For second time, Trump seeks to eliminate federal funding for tribal colleges and universities

For the second year in a row, the Trump administration is proposing slashing federal funding for tribal colleges and universities.

President Donald Trump's fiscal year 2027 budget proposal calls for a $1.5 trillion increase to defense spending and would carve billions of dollars out of programs that fulfill trust and treaty responsibilities to tribal nations, including entirely eliminating funding for the Institute for American Indian Arts, the country’s only federally funded college for contemporary Native American arts.

The budget proposal released last week also calls for cutting funding for TCUs, as well as funding for two schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education: Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico. Students at both colleges sued the BIE last year over funding and staffing cuts made by the administration.

“If this budget was to pass, our TCUs would be forced to close within a year,” said Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which represents the interests of tribal colleges and universities.

Trump's budget proposal also slashes billions of federal dollars in housing, business, and infrastructure grants that benefit Native Americans.

There are about three dozen TCUs operated by tribal nations in the U.S., and they provide education to mostly rural parts of the country, often at a significant discount for tribal citizens. Most of them get the majority of their funding from the federal government. It’s a financial commitment tied to the country’s trust responsibilities and treaty rights owed to tribes.

Last year, Trump also cut funding for TCUs, including several grants at agencies like USDA that support education for tribal citizens. He also cut funding for minority-serving institutions and reallocated some of it to historically Black colleges and Universities and TCUs.

Leaders at tribal colleges said they aren’t expecting those reallocated funds this year.

Rose said that, just like last year, it’s now up to Congress to defend federal funding for TCUs.

“These cuts are unacceptable, and I will fight relentlessly to protect IAIA and secure the federal funding they need,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat from New Mexico and a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said in a statement. “President Trump’s budget proposal to eliminate IAIA’s federal funding is a direct attack on Native communities and yet another example of how the administration is turning its back on Native communities.”