Latest news with #BrookingsMetro
Egypt Independent
4 days ago
- Politics
- Egypt Independent
The common thread in Trump's latest moves: squeezing big blue cities
President Donald Trump is moving systematically to tighten his grip on Democratic-leaning big cities — the geographic center of resistance to his agenda — by undermining their autonomy and eroding their political strength. Those militant goals are the common thread that links the high-profile initiatives Trump has launched in recent days to seize control of law enforcement in Washington, DC; pressure red states to draw new congressional district lines; and potentially pursue an unprecedented 'redo' of the 2020 census. These new efforts compound the pressure Trump is already placing on major cities with an agenda that includes aggressive immigration enforcement; cuts in federal research funding to universities central to the economy of many large metros; and threats to rescind federal funding for jurisdictions that resist his demands to impose conservative policies on immigration, education, homelessness and policing. Trump is pursuing this confrontational approach at a time when major metropolitan areas have become the undisputed engines of the nation's economic growth — and the nexus of research breakthroughs in technologies such as artificial intelligence, which Trump has identified as key to the nation's competitiveness. The 100 largest metropolitan areas now account for about three-fourths of the nation's economic output, according to research by Brookings Metro, a center-left think tank. Yet Trump is treating the largest cities less as an economic asset to be nourished than as a political threat to be subdued. Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, said Trump's approach to the nation's largest cities is 'colonial' in that he wants to benefit from their prodigious economic output while suppressing their independence and political clout. This administration is 'treating America's great economic engines as weak and problematic colonial outposts,' Muro said. 'They view them as the problem, when (in reality) they are the absolute base of American competitiveness in the battle against China or whoever (else).' Antagonism toward major cities has long been central to Trump's message. Several times he has described American cities with mayors who are Democrats, members of racial minorities, or both, as dystopian 'rodent-infested' 'hellholes.' Trump in 2024 nonetheless ran better in most large cities than in his earlier races, amid widespread disenchantment about then-President Joe Biden's record on inflation, immigration and crime. Still, as Trump himself has noted, large cities, and often their inner suburbs, remain the foundation of Democratic political strength and the cornerstone of opposition to his agenda. A series of dramatic actions just in the past few days shows how systematically Trump is moving to debilitate those cities' ability to oppose him. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser attends a news conference on August 11 about President Donald Trump's plan to place Washington police under federal control and deploy National Guard troops to the nation's capital. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Normalizing 'militarized cities' The most visible way Trump is pressuring big cities is by deploying federal law enforcement and military personnel into them over the objections of local officials. In his first term, Trump sent federal law enforcement personnel into Portland, Oregon, and Washington, DC, in the aftermath of George Floyd's 2020 murder. But after he left office, Trump, who does not often publicly second-guess himself, frequently said that one of his greatest regrets was that he did not dispatch more federal forces into cities. In his 2024 campaign, he explicitly pledged to deploy the National Guard, and potentially active-duty military, into major cities for multiple purposes: combating crime, clearing homeless encampments and supporting his mass deportation program. In office, Trump has steadily fulfilled those promises. When protests erupted in Los Angeles in June over an intense Immigration and Custom Enforcement deportation push, Trump deployed not only the National Guard (which he federalized over the objection of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom), but also active-duty Marines. Then, the administration used those forces not only to guard federal buildings, but also to accompany ICE (and other agencies) on enforcement missions — including a striking deployment of armored vehicles and soldiers in tactical gear to a public park in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood. The underlying immigration enforcement that precipitated the LA protests constituted a different show of force. As a recent CNN investigation showed, ICE is relying much more on street apprehensions in cities in blue states than in red states, where it is removing more people from jails and prisons. The administration says that imbalance is a result of 'sanctuary' policies in blue states and cities limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But civil rights groups see the administration's confrontational blue-state approach as an attempt to intimidate both local officials and immigrant communities. (The fact that ICE last week conducted an immigration sweep directly outside a Newsom press conference bolstered the latter interpretation.) Whatever the rationale, research by the University of California at Merced suggests the administration's enforcement approach is hurting blue cities. Using census data, the school's Community and Labor Center recently found that from May to July the number of California workers holding a private-sector job fell by about 750,000 — proportionally an even greater decline than during the 2008 Great Recession. Hispanic people and Asian Americans accounted for almost all the falloff. Sociology professor Ed Flores, the center's faculty director, said he believes the decline is 'absolutely' tied to economic disruption flowing from 'the presence of ICE and the way that (people) are being apprehended' on the street. New York City, too, has seen a notable drop in the labor force participation rate among Hispanic men. Members of the National Guard face off against people protesting an ICE immigration raid at a licensed cannabis farm near Camarillo, California, on July with the military (if not ICE) presence in LA winding down, Trump has sent hundreds of National Guard troops into Washington, DC, while also utilizing a section of federal law that allows him to temporarily seize control of the city's police department. In his news conference last week announcing the DC moves, Trump repeatedly said he would supplement the National Guard forces, as he did in LA, with active-duty troops if he deems it necessary. And he repeatedly signaled that he is considering deploying military forces into other cities that he described as overrun by crime, including Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Oakland, California — all jurisdictions with Black mayors. 'We're not going to lose our cities over this, and this will go further,' Trump declared. Most experts agree that Trump will confront substantial legal hurdles if he tries to replicate the DC deployment in other places. 'What they are doing in DC is not repeatable elsewhere for a number of reasons,' said Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Nunn said Trump can order this mission because of the DC National Guard's unique legal status. On the one hand, Nunn noted, the DC Guard is under the president's direct control, rather than the jurisdiction of a state governor. On the other, he said, the Justice Department has ruled that even when the president utilizes the DC Guard, its actions qualify as a state, not federal, deployment. That's critical because state guard deployments are not subject to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act's ban on federal military forces engaging in domestic law enforcement. If Trump tries to deploy the National Guard to address crime in the big cities of blue states, such as Chicago or New York, Nunn argued, he would face a catch-22. Since there's virtually no chance Democratic governors would agree to participate, Trump could only put troops on those streets by federalizing their states' National Guard or using active-duty military, Nunn said. But, he added, 'once they are working with federalized National Guard or active-duty military forces, the Posse Comitatus Act applies' — barring the use of those forces for domestic law enforcement. Trump could seek to override the Posse Comitatus Act's ban on military involvement by invoking the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act has not been used to combat street crime, but the statute allows the president to domestically deploy the military against 'any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.' Trump answers questions during a White House press conference on August Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in the relationships among different levels of government, agreed that invoking the Insurrection Act to justify sending the National Guard into cities over mayors' objections would shatter the generally understood limits on the law's application. But he also believes that precedent provides no firm assurance that this Supreme Court, which has proved extremely receptive to Trump's expansive claims of presidential authority, would stop him. Trump 'could try' to win court approval of military deployments to fight crime by citing the Insurrection Act's language about ''domestic violence' and 'unlawful combinations'' and then claiming that is 'depriving the people of their right to security,' Briffault said. Whatever the legal hurdles, more widely deploying the military on domestic missions would bring substantial consequences. Mayor Jerry Dyer of Fresno, California, who spent 18 years as the city's police commissioner, says that putting military forces onto the streets of more cities would create problems of coordination with local officials and trust with local communities. 'Whenever you start sending federal resources into local jurisdictions and actually take over the policing of that jurisdiction, it can become very disturbing to that community and quite frankly can create some neighborhood issues and ultimately a lack of trust,' said Dyer, who co-chairs the Mayors and Police Chiefs Task Force for the US Conference of Mayors. Even more profound may be the implications of numbing Americans to the sight of heavily armored military forces routinely patrolling the streets of domestic cities — an image that historically has been common only in authoritarian countries. New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading scholar of authoritarian regimes, wrote last week that the ultimate aim of Trump's domestic deployments 'is to habituate Americans to see militarized cities and crackdowns against public dissent in cities as normal and justified.' Step by step, she argued, Trump is seeking 'to disempower and delegitimize all Democratic municipal and state authorities.' How the redistricting war is marginalizing cities In less obvious ways, the battle that has erupted over redistricting — and the likely fight approaching over the census — constitutes another Trump-backed effort to 'disempower' large metropolitan areas. The unusual mid-decade congressional redistricting that Texas Republicans are pursuing at Trump's behest would increase the number of Republican-leaning US House seats largely by reducing the number of districts representing the state's biggest metropolitan areas, including Dallas, Houston and Austin, which all lean Democratic. The new map would further dilute the political influence of Texas' major metro areas, even as they have accounted for about four-fifths of the state's population and economic growth over recent years, said Steven Pedigo, director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. 'The growth in Texas has been driven by urban communities, but those communities are not going to be represented in these additional maps,' Pedigo said. In that way, the new Texas map extends the strategy that Republicans there, and in other growing Sun Belt states, used in the maps they drew after the 2020 census, said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Empty seats are seen as a Texas House meeting is called to order at the state Capitol in Austin on August 5. Texas Democratic lawmakers fled the state to protest a proposed Republican redistricting such as Texas and Florida that added the most House seats and electoral votes after the 2020 census — and are poised to gain the most again after 2030 — are adding population primarily among non-White people and in Democratic-leaning metro areas, Bisognano noted in a recent memo. Yet both of those groups will be denied the additional House representation generated by that population growth if the Republicans controlling Sun Belt state governments continue to draw district lines that splinter metro populations and favor rural ones. 'They are subjugating (metro voters) to produce a partisan outcome that is not reflective of the people of those cities,' Bisognano said. The calls from Trump and Vice President JD Vance to 'redo' the 2020 census, partly to exclude undocumented immigrants, could marginalize cities even more. Even if Trump could surmount the many legal and logistical obstacles to conducting a mid-decade census, a reapportionment of House seats and electoral votes that excluded undocumented immigrants would not result in the shift of influence from blue to red states that many conservatives envision. John Robert Warren, a University of Minnesota sociologist, concluded in a 2025 paper that if unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the 2020 census, California and Texas would each lose a House seat and New York and Ohio would each gain one. 'It would make literally zero difference,' Warren said. 'If you assume Texas and Ohio go red and California and New York go blue, then it's just a wash.' Excluding undocumented immigrants from the count, though, could offer Trump another way to squeeze urban centers. Many agricultural communities have substantial undocumented immigrant populations, but half of all undocumented immigrants live in just 37 large counties, according to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute. 'Within a state that Republicans control, by not including (undocumented people), it would be much easier to draw Republican districts because you would have a smaller minority population base to work with,' said Jeffrey Wice, a redistricting expert at New York University's law school. Not only congressional representation but also the many federal funding sources tied to population would shift toward rural areas if the census undercounts the urban population, he noted. Wice, who formerly consulted for Democrats on redistricting, says blue states and cities can't assume Trump won't pursue any of these possibilities, no matter how far-fetched they now seem. The same is surely true on the deployment of federal force into blue places. The New Republic's Greg Sargent recently published an internal Department of Homeland Security memo that described the joint ICE-National Guard mission in Los Angeles as 'the type of operations (and resistance) we're going to be working through for years to come.' (Emphasis added.) During World War II, the German siege of Leningrad famously lasted nearly 900 days. Big blue American cities may be counting down the hours as anxiously for the 1252 days remaining in Trump's second term.
Forbes
29-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
College Admissions Is Changing. Here's What Parents Need To Know.
University students hanging out in campus main lawn The college admissions process has always involved a certain level of mystery. But for many families today, that mystery feels more like a moving target. Between shifting enrollment trends, evolving policies, and the sudden ubiquity of AI, even the most seasoned parents are asking: What's actually happening—and how do I help my child make a smart, meaningful choice? It's a timely question—and a necessary one. In July 2025, Brookings Metro released a sweeping new report on youth economic mobility. Their conclusion was clear: 'A high school diploma and even a college degree are no longer enough to ensure upward mobility.' Today's students face a more complex—and in some ways more fragile—pathway from education to opportunity. That doesn't mean college has lost its value. But it does mean that value is no longer guaranteed. It has to be earned, demonstrated, and understood in new ways. As a parent, your role is not just to guide your child through the application process, but to help them ask the right questions. Questions that go beyond prestige and test scores—questions that get at what the college experience will actually do to support their growth, purpose, and future. Focus On Fit But Redefine What Fit Means We often talk about finding the 'right fit' in college admissions. But in this moment, fit needs to mean more than personality or campus culture. It should also reflect outcomes. Support systems. Financial realities. And the alignment between what your child wants from college—and what the college is built to deliver. Start with one foundational question: Where do students go after they leave this place? Not just where they enroll for graduate school, or how many land jobs. Ask what kinds of jobs. What kinds of lives. And how those outcomes differ depending on major, identity, or income level. A college that talks about 'opportunity' should be able to show you the pathways they've built—and how they're evolving those pathways in light of today's economy. Many institutions are starting to do this more transparently. They're publishing first-destination outcomes, showcasing alumni stories, and investing in dashboards that let families see how degree programs translate into real-world success. These aren't just marketing tools. They're signs of accountability. Some schools are setting a new bar for what that accountability looks like. The University of Texas System, for example, offers SeekUT, a public dashboard that details graduate earnings, student debt, and workforce outcomes by campus and major. It's a rare tool that lets families see how different degrees at the same institution lead to vastly different financial trajectories—critical information for making informed choices. At Georgia State University, students benefit from one of the most advanced student success systems in the country. The university uses predictive analytics to track over 800 risk indicators per student and proactively deploys support through academic advising and targeted microgrants like the Panther Retention Grant. Their efforts have helped close graduation gaps across income and racial lines—and demonstrate that fit isn't just about getting in, but about being supported all the way through. Meanwhile, Northeastern University has long recognized that academic fit includes professional fit. Its renowned co-op program integrates paid, full-time work placements with classroom learning, producing graduates who are more likely to land jobs quickly—and often with the very companies where they completed co-ops. Nearly 96% of Northeastern graduates are employed or in grad school within nine months, and over half receive offers from prior co-op employers. The Brookings report emphasizes what many parents have seen firsthand: Today's economy rewards students who have not only learned, but applied what they know. That means internships, apprenticeships, job shadowing, and project-based learning are not nice-to-haves—they're central to how college connects to life after graduation . Ask colleges: Look for institutions that treat experiential learning as part of the degree, not an extracurricular afterthought. That's the new gold Is Here. What Matters Is How It's Handled. Generative AI is already reshaping both sides of the admissions process. According to Acuity Insights' 2025 survey of 1,000 applicants, 35% of students used AI tools like ChatGPT during the application process. On the institutional side, 51% of admissions leaders say AI will significantly change how they evaluate candidates, and 78% are concerned about its effect on authenticity. But the real story isn't whether AI is used—it's how. Some institutions are creating guidance for students on how to use AI responsibly. Others are offering transparency statements or updating essay prompts to encourage reflection over perfection. Ask admissions officers how they view AI in the application process—and whether their faculty are engaging with AI in the classroom. Because your child won't just be evaluated with these tools; they'll be working alongside them in college and in their future career. This Is a Moment of Opportunity—If We Let It Be Yes, the college process is more complex than it used to be. But complexity doesn't have to mean confusion. It can also mean clarity—if families and institutions are willing to speak honestly about what matters most. For families, that means taking a step back from the prestige race and leaning into the questions that matter most: Will this school support my child's growth? Will they be seen here—not just recruited? Will they graduate with more than a degree—with a direction? And for colleges, it means meeting that level of inquiry with transparency, data, and deep care for the students they serve. Because at the end of the day, the most powerful promise a college can make is not about exclusivity—but about transformation.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Brookings Metro Unveils Dashboard To Help Cities Track And Close Gaps In Black Business Ownership
Brookings Metro's Center for Community Uplift recently revealed its new Black Business Parity Dashboard, a tool that it will use to help policymakers, organizers, and other community members to make the potential impact of Black residents entrepreneurship a reality through providing data that shows what those businesses would look like if they were equitably funded in proportion to their population share. According to Brookings, the tool examined Atlanta, which is seen as one of America's Black Meccas, and found that if the population share of Atlanta was matched by Black businesses, its 14,000 Black-owned businesses would become 63,000 Black-owned businesses, a dramatic increase. Similarly, in Detroit, where there are almost 2,800 Black-owned businesses, if that number was adjusted along the lines of Detroit's Black population share, it would result in more than 23,000 Black-owned firms which would create approximately 460,000 jobs for Detroit's metro area, which could contribute to the city's economic recovery from decades of job and population losses. The tool helps prove what a group of researchers asserted in their 2021 analysis of a deadly precondition for Black businesses for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the racial wealth divide, which also affects how Black businesses are invested in and discouraged from scaling up because they don't have the capital necessary to expand their footprints. According to the analysis from Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Dr. Jared Ball, Jamie Buell, and Joshua Devine, 'To produce more personal and community wealth from Black entrepreneurship, public and private sector spending should be intentionally channeled to Black-owned businesses.' Although the findings of their research focus on the pandemic, their findings dovetail with the stated aims of the Black Business Parity Dashboard, which are to give city and community leaders the tools to visualize what a greater and more targeted investment in Black-owned businesses could produce in their metro areas. Indeed, according to a 2024 analysis of the economic impact of Black-owned small businesses by The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, per data from the 2021 Census; 161,031 Black-owned businesses produced $206 billion in revenue, which suggests that if these businesses were quadrupled, which some of the models in the dashboard say would be the case, that revenue number could become even more impressive. As Brookings advised in 2020, the key to unlocking the American economy lies in increasing investments in Black-owned businesses, as they noted, 'the underrepresentation of Black businesses is costing the U.S. economy millions of jobs and billions of dollars in unrealized revenues,' but their prescription for solving that problem then, as the Dashboard makes clear now, is to create parity for the nation's Black-owned businesses. According to Ashleigh Gardere, senior advisor to the president at PolicyLink, solutions for how to address the racial wealth gap can also be applied to Black-owned businesses. 'DBE programs and small business training will never be enough to close the racial wealth gap in America—that's just tinkering at the edges. We need racial equity standards in the private sector: from greater access to capital beyond traditional debt to new and reparative financial products, from private sector business opportunities to narrative change strategies that center and celebrate Black businesses.' RELATED CONTENT: OPINION: Tariffs Are Squeezing Black-Owned Businesses—Here's How We Fix It
CNN
13-04-2025
- Business
- CNN
Analysis: Trump's drive against top universities could carry a big economic cost
President Donald Trump's offensive against elite universities is also an assault on the nation's most economically dynamic metropolitan areas — and a threat to America's global competitiveness. From Boston and Austin to Seattle and Silicon Valley, these elite research universities have served as the catalysts for growth in the nation's most productive regional economies. They have produced a steady stream of scientific breakthroughs and skilled young graduates who flow into companies pursuing cutting-edge technologies in computing, communications, artificial intelligence, medical equipment, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and other advanced industries. 'This is the fundamental economic geography of the high-value, advanced industry system in America,' said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank. 'This is American industrial policy at work.' But now the Trump administration is threatening to stall this economic engine by terminating research grants for major universities, cutting overall federal support for scientific research, and deporting international students over their political activities. 'This is about the well-being of our constituents and it's also about the future of our communities,' Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in an interview. The research grants the Trump administration is rescinding, she said, 'are not on or off switches that affect (only) the current moment or current generation; these are investments in our collective future.' For communities whose economies revolve around major research universities, she said, stopping Trump's moves against them represents 'survival stakes.' Despite some improvement for Trump in the 2024 election, the regions surrounding these big universities voted preponderantly against him last year. So, in targeting elite research universities that conservatives deride as strongholds of 'the woke mind virus,' Trump may believe he is hurting only places already hostile to him. But because these universities are so integrated into their surrounding regions, Trump cannot hurt these campuses without also harming the metro areas leading the country's domestic economic growth. And because those metro areas have become the nation's principal incubators of scientific and technological advances, harming them also harms the nation's international competitiveness, particularly as it faces a mounting challenge from China in critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. In the global competition for 21st-century economic supremacy, Trump's wide-ranging assault on America's top research institutions may come to be seen as a profound act of unilateral disarmament. Collaboration among the government, academia and business to promote scientific and technological advances traces back to the earliest days of American history. But the partnership between the government and universities ascended to a new height during World War II. Under the leadership of Vannevar Bush, a legendary engineer and university administrator, Washington enlisted academic scientists into the war effort to an unprecedented extent (a process that included the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb). A landmark report from Bush in 1945 inspired the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950 to promote basic research in science and engineering. The National Institutes of Health has long provided parallel support for basic medical research. Washington further expanded its role in nurturing basic research after the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957. The big increase in federal support for education and scientific research after Sputnik was the moment when 'universities and government became joined in terms of the future of this society,' said Ira Harkavy, director of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. The fruits of that collaboration included the scientific advances that produced the semiconductor and the internet. In recent decades, basic scientific research conducted at elite universities has become the cornerstone of America's most innovative industries, said Martin Kenney, a professor in the Community and Regional Development Program at the University of California at Davis. Since about 1980, he said, the US 'innovation system' has informally evolved into a three-step process in which new technologies start with basic research at academic institutions; are honed at startup companies funded through venture capital; and ultimately are commercialized at scale once those startups are bought by larger existing companies or taken to the stock market through initial public offerings. 'That was the way the United States decided to compete globally and (to develop) the highest-end technology,' Kenney said. That genealogy is evident in many of the nation's most economically vibrant metropolitan areas. Many cities now benefit from large amounts of direct employment and local purchases from medical and academic institutions — what urban planners call 'meds and eds.' But even greater may be the spinoff economic effects from big scientific and medical institutions. The regions that house the nation's most advanced companies in fields such as biotechnology, computing and artificial intelligence almost all orbit around world-class universities and medical centers, which have generated both scientific breakthroughs and a talent pipeline critical to those industries' growth. Places that have benefited from this dynamic include Boston, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Houston, Los Angeles and the Research Triangle in North Carolina (with three universities each among the top 100 recipients in federal research grants); New York City (with four); and Austin, Seattle and Madison, Wisconsin, each of which is home to its state's flagship public university, also a top 100 grant recipient. A Brookings Metro analysis provided exclusively to CNN found that of the 100 US counties that generate the most economic output, 44 are home to a university that ranks among the top 100 in receiving federal research grants. Forty-one of the 100 counties producing the most economic output also contain at least one or more of the 100 institutions graduating the most PhDs in science and engineering. (Several other top 100 output counties, like San Mateo outside San Francisco and Essex outside Boston, benefit from the economic activity spun off from nearby universities even though they don't house one themselves.) These counties far outpunch their weight in generating economic activity. The 44 high-output counties that house at least one major research university represent less than 1.5% of the nation's roughly 3,100 counties. But they generate nearly 35% of the nation's total economic output, Brookings Metro found. 'People look at the US innovation system as something that is immutable and durable,' Muro said. 'But these are actually delicate ecosystems that have been built up over 50 years. This is one of the great achievements of post-World War II American economic development. And that could be gravely disrupted here.' The explosive growth in Madison and its suburbs show how these pieces fit together. Many of the region's biggest employers trace their products back to research conducted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (which ranks No. 15 as a recipient of federal research grants) and recruit university graduates as workers, said Zach Brandon, president of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce. These include a concentration of companies developing advanced medical treatments and technologies, led by Epic, the huge software company that created the MyChart app and was founded by a University of Wisconsin graduate. The success of these companies, which has made Madison the state's fastest-growing area, demonstrates that 'when you really think about making what's next, inventing the future, that's happening because of research at our world class universities,' Brandon said. On multiple fronts, the Trump administration is now threatening that pipeline from academia to business. It has canceled, suspended or announced reviews into billions of dollars in combined federal grants to seven institutions that rank among the 100 top recipients of government research funds: Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania, with Northwestern and Cornell added to the list last week. The administration has targeted these institutions primarily because of their response to campus protests against the war in Gaza, but also over their policies on racial diversity in admissions, cooperation with immigration enforcement and allowing transgender women to compete in sports. Another 19 universities that rank among the top 100 federal grant recipients were among those notified in a March letter from the Education Department that they faced the possible funding losses over allegations of failing to protect students from antisemitism. Separately, Johns Hopkins University lost $800 million in grants and contracts from the administration's sweeping cuts at the US Agency for International Development, which forced it to dismiss some 2,000 employees. Simultaneously, the administration has slowed the distribution of National Science Foundation grants: One recent analysis found the NSF approved about 50% fewer grants in the first two months of Trump's second term as it did in the equivalent period last year. Last week, the NSF announced it is funding fellowships for only half as many graduate students as it did last year. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the economic implications of its policies toward scientific research and major universities. No Trump policy change has rattled academia more than the National Institutes of Health's February announcement that it is slashing the share of federal research dollars that universities can apply to ongoing overhead costs. Universities have relied on those so-called indirect expenses to build the infrastructure that underpins their scientific research, from constructing labs to hiring support staff. The administration has defended the change as an effort to ensure that more federal dollars flow directly into research rather than ancillary activities. But scientists and university administrators have said the change would force massive cutbacks in research. Earlier this month, a district court judge in Maryland permanently blocked Trump from making the change, but the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority has already overturned several similar lower court rulings. Supporters of university research see another threat: the administration's repeated moves to deport foreign students, including several for political viewpoints they expressed about the Israel-Hamas war. 'If you are a smart kid in India or China, you are going to ask: 'Why am I going to go to the United States?'' Kenney said. These pincer moves have divided academic administrators, with some schools conceding to the administration's demands (such as Columbia) and others pledging to fight them (Princeton). But the implications of these cutbacks will reverberate far beyond campus walls. 'It's not just the university presidents who are nervous; it's going to be the regional economic developers and the regional business leaders who will be extremely concerned about the interruptions that are coming,' Muro said. Brandon, of Madison, is one of those concerned business leaders. He's working to revive an organization of local chambers of commerce to lobby Washington to support federal funding for scientific research. 'The basic research of today is the applied research of tomorrow and is the innovation of the future,' he said. 'If we turn off that tap, sure you could go four years, you can maybe go eight years, but eventually the innovation drought comes.' Wu, the Boston mayor, similarly organized a bipartisan group of 45 local officials to join the lawsuit to block the administration's cuts in indirect costs for NIH grant recipients. Trump's offensive against research universities, she said, 'is different from what has ever happened before, where individual communities and industries are being targeted and punished.' Trump gained ground in 2024 in the nation's most economically productive places, but they still voted heavily against him. According to Brookings Metro, former Vice President Kamala Harris won 40 of the 44 high-output counties that also house at least one top research university. Those 40 counties alone accounted for nearly 40% of Harris' votes nationwide; the four top counties Trump won in that group, by contrast, accounted for only 5% of his votes. Even the domestic political consequences of Trump's moves against major universities, though, may pale beside the international implications. Some scientific and business leaders have described China's striking recent advances in AI technology as a modern equivalent to the Sputnik shock that galvanized the nation in the late 1950s. Yet Trump is responding in exactly the opposite way as the nation did then, when it surged federal support for research and education. 'If we are going to have a 'Sputnik moment' on AI and (related) technologies,' Muro said, 'this does not seem like a winning response.' Trump's escalating war against top-tier American universities and the big blue metros that orbit them might channel his base's antagonism toward 'coastal elites,' but the ultimate winner in this confrontation may be China.
CNN
13-04-2025
- Business
- CNN
Analysis: Trump's drive against top universities could carry a big economic cost
President Donald Trump's offensive against elite universities is also an assault on the nation's most economically dynamic metropolitan areas — and a threat to America's global competitiveness. From Boston and Austin to Seattle and Silicon Valley, these elite research universities have served as the catalysts for growth in the nation's most productive regional economies. They have produced a steady stream of scientific breakthroughs and skilled young graduates who flow into companies pursuing cutting-edge technologies in computing, communications, artificial intelligence, medical equipment, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and other advanced industries. 'This is the fundamental economic geography of the high-value, advanced industry system in America,' said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank. 'This is American industrial policy at work.' But now the Trump administration is threatening to stall this economic engine by terminating research grants for major universities, cutting overall federal support for scientific research, and deporting international students over their political activities. 'This is about the well-being of our constituents and it's also about the future of our communities,' Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in an interview. The research grants the Trump administration is rescinding, she said, 'are not on or off switches that affect (only) the current moment or current generation; these are investments in our collective future.' For communities whose economies revolve around major research universities, she said, stopping Trump's moves against them represents 'survival stakes.' Despite some improvement for Trump in the 2024 election, the regions surrounding these big universities voted preponderantly against him last year. So, in targeting elite research universities that conservatives deride as strongholds of 'the woke mind virus,' Trump may believe he is hurting only places already hostile to him. But because these universities are so integrated into their surrounding regions, Trump cannot hurt these campuses without also harming the metro areas leading the country's domestic economic growth. And because those metro areas have become the nation's principal incubators of scientific and technological advances, harming them also harms the nation's international competitiveness, particularly as it faces a mounting challenge from China in critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. In the global competition for 21st-century economic supremacy, Trump's wide-ranging assault on America's top research institutions may come to be seen as a profound act of unilateral disarmament. Collaboration among the government, academia and business to promote scientific and technological advances traces back to the earliest days of American history. But the partnership between the government and universities ascended to a new height during World War II. Under the leadership of Vannevar Bush, a legendary engineer and university administrator, Washington enlisted academic scientists into the war effort to an unprecedented extent (a process that included the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb). A landmark report from Bush in 1945 inspired the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950 to promote basic research in science and engineering. The National Institutes of Health has long provided parallel support for basic medical research. Washington further expanded its role in nurturing basic research after the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957. The big increase in federal support for education and scientific research after Sputnik was the moment when 'universities and government became joined in terms of the future of this society,' said Ira Harkavy, director of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. The fruits of that collaboration included the scientific advances that produced the semiconductor and the internet. In recent decades, basic scientific research conducted at elite universities has become the cornerstone of America's most innovative industries, said Martin Kenney, a professor in the Community and Regional Development Program at the University of California at Davis. Since about 1980, he said, the US 'innovation system' has informally evolved into a three-step process in which new technologies start with basic research at academic institutions; are honed at startup companies funded through venture capital; and ultimately are commercialized at scale once those startups are bought by larger existing companies or taken to the stock market through initial public offerings. 'That was the way the United States decided to compete globally and (to develop) the highest-end technology,' Kenney said. That genealogy is evident in many of the nation's most economically vibrant metropolitan areas. Many cities now benefit from large amounts of direct employment and local purchases from medical and academic institutions — what urban planners call 'meds and eds.' But even greater may be the spinoff economic effects from big scientific and medical institutions. The regions that house the nation's most advanced companies in fields such as biotechnology, computing and artificial intelligence almost all orbit around world-class universities and medical centers, which have generated both scientific breakthroughs and a talent pipeline critical to those industries' growth. Places that have benefited from this dynamic include Boston, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Houston, Los Angeles and the Research Triangle in North Carolina (with three universities each among the top 100 recipients in federal research grants); New York City (with four); and Austin, Seattle and Madison, Wisconsin, each of which is home to its state's flagship public university, also a top 100 grant recipient. A Brookings Metro analysis provided exclusively to CNN found that of the 100 US counties that generate the most economic output, 44 are home to a university that ranks among the top 100 in receiving federal research grants. Forty-one of the 100 counties producing the most economic output also contain at least one or more of the 100 institutions graduating the most PhDs in science and engineering. (Several other top 100 output counties, like San Mateo outside San Francisco and Essex outside Boston, benefit from the economic activity spun off from nearby universities even though they don't house one themselves.) These counties far outpunch their weight in generating economic activity. The 44 high-output counties that house at least one major research university represent less than 1.5% of the nation's roughly 3,100 counties. But they generate nearly 35% of the nation's total economic output, Brookings Metro found. 'People look at the US innovation system as something that is immutable and durable,' Muro said. 'But these are actually delicate ecosystems that have been built up over 50 years. This is one of the great achievements of post-World War II American economic development. And that could be gravely disrupted here.' The explosive growth in Madison and its suburbs show how these pieces fit together. Many of the region's biggest employers trace their products back to research conducted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (which ranks No. 15 as a recipient of federal research grants) and recruit university graduates as workers, said Zach Brandon, president of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce. These include a concentration of companies developing advanced medical treatments and technologies, led by Epic, the huge software company that created the MyChart app and was founded by a University of Wisconsin graduate. The success of these companies, which has made Madison the state's fastest-growing area, demonstrates that 'when you really think about making what's next, inventing the future, that's happening because of research at our world class universities,' Brandon said. On multiple fronts, the Trump administration is now threatening that pipeline from academia to business. It has canceled, suspended or announced reviews into billions of dollars in combined federal grants to seven institutions that rank among the 100 top recipients of government research funds: Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania, with Northwestern and Cornell added to the list last week. The administration has targeted these institutions primarily because of their response to campus protests against the war in Gaza, but also over their policies on racial diversity in admissions, cooperation with immigration enforcement and allowing transgender women to compete in sports. Another 19 universities that rank among the top 100 federal grant recipients were among those notified in a March letter from the Education Department that they faced the possible funding losses over allegations of failing to protect students from antisemitism. Separately, Johns Hopkins University lost $800 million in grants and contracts from the administration's sweeping cuts at the US Agency for International Development, which forced it to dismiss some 2,000 employees. Simultaneously, the administration has slowed the distribution of National Science Foundation grants: One recent analysis found the NSF approved about 50% fewer grants in the first two months of Trump's second term as it did in the equivalent period last year. Last week, the NSF announced it is funding fellowships for only half as many graduate students as it did last year. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the economic implications of its policies toward scientific research and major universities. No Trump policy change has rattled academia more than the National Institutes of Health's February announcement that it is slashing the share of federal research dollars that universities can apply to ongoing overhead costs. Universities have relied on those so-called indirect expenses to build the infrastructure that underpins their scientific research, from constructing labs to hiring support staff. The administration has defended the change as an effort to ensure that more federal dollars flow directly into research rather than ancillary activities. But scientists and university administrators have said the change would force massive cutbacks in research. Earlier this month, a district court judge in Maryland permanently blocked Trump from making the change, but the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority has already overturned several similar lower court rulings. Supporters of university research see another threat: the administration's repeated moves to deport foreign students, including several for political viewpoints they expressed about the Israel-Hamas war. 'If you are a smart kid in India or China, you are going to ask: 'Why am I going to go to the United States?'' Kenney said. These pincer moves have divided academic administrators, with some schools conceding to the administration's demands (such as Columbia) and others pledging to fight them (Princeton). But the implications of these cutbacks will reverberate far beyond campus walls. 'It's not just the university presidents who are nervous; it's going to be the regional economic developers and the regional business leaders who will be extremely concerned about the interruptions that are coming,' Muro said. Brandon, of Madison, is one of those concerned business leaders. He's working to revive an organization of local chambers of commerce to lobby Washington to support federal funding for scientific research. 'The basic research of today is the applied research of tomorrow and is the innovation of the future,' he said. 'If we turn off that tap, sure you could go four years, you can maybe go eight years, but eventually the innovation drought comes.' Wu, the Boston mayor, similarly organized a bipartisan group of 45 local officials to join the lawsuit to block the administration's cuts in indirect costs for NIH grant recipients. Trump's offensive against research universities, she said, 'is different from what has ever happened before, where individual communities and industries are being targeted and punished.' Trump gained ground in 2024 in the nation's most economically productive places, but they still voted heavily against him. According to Brookings Metro, former Vice President Kamala Harris won 40 of the 44 high-output counties that also house at least one top research university. Those 40 counties alone accounted for nearly 40% of Harris' votes nationwide; the four top counties Trump won in that group, by contrast, accounted for only 5% of his votes. Even the domestic political consequences of Trump's moves against major universities, though, may pale beside the international implications. Some scientific and business leaders have described China's striking recent advances in AI technology as a modern equivalent to the Sputnik shock that galvanized the nation in the late 1950s. Yet Trump is responding in exactly the opposite way as the nation did then, when it surged federal support for research and education. 'If we are going to have a 'Sputnik moment' on AI and (related) technologies,' Muro said, 'this does not seem like a winning response.' Trump's escalating war against top-tier American universities and the big blue metros that orbit them might channel his base's antagonism toward 'coastal elites,' but the ultimate winner in this confrontation may be China.
