How Trump’s Policies Are Reshaping American Universities and Global Science

A new analysis published in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance argues that the second Trump administration’s policies toward American universities constitute damage of a scale and permanence that extends far beyond the campus gates. Luyu Du and Barry Bozeman, both of Arizona State University’s Center for Organization Research and Design, examine the budget cuts, the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, the targeted withdrawal of billions of dollars in federal research grants, and the restrictions placed on foreign students and faculty. Their conclusion is stark: the consequences are considerable, they are already visible, and they reach well beyond U.S. borders, with the U.S.-China relationship serving as the most consequential fault line.

The paper, published on 15 December 2025, arrives amid a documented cascade of federal actions against research universities. Reporting compiled in the study’s source material includes the Trump administration’s pause of roughly 510 million dollars in funding for Brown University, the Department of Energy’s reduction of university overhead reimbursement rates on research grants to 15 percent, and the National Science Foundation’s halt of new funding awards alongside caps on indirect cost rates. Science magazine’s own accounting of the administration’s first hundred days described a chaotic push to remake federal research with lasting consequences, and a Nature editorial framed the moment as an assault on science anywhere being an assault on science everywhere.

Du and Bozeman approach this upheaval with a method they call grounded speculation. Rather than attempting precise prediction, the technique combines empirical extrapolation from existing data, which provides the grounding, with reasoned projections of future trajectories, which provides the speculation. The approach is suited to a situation in which policy changes have outpaced the accumulation of outcome data. By anchoring projections in documented trends, such as enrollment statistics, funding patterns, and scientist mobility, the authors aim to identify plausible long-term consequences of what they term Trumpism for U.S. science and higher education, while also discussing possibilities for rectifying the intense damage they believe has occurred.

The financial architecture of American research universities is central to the analysis. Federal grants have long covered not only direct research costs but also the indirect costs of operating laboratories, maintaining compliance infrastructure, and supporting administration. When the Energy Department cut overhead rates to 15 percent and the NSF followed with its own caps, universities faced immediate shortfalls that could not be absorbed without cutting research programs, staff, or graduate student support. Compounding the pressure, the administration has pursued institutions directly, with funding pauses used against specific universities and, in the case of Harvard, threats to tax-exempt status that analysts estimated could cost the institution billions of dollars.

The erosion of the U.S. Department of Education adds a structural dimension to the fiscal shock. The department administers student aid, enforces civil rights protections, and coordinates federal higher education policy. Its evisceration, as the authors describe it, removes institutional capacity precisely when universities need stable federal counterparts to negotiate the disruption of grants, visas, and compliance demands. The study situates these moves within a longer history of the fragile contract between university science and the federal government, a partnership that since the Second World War has made American universities the backbone of the world’s dominant scientific enterprise.

International students sit at the center of the paper’s concern, and the data on their retreat from the United States is sobering. Studyportals reported in 2025 that international student interest in studying in the U.S. had fallen to its lowest level since the mid-pandemic period. NAFSA, the association of international educators, projected a declining fall 2025 international enrollment outlook with significant economic consequences. Earlier research on the first Trump administration had already documented a measurable Trump effect, in which political shocks depressed international student flows, and the second administration’s travel bans, visa restrictions, and proclamations targeting foreign students have intensified that dynamic. The American Council on Education characterized the combination of travel restrictions and the Harvard proclamation as an escalating assault on international student access.

The U.S.-China dimension receives particular attention because of what is at stake scientifically and economically. Chinese students and scholars have long been a pillar of American STEM research, and National Science Foundation data show that most early-career U.S.-trained science and engineering doctorate recipients who held temporary visas at graduation stayed and worked in the United States afterward. Declining numbers of Chinese nationals entering the U.S. as students, faculty, and in many cases immigrants therefore translate directly into reduced American science capacity and innovation. Meanwhile, China has built aggressive talent recruitment programs, including the Young Thousand Talents program, which a study in Science found successful in recruiting and nurturing top-caliber scientists, and Chinese institutions are actively courting researchers discouraged by the American climate.

The chilling effects extend to scientists already in the United States. A Nature poll reported that 75 percent of U.S. scientists who responded were considering leaving the country. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documented fears among Chinese American scientists caught in the crossfire of geopolitical tensions, a legacy sharpened by the Justice Department’s China Initiative, which an MIT Technology Review data analysis found to be a flawed prosecution effort whose shadow, as Nature reported, still looms large for U.S. scientists. Stanford researchers have documented a reverse brain drain among Chinese scientists in the U.S., and reporting in The New York Times noted that China’s efforts to attract talented scientists have been helped by American visa policies. A study in the Journal of Informetrics has called for halting the ongoing decoupling of U.S.-China scientific collaboration, warning that the loss of joint research damages both nations and global science.

The long-term projections that emerge from the grounded speculation exercise are grim for American competitiveness. The National Science Board has warned that talent is the treasure, and the National Academies have examined how international talent programs in a changing global environment are redistributing scientific human capital. If the United States continues to restrict the inflow of foreign students and researchers while cutting the grant funding that sustains research teams, the cumulative effect is a weakening of the very system that produced American scientific dominance. Science has documented partisan disparities in the funding of science, and the increasing dominance of teams in knowledge production means that fragmentation of the research workforce carries compounding costs. The authors also note the domestic toll: universities facing simultaneous funding cuts, enrollment declines, and political pressure on governance, including White House meetings with university leaders over proposed compacts tied to funding.

Du and Bozeman close by turning to repair. They discuss possibilities for rectifying the intense damage, drawing on Bozeman’s prior work on planning for the restoration of science policy. The task, as they frame it, is not merely to reverse individual cuts but to rebuild the talent pipelines, funding structures, and international openness on which American universities and the global scientific enterprise depend. Whether restoration is possible depends on recognizing, as their title insists, that the implications are both domestic and international: the world’s science superpower status, as Nature asked, may not hold for long if the policies persist. For researchers, students, and policymakers watching the trajectory, the paper offers a framework for measuring the damage and a reminder that the costs of Trumpism for universities will be counted in decades, not news cycles.

Subject of Research: Impacts of Trump administration policies on U.S. research universities and international science talent flows

Article Title: Trump’s destruction of U.S. universities: domestic and international implications

Article References: Du, L., & Bozeman, B. (2025). Trump’s destruction of U.S. universities: domestic and international implications. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 380-392. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00136-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00136-6

Keywords: Trump administration, U.S. universities, research funding, international students, U.S.-China relations, science policy, higher education, brain drain, federal grants, Chinese scientists, Department of Education, global science