Trump’s EO returns to taxpayers power over the universities they fund

President Trump’s executive order improving free inquiry and financial accountability at federally funded colleges has been met with a supremely lazy, yet predictable, straw man.

Conservatives would no doubt be up in arms if the federal government were targeting actual private entities, especially through an executive order. But given the exorbitant amount of federal funding received by universities, taxpayers are stakeholders in the overwhelming majority of college campuses. And like it or not, Congress has handed over its authority to the executive branch in this matter. Although it still employs the power of the purse in authorizing funds, it is the executive agencies and departments, all under the authority of the president, that allocate federal funding. Consider, for example, how former President Barack Obama threatened the funding of colleges that failed to find guilty a sufficient share of accused sexual assailants.

Wu’s argument ignores both how the executive order is outlined and the financial stake that every federal taxpayer has in American universities.

The executive order includes two main components: tying federal research funding to “free inquiry” and mandating more transparency for university finances. While the latter ought to receive more plaudits from the public for getting universities to put more skin in the game of tuition increases, it’s the former that’s become a lightning rod for left-wing ire.

The executive order is still light on explanation of enforcement, but its underlying theses are simple: So long as universities, public and private alike, rely on taxpayers for research funding, they ought to be accountable to the hand that feeds them. The executive order then requires public universities to enforce the First Amendment and private schools to comply with “stated institutional policies regarding freedom of speech” in order to receive federal research funding.

For all the hand-wringing from nervous liberals, the executive order may not actually do much in practice, and even if its maximally enforced, public schools are already legally obligated to apply the First Amendment, and private schools can still evade punishment by rewriting their own speech codes. All the executive order asks of them is to keep to their own rules.

But at least they can no longer lie, and that’s actually a pretty big change.

The more important question, especially for conservatives, is whether this sets a precedent of further expansion of the already overbearing federal reach. If this were a straight mandate that didn’t use federal funding as an incentive, perhaps it would be. But as Grant Addison explains in detail in the latest issue of the Washington Examiner magazine, the free inquiry component of the executive order is “both statutorily justifiable and consistent with the grant-making purpose”:

Conservatives would hardly be okay with the executive branch imposing on those institutions in an unprecedented manner. But this executive order doesn’t defy legal precedent, nor does it give the government a new domain to control. It merely fulfills rules already in place.

The real lesson that livid liberals ought to take from this order is one that conservatives have wailed about for years: any time the public funds something, the government has a say over it. This reality doesn’t become any more or less egregious depending on who’s in power; it’s just that you only realize it when you’re out of power. The true moral of this story should be that taxpayers ought to leave the business of funding increasingly corrupt colleges altogether. Until then, why shouldn’t the president use existing precedent to hold universities to their own rules?