. The monies are expected to be reallocated toward other programs that align with “administration priorities.”
But there is only so much that the administration can do on its own. Congress passed, and then President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, signed into law legislation that created the assistance program for HSIs. They simultaneously set aside other grants for other minority serving institutions. As a result, the Education Department can reprogram discretionary funds, but McMahons hands are tied with respect to certain mandatory spending.
All the same, this kind of budgetary overhaul would have been politically unthinkable to most Republicans pre-Trump. It would have been impossible prior to a landmark 2023 ruling by the Supreme Court that found race considerations in university admissions unconstitutional. A sea-change moment, the ruling bowled over affirmative action programs that had been a pillar of higher education.
The move by McMahon to end the minority students grants is a direct downstream result of the court case. The DOJ specifically cited the Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, in its letter to Speaker Johnson announcing its decision not to defend the Hispanic college program.
“For too long,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in that decision, universities “have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individuals identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
This has given the Trump administration a free hand in efforts to uproot affirmative action from the academy.
When Tennessee and Students for Fair Admissions filed suit to challenge the HSI program earlier this year, Francisca Fajana, Director of Racial Justice Strategy at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, condemned the lawsuit as “a direct attempt to erase programs that remedy racial and ethnic disparities and strip away essential resources from institutions that serve Latino students.”
At the time, Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, countered that “no student or institution should be denied opportunity because they fall on the wrong side of an ethnic quota.”
Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.