The Trump administration has issued a slew of Executive Orders (EOs) since the start of Donald Trump's second term as president. Many concern higher education and related matters. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is keeping track of them with our new Trump Administration Education Executive Order Tracker, which we will update regularly. Our Tracker also includes written responses by NAS (and sometimes its staff members, writing in outside venues) to these EOs.
Partly we’re keeping track because these EO’s promise enormous change to America’s education policy—and frequently they aim at reforms that NAS has been urging for years or decades. We are delighted to record how much of our own longstanding policy agenda has been taken up by the Trump administration. Of course we also wish to record when we part ways with the Trump administration, and our Tracker includes those instances too. Any reader interested in what education policy may become should look at the Trump Administration’s EOs.
May become. Promise enormous change. The Executive Orders are not themselves policy change. In the first place, virtually every Trump Administration EO has been subject to legal challenge and, frequently, suspension by a federal judge. We cannot tell precisely how many of these EOs will survive through to approval by the Supreme Court. Our Tracker aims to provide information about whether an EO has been suspended by judicial order—although we are not going to track each back-and-forth as an EO wends its way from an individual judge, to a circuit court, to the Supreme Court. When the dust settles, we will include information about how many EOs ended up with judicial approval.
These EOs also tend to be more declarations of intent than detailed regulatory changes in themselves. Frequently they say we will remove “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), we will have reproducibility in science; every federal department will make it so. To which the response must be, Bravo! And now let’s see how this actually gets enforced, given the predictable sabotage from reluctant bureaucrats. We have great confidence that the Trump administration will enforce substantial amounts of what is promised in these EOs—and that (say) a Vance or DeSantis or Rubio administration starting in January 2029 would continue to give substance to these EOs. But we are keeping track of these EOs partly as an aide memoire, so that we and others may say to the Trump administration, how are you doing on putting these EOs into effect?
Then too, an EO can be rescinded by any future administration. NAS has long urged Congress to hard-wire education reform by statute. Our Tracker also should double as a to-do list for Senators and Congressmen: wherever possible, these EOs should be the models for laws. The Trump administration’s EOs have penciled an agenda for education reform; we need laws to engrave that agenda in stone.
The Trump administration’s EOs ultimately matter because they are setting up the next generation of education reform. Not every EO will pass judicial scrutiny; not every EO will survive the vicissitudes of political change. But these EOs give education reformers an agenda that will keep them busy at least until 2050. Our Tracker collates the coming generation’s education reform agenda.
Photo by The White House on Flickr
