Who are the power players in President Trump’s fight against universities? And, then, how federal workers are coping with the interminable government shutdown. Plus:

Emma Green 
A staff writer covering education and academia.

In the course of the past nine months, the Trump Administration has executed a highly effective assault on higher education. D.E.I. programs have been dismantled across the country. Columbia will pay more than two-hundred million dollars to settle allegations of antisemitism and violations of antidiscrimination law. The N.C.A.A. changed its policy on trans student athletes. And the President pushed Congress to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included major structural reforms to higher ed, affecting student loans and more.

Earlier this year, I set out to understand the who, the how, and the why of this higher-ed agenda. I spoke with a number of the Administration officials behind these policies, who have not spoken widely to reporters before. One thing that surprised me is how much their motivations varied, and how strongly they feel about the broader cultural importance of reforming universities.

May Mailman, who until recently was a policy deputy in the White House, has been coördinating the Administration’s efforts. She argued that many universities are too rich to deserve endless public largesse, and that they’re failing in their mission, often producing, as she put it, “indebted students with useless majors who hate our country and like to go to riots.” She also argued that the so-called woke features of campus life, such as D.E.I., violate federal laws by discriminating on the basis of race.

Josh Gruenbaum, who runs the Federal Acquisition Service, the government’s clearing house for goods, services, and contracts, described the central insight of the Administration’s playbook: that the federal government has billions of dollars’ worth of contracts with universities. “The way we need to be thinking about these things is: we are making an investment,” he told me. If schools violate their contracts—by, say, failing to address antisemitism on campus—the federal government doesn’t have to do business with them, he said.

The Administration has frozen hundreds of millions in federal funds for universities, especially ones that had high-profile protests after the October 7th attacks in Israel. Many of these funds have been for science research. Jonathan Pidluzny, the deputy chief of staff for strategy and implementation at the Department of Education, is one of the architects of the Administration’s higher-ed strategy. He insisted that the Administration is not anti-science; that’s just where their best leverage lies. Schools “need to understand that the consequences would be real,” he said. Pidluzny is an academic, and he spoke to me about his love for universities, where students ideally learn “to think, to write, to appreciate beauty”—something he said has been “imperilled by the woke takeover” of higher ed. “How did I get to where I am?” Pidluzny said. “It’s watching something really valuable to our way of life slip away.”

“Call it Frommer’s for edgelords,” T. M. Brown writes, of “a growing library of irony-soaked travel content” that’s seemingly geared toward the rightward shift among young male audiences. These dispatches claim to be an unvarnished look at some of the world’s most dangerous places. But what is its real motive? Read the story »

It’s day fifteen of the government shutdown. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been furloughed or are currently working without pay. The Administration has also issued reductions in force at agencies such as the Treasury Department and Health and Human Services, firing more than four thousand workers—an unprecedented action during a shutdown.