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Let’s begin with a kind of riddle. Last year, faced with attacks from the Trump administration, Columbia gave way, but Harvard resisted, and even achieved notable courtroom successes. Yet Yale chooses today to bow. How can one explain such a striking contrast?
The answer lies in a massively consequential regulation proposed by the Office of Management and Budget .
What is it about?
It is a little-known text to the general public, but it concerns the deepest overhaul since its creation in 2013 of the framework governing all federal funding: the “Uniform Guidance.”
The Trump administration turned a simple guide into a binding regulation, applicable across all agencies.
Moreover, it requires that nearly all federal grants, which until now were awarded on the basis of scientific merit, be subjected to a “pre-award review” and to the approval of “senior” political officials tasked with ensuring that these grants “advance the President’s political priorities in a demonstrable manner.”
The text even specifies that the recommendations of peer evaluators “remain consultative” and should not be “routinely endorsed.”
Is this an attempt to bring university research to heel under the administration?
Absolutely. concretely, this regulation equips the Trump administration with discretionary power to cut federal funding wherever and however it wishes. It authorizes it to take hostage every federal grant to any university. Here is the new reality: it is not Yale that has changed in twelve months, it is the weapon aimed at the American University that has changed in character.
A note for European readers: the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is a White House office, whose main mission is to assist the President of the United States in drawing up the budget. How can a technical body preside over this revolution in the organization of American science?
That is the heart of the matter. The scientific research conducted at universities has sustained American dominance in technological, scientific, medical, military, and economic fields since World War II, when the federal government began to fund much of the sciences.
But the support rested on a firm principle: the distribution of funds had to be decided by disinterested experts, qualified to assess the merits of scientific and technological proposals.
In a single monstrous gesture, the OMB-proposed regulation aims to overturn this fundamental principle. Federal funding would be suspended above the heads of university administrators like a Damoclean sword, threatening to decapitate research at any university bold enough to resist the administration’s demands.
To characterize this unprecedented centralization of presidential power, you even go so far as to invoke Stalin and his relationship with science, in a piece you recently published in Slate . Isn’t this comparison excessive?
No, it is correct in principle. Like Joseph Stalin in the former Soviet Union, the Trump administration asserts the right to exercise direct political control over scientific research.
Stalin’s totalitarian grip was catastrophic for Soviet science, and we can expect consequences no less massive and devastating from Trump’s effort to bring universities to heel.
Which consequences?
One first effect, easily foreseeable, will be to slow American scientific and technological development.
But there is a second, equally essential effect: to subject American research universities to the administration’s domination. No university can afford to ignore how this administration will exercise its discretion, sinister and openly political, to steer the flow of scientific grants.
Let’s trace the sources of this offensive. According to you, the Kratsios report on Trumpist science, which has just appeared, is a founding text. It is a speech by J.D. Vance warning “universities are the enemy”…
In 2021, seeking to redefine the conservative movement, J. D. Vance declared war on American higher education institutions.
Before the National Conservatism Conference, he asserted that universities taught “progressive orthodoxies” based on “deception and falsehood,” and that conservatives should therefore “attack honestly and aggressively the universities of this country.”
He also added: “We hand our children over to our enemies, and it is time to stop doing so.”
The new Trump administration is systematically pursuing this agenda: by using the substantial federal funding for research as leverage, one of Trump’s first acts upon returning to power was to press universities to stop teaching progressive ideas and adopt conservative viewpoints.
What has been the Trump administration’s strategy since taking power?
Last year, the favored tactic was to use accusations of antisemitism to justify sweeping budget cuts, unless universities accepted conditions that bore little or no relation to the initial claims.
The administration now appears to have shifted approach. It accuses Yale of granting preferential admission to Black and Hispanic applicants, which would amount to a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race by institutions receiving federal funds.
These accusations are legally weak and, under normal circumstances, they would be challenged in court without hesitation. What is certain is that the administration was seeking a legal tool commensurate with its ambition. Yale fears it has finally found one.
Could you return to this legal point to spell out its political scope?
The administration assesses compliance with Title VI using a memorandum from former Attorney General Pam Bondi, dated July 29, 2025, which claims to apply the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended affirmative action in 2023. Or, this memorandum directly contradicts the ruling it cites.
It even offers an extreme interpretation. Directly contradicting Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in this case, it would bar universities from considering essays in which applicants describe obstacles they have overcome, on the notable ground that such essays could become a “substitute” for “protected characteristics.” Roberts had explicitly preserved this possibility. The memorandum is so full of vague and uncertain criteria that it could easily serve as a lever to sow trouble in Yale’s undergraduate, medical, and law school admissions.
According to circulating information, Yale would be ready to grant the Department of Justice oversight of admissions to its college, to its medical school and to its law school. The latter is where J. D. Vance was trained…
Yes, this is what leads me to speak of terror. The university’s willingness to risk the crown jewels says much about the frightening power of the OMB rule. The rule simply facilitates extortion, plain and simple. I am not privy to the secrets of Yale’s administrators and trustees. But I would bet a sizeable sum that the rule’s potentially devastating impact is what motivates their highly controversial decision to negotiate with the Trump administration.
Is the threat of withdrawal of federal funding enough to compel institutions to bow?
The question of how Yale School of Medicine can survive in its current form without federal research funding is, for example, already being raised.
It is no accident that Yale has taken the remarkable step of bringing in the law firm McGuireWoods, which played a controversial role in negotiations with the administration when the highly respected president of the University of Virginia, James Ryan, was summarily dismissed.
Yale President Maurie McInnis wrote to the university community that negotiating with the Department of Justice over Title VI allegations fell under “ordinary practice” . Do you grant her that?
McInnis is wrong. There is nothing “ordinary” in what the Trump administration is doing right now.
Trump leads an administration that has demonstrated a willingness to use federal subsidies as leverage to reshape the very nature of American universities. He heads an administration that acts regularly with little regard for legal procedures.
Unlike any previous president, he leads an administration that threatens to impose sanctions and suffering far beyond what the law prescribes, or even allows. The president’s email was meant to give the impression that nothing unusual was happening. Yet, it is precisely the exceptional that is becoming the rule.
If Yale yields, who will be able to resist?
This is the core question, and it goes far beyond Yale.
If powerful Yale, with its vast resources, is so afraid of the OMB regulation that it cannot find the courage to resist legally weak charges, what hope remains for an ordinary research university?
If Yale compromises, the stain on its honor will not merely originate from its own tolerance of intimidation tactics; it will also derive from having unleashed this administrative wolf upon the entire American research community.
From Europe’s viewpoint, the silence and the numbness with which such brutal and violent attempts to bring things to heel are met are stunning. How do you explain them?
Americans should vigorously oppose it, not only in court but also in Congress and in the political arena. We must explain to them the extreme folly of a rule that promises to throw sand in the gears of technological and scientific research, while that very research has proven to be a driver of American prosperity since 1945.
Yet I note that there has been surprisingly little resistance to the administration’s attacks on science, knowledge, and universities. The United States has become a tribal nation, in which one camp seems determined to win, even at the cost of shrinking essential national resources such as the technical and administrative capacities needed to promote health, forecast the climate, or generate knowledge.
Universities have long assumed the essential importance of their mission to the point that they have completely lost the capacity—and perhaps the will—to reach out to a nation beset by turmoil and confusion in order to illuminate public opinion.
What could European scientific authorities do in this context?
First of all, this is an American problem. Only Americans can solve it. At most, I can urge my European colleagues to show patience and understand that many Americans, indeed most of them, oppose Trump and his atrocious policies.
Ultimately, it is up to us, Americans, to put an end to this national nightmare, and we will. That will be followed by a long period during which trust must be rebuilt. At that moment, the compassion and support of the international community will be essential.
In the face of rhetoric about a “new golden age,” isn’t the Trumpist culture war already undermining the foundations of American power, while scientific rivalry with China remains intense?
Yes, we must ask whether the Trump administration is determined to win its culture war against American higher education to the point of accepting, for that price, the decline of American influence.
And the question that follows is one for the entire country: is there enough real national pride left in the American people to stand up to such a self-destructive agenda?