U of A monitors federal grants situation as judge blocks freeze

Higher education officials in Arizona say they’re closely monitoring the quickly changing landscape, as a judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s sweeping freeze on federal grants, loans and financial assistance.

The White House’s order could vastly affect top-tier research universities such as the University of Arizona if it takes place; even grants that have been awarded but not spent were supposed to be halted.

But it would not immediately apply to Pell grants and other forms of federal student aid, although such aid would be subject to federal review under President Donald Trump’s plan, according to national reports.

“It’s a quite literal nightmare,” said Jeremy Bernick, president of the UA Graduate and Professional Student Council, before the judge’s action. “Confusion and fear are rampant amongst everyone right now: students, staff, faculty. ... It’s absolutely unprecedented.”

UA Regents Professor Lucy Ziurys, a faculty senator, said the UA wouldn’t be able to keep its prominence in its strong areas of research without federal funding since the university depends on research dollars for its education and training.

“This sort of action is really destroying one of the greatest strengths of the United States, which is its science, engineering and research potential, and the training of young, talented people,” Ziurys said of the White House’s order. “These research grants are training PhDs and master’s students — they’re getting the next phase of their education. … This affects our economy, our military. This sort of action is anti-science, anti-research and anti-education.”

UA spokesperson Mitch Zak, also speaking Tuesday before the federal judge’s order later in the afternoon, said university officials would provide updates when they have them. Spokespeople for Pima Community College and the Arizona Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s three public universities, issued similar statements that they are monitoring the federal actions and regulations.

The White House budget office ordered the pause Monday on federal grants, loans and financial assistance except Medicare, Social Security, student loans and scholarships. The office directed federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance” and any other programs that included “D.E.I., woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal,” the New York Times reported.

U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan blocked the action Tuesday afternoon, minutes before it was set to go into effect at 3 p.m. Arizona time. The administrative stay pauses the freeze until Monday.

Zak did not immediately have a dollar figure for the UA’s share of overall federal grants, but the website Data USA puts the number at $385 million in fiscal year 2022.

UA’s James E. Rogers College of Law sent an email to its community Tuesday afternoon saying financial aid offices had been advised that formal guidance from the U.S. Department of Education would be released soon.

“The University of Arizona recognizes the significant concerns regarding yesterday’s memo from the Office of Management and Budget, including its potential impact on our students and the communities we serve,” the email said. “While the full implications of this freeze remain unclear, it appears that Federal Student Aid may not be impacted.”

An email from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators confirmed that all Title IV student financial aid — which includes Pell Grants, federal student loans, federal work-study and Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants — would be exempt from the White House’s order.

The White House’s memo, sent Monday by Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, said, “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”

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UA Faculty Chair Leila Hudson, who emphasized she was representing just her personal point of view and not speaking on behalf of the university, said the effects remain to be seen and that faculty are waiting for further guidance from federal authorities as well as from the UA administration on how to interpret the orders.

“There’s a great deal of anxiety and uncertainty amongst our faculty about what this temporary moratorium on federal grants will mean for the hundreds if not thousands of ongoing research programs and proposals,” Hudson said before the judge’s ruling. “If not handled carefully and expeditiously, it could cause a great deal of disruption to our research productivity.”

“In my private capacity, as someone who has been at and around this university for a long time, our operations and our organization have always been and will continue to be organized around excellence and merit,” said Hudson. “And that includes entities and projects that may be swept up in these executive orders.”

Mark Stegeman, a professor of economics at the UA Eller College of Management, said it was very hard to tell at this point what the impact on universities like the UA would be, especially because DEI itself wasn’t a very well-defined concept.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are three different concepts, so that label itself isn’t very precise and it’s applied differently in different places,” said Stegeman. “And so, one of the problems of going after ‘DEI programs,’ if you separate the label from what those programs are actually doing, it’s hard to tell what you’re prohibiting, right?”

On Monday, UA’s senior vice president for research and innovation, Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, had written in a memo to faculty that a federal “Office of Science is immediately ending the requirement for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plans on any proposals submitted to the office; open solicitations have been or will be amended to remove the PIER plan.”

Díaz de la Rubia was writing — before the White House expanded the pause on grants — to advise faculty specifically about the National Institutes of Health putting grant application reviews on hold under the new administration, “which may affect the funding process.” The UA received $197.9 million in NIH funding in fiscal year 2023, it reported last February.

“Acting so abruptly and especially imprecisely, so there’s a lot of uncertainty about the long run outcome, causes lots of inefficiencies and a waste of resources,” said Stegeman of the freeze. “So, whatever it is that they end up wanting to do in the long run, it would have been much less disruptive to figure that out, give people some warning before abruptly cutting off funding flows, unless there’s some immediate crisis or problem that requires immediate repair.”

UA officials had pointed Monday to a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science document showing that President Donald Trump signed an executive order to suspend “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, procedures, programs, activities, and reviews” and DEI consideration in contract awards.

Among other guidance offered earlier Monday, before the freeze expansion was announced, Díaz de la Rubia told faculty they should continue to submit federal proposals — but also to “broaden your portfolio.”

“While we are monitoring the federal landscape, it is important to seek alternative funding sources from Foundations and non-federal sponsors,” he wrote.

He also advised UA researchers to “continue your important work in education, research and service” and to report any delays or effects on their work, due to the new federal decisions, to university administrators.