The Impact of State and Federal Policies on Academic Researchers

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Ithaka S+R The Impact of State and Federal Policies on Academic Researchers
Findings from a National Survey Dylan Ruediger, Chelsea McCracken, Jonathan Barefield

In open-ended comments left by 663 survey respondents, concerns about the state of academic freedom within the research enterprise were a common theme. Recent federal policies, noted one, are “beyond perilous for the system of higher education, and will have a far-reaching impact on the quality of life in the US and the world.” Another described their state government as working aggressively to limit academic freedom and institutional autonomy. While a few respondents noted that they agreed with the premise of divisive concepts or anti-DEI legislation or felt that this type of legislation had improved academic freedom, we heard most often from those who expressed concern that the future was bleak. “The collective institutional research capacity of the United States is in free-fall,” said one respondent, “we are losing our leadership position in the world.”

Key findings: 

• State and federal policies targeting divisive concepts or DEI are shaping research agendas at scale and across disciplines. Twenty percent of all respondents, and 29 percent of researchers working in states with divisive concepts or similar laws, reported having avoided certain research topics because of state laws and policies.
• Eight percent of respondents representing a wide range of disciplines reported having had a federal grant cancelled in 2025.
• Eleven percent of respondents reported that federal and state policies restricting research activities are compelling them to seek employment out of state, to leave the academy, or to look for academic positions overseas.
• Researchers, particularly those at doctoral institutions and those employed in states with divisive concepts legislation, report concerns about whether university presidents and, especially, boards are willing to advocate for their academic freedom as researchers.

Lobbying on Iran and Venezuela

Many posts have discussed lobbying, "shadow lobbying," "unlobbying," and "non-lobbying lobbying."

Daniel Barnes at POLITICO:

LOBBYING ON THE FRONT LINES: The Trump administration’s military actions in Iran and Venezuela sparked lobbying activity from 54 companies and organizations in the first quarter of 2026, collectively spending $13.3 million, an analysis of lobbying disclosure data by our colleagues Paroma Soni and Catherine Allen found. Most of these came from political advocacy-focused groups or the energy industry.

— The biggest private sector represented was, unsurprisingly, oil and gas. Chevron spent $1.6 million on all lobbying activity in Q1 and listed sanctions on Venezuela and energy access as specific lobbying issues. Shell, which spent $1.4 million, lobbied to advance its role in the commercial development of natural gas in one of Venezuela’s largest offshore gas fields. BP lobbied on the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which handles sanctions for Venezuelan energy activity and Iran-linked projects such as the Shah Deniz gas corridor.
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— Several advocacy groups also lobbied on pending legislation related to Iran and Venezuela, particularly on the congressional war powers resolutions to disapprove of military action. They ranged from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Quaker-aligned Friends Committee on National Legislation to the American Federation of Teachers. The pro-Israel group American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbied on increased sanctions against Iran and U.S. military assistance to Israel, as did the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street group.

Threats to Econ Stats

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.

David S. Johnson at Brookings:

Since the founding of the country, the nation’s economic statistical system has produced timely, accurate, and relevant statistics that are used by policymakers and the public to make critical decisions. However, in recent years, the nation’s economic statistical agencies have been increasingly threatened by political and technical challenges. Having dealt with continually falling budgets, staff shortages, and increasing pressures to modernize their statistical infrastructure, these agencies are now experiencing a period of unprecedented staff reductions, budget cuts, and criticisms of their statistical credibility. This social and political environment has put federal statistical agencies into a state of crisis, furthering distrust of government statistics among the American people and reducing the availability of statistics on various aspects of the nation’s economy, people, and well-being.

The specific threats to the Federal Statistical System (FSS) can be placed into two broad categories. First, some threats are internal within the FSS, including declining survey response rates, changing technology, and the use of blended data. Second, other threats arise from external factors or political structures, including declining public trust, political interference, falling agency budgets, and staffing limits.

This paper provides an overview of internal and external threats and suggests a key mechanism for how agencies can survive in this challenging climate: keeping the staff motivated. After reviewing the structure of the FSS and headline economic indicators (or Principal Federal Economic Indicators), the paper focuses on the internal threats of falling response rates and difficulties in innovation and the external threats of decreasing budgets, staff, trust, and increasing political interference. This analysis shows that falling response rates are a concern if they bias the statistics, demonstrates the challenges faced by agencies in modernizing their statistics, highlights the recent reductions in staff, and discusses the implications of decreasing financial resources over the past 15 years. The conclusion examines whether attempts to limit the independence of the agencies could harm the statistics.

Download the full report

Declining Desire to Move to the US

Many.posts have dealt with international views of the United States.  They have taken a negative turn.

 Julie Ray and Anita Pugliese at Gallup:

The U.S. remains the most desired destination for people who would like to leave their own countries permanently, but Gallup's latest data show it is less attractive than it once was.

In 2025, 15% of adults worldwide who say they would like to move permanently to another country name the U.S. as their preferred destination, the lowest level recorded in nearly two decades of Gallup research. From 2007 to 2009, 24% of would-be migrants named the U.S. as their top choice, and that figure remained near 20% through 2016. Since 2017, it has been at or below 18%.

The rank order of the countries attracting the most interest from potential migrants has seen little change since Gallup’s first measure. Canada ranks second, as it has for several years, with 9% of potential migrants mentioning the U.S. neighbor. The appeal of these desired destinations did not change in 2025, even as the U.S. became less desirable.

 

Federal Boards and Commissions: the Partisanship Issue

Many posts have discussed regulation and the administrative state. 

Chris Piper at the Partnership for Public Service:

Since returning to office, Trump has systematically targeted Democratic members of partisan-balanced boards and commissions. Now, nearly 40% of partisan-balanced boards and commissions have no Democratic members at all. This represents a rapid and historically unprecedented shift in the composition of bodies Congress designed to operate with bipartisan representation.

Of the 33 full-time boards and commissions, 23 include some form of partisan balancing requirement, typically limiting any one party to a bare majority of seats.

Partisan balancing requirements were designed not just to ensure representation, but to force internal contestation—replacing unilateral decision-making with structured disagreement and consensus building. Beyond cross-partisan deliberation, Congress has viewed partisan balancing as an “important restraint on the President from filling every commission seat with Administration partisans.”

In practice, presidents of both parties have historically maintained opposition-party representation, replacing members gradually as terms expired and often renominating incumbents. The Senate reinforced this practice through a long-standing norm of considering nominees to boards and commissions in bipartisan pairs. For example, through 2020, roughly 90% of Federal Election Commission members were confirmed this way.

Trump has abandoned these norms entirely. Since returning to office, he has fired or attempted to fire 16 Democratic members across 11 partisan-balanced boards and commissions while declining to nominate Democratic replacements. Over the same period, 12 new Republican members have been confirmed and zero Democrats.

Trust in HIgher Education

Elite academia leans heavily to the left.

Report of the Yale Committee  on Trust in Higher Education

 It should come as no surprise that trust in higher education has fallen most among those Americans who identify as Republican or conservative. According to Gallup, the percentage of self-identified Republicans who expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education declined from 56 percent in 2015 to 26 percent in 2025, while confidence among Democrats fell more modestly, from 68 to 61 percent.42 In one national survey, only 19 percent of Republicans expressed “quite a lot” of confidence that the nation’s leading research universities “teach students neutrally and without political bias.”43 

The complaint that colleges and universities lean left is hardly new. William F. Buckley, Jr., made much the same case about Yale in 1951.44 Yet something distinctive has happened in recent decades. In 1989 approximately 40 percent of the nation’s faculty identified as liberal, 40 percent as moderate, and 20 percent as conservative. By 2014, those numbers had shifted to 60 percent liberal, 30 percent moderate, and 10 percent conservative.45 Of course it is not just the faculty that has changed. The political system has changed too. Fifty years ago, the Democratic and Republican parties were less ideologically divided than they are today. As the parties resorted, so did the partisan preferences of many professions, including within higher education. 

42 Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Confidence in Higher Education Now Closely Divided,” Gallup, July 8, 2024; Jones, “U.S. Public Trust in Higher Ed Rises From Recent Low.” 43 Ken Goldstein, “Yale public opinion studies: September 2025 national, state, and local studies,” presentation, November 19, 2025. 44 William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Regnery, 1951). 45 Samuel J. Abrams, “Mind the Professors,” The American Interest, March 10, 2017. 

The Shadow Docket's Origin Story

Many posts have discussed the judiciary.

  Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak at NYT:

Just after 6 p.m. on a February evening in 2016, the Supreme Court issued a cryptic, one paragraph ruling that sent both climate policy and the court itself spinning in new directions.

For two centuries, the court had generally handled major cases at a stately pace that encouraged care and deliberation, relying on written briefs, oral arguments and in-person discussions. The justices composed detailed opinions that explained their thinking to the public and rendered judgment only after other courts had weighed in.

But this time, the justices were sprinting to block a major presidential initiative. By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning.

At the time, the ruling seemed like a curious one-off. But that single paragraph turned out to be a sharp and lasting break. That night marks the birth, many legal experts believe, of the court’s modern “shadow docket,” the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power.

Since that night a decade ago, the logic behind the Supreme Court’s pivotal 2016 order has remained a mystery. Why did a majority of the justices bypass time-tested procedures and opt for a new way of doing business?

The answer would remain secret for generations, legal experts predicted. “We’ll never know (at least, until our grandkids can read the justices’ internal papers from that time period),” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, wrote in a newsletter in February marking the anniversary of the order.

The New York Times has obtained those papers and is now publishing them, bringing the origins of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket into the light.

The 16 pages of memos, exchanged in a five-day dash, provide an extraordinarily rare window into the court, showing how the justices talk to one another outside of public view.