After Federal Grant Losses, HBCUs Put Hope in Executive Order

Earlier this month, Morgan State University was gearing up to host a group of local K-12 students at the campus’s engineering school. The field trip was part of a series of programs intended to expose underrepresented students to STEM careers, funded by a roughly $450,000 contract with the U.S. Navy. Students planned to tour the historically Black university’s artificial intelligence and cybersecurity labs.

But then the university’s president, David K. Wilson, found out the Department of Defense had terminated the contract. As a result, the trip was canceled.

Stunned, Wilson said, his “fatherly instincts took over.” He declared the April 16 trip back on and said he would personally shell out the several thousand dollars it would take to bring the 80 students to campus.

“I just decided that this had to happen,” he said. “There was no way on God’s green earth that Morgan State University was going to deny these inquiring minds, these future innovators, possibly future engineers, an opportunity to find out what those disciplines were all about.”

HBCUs like Morgan State find themselves in a precarious position as federal agencies slash grants and contracts they associate with diversity, equity and inclusion to comply with President Trump’s anti-DEI directives. Some have lost federal funds in Trump’s first 100 days while others are trimming already lean budgets and launching fundraising campaigns to prepare for the worst.

HBCU leaders hope that the executive order Trump signed Wednesday to “promote excellence and innovation” at HBCUs and re-establish a White House initiative supporting them signals better times ahead for the institutions. Many can ill afford a financial hit.

While all kinds of higher ed institutions are facing federal grant cuts, the losses have greater potential for harm at HBCUs, some advocates say.

“That money has to be replaced through some other stream, which is difficult when you’re dealing with fewer resources from the beginning—some of that due to the historic underfunding of HBCUs and some of it because you are an institution that historically was founded on educating those whose educational opportunities are least,” said Terrell Strayhorn, director of the Center for the Study of HBCUs at Virginia Union University.

Though Wilson was able to save the field trip, he can’t cover all of Morgan State’s federal funding losses out of his own pocket—or the university’s coffers.

The research university—likely poised to achieve R-1, or very high research, status in the next Carnegie Classification cycle—has had 17 federal grants suspended or terminated since Trump’s anti-DEI directives were announced. Wilson said the total value of those grants equals about $13 million, though much of the money has already been spent, so the university stands to lose closer to $5 million. Officials are disputing one of the grants pulled from its Center for Equitable Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems; Wilson believes the word “equitable” is what likely triggered the termination, but he insists the center is really about creating “trustworthy” AI that draws on real research studies to deliver information.

“I’m hopeful that the reviewers will come to the same conclusion as we that this is the type of research that will really, really aid DOD in its mission,” Wilson said.

What’s at Stake

Some of the grants lost provided HBCUs with valuable supports and experiential learning opportunities for students, while others supported research, including on racial disparities.

Florida A&M University, for example, has received an annual grant from the National Institutes of Health for the last 40 years. The money has gone primarily to the university’s pharmacy school and its Research Centers in Minority Institutions program to build up research infrastructure on campus. But the federal agency abruptly terminated the $16.3 million grant on March 21, effective immediately, explaining that the “award no longer effectuates agency priorities” and is linked to DEI, according to Seth Ablordeppey, interim dean of FAMU’s College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Institute of Public Health. The university is appealing the grant revocation.

The loss hit the institution hard. Ablordeppey said the labs that lost support were doing “standard research, innovative research,” with a focus on a type of breast cancer that tends to be more prevalent in minority communities.

“To say that the National Institutes of Health is no longer interested in breast cancer or pancreatic cancer just beats my mind … DEI is not something we do here. We are open to anybody who wants to come here,” he said, noting that non-Black students attend HBCUs as well. He argued that “precision medicine,” which takes different kinds of health disparities into account, is also important to the pharmaceutical field.

Ablordeppey fears the university won’t be able to afford the lab equipment graduate students use for their research, interfering with their academic trajectories. He also worries faculty members whose research relied on the federal money might leave the institution. He believes no fundraising effort could replace the amount lost.

“Our programs will suffer significantly as a result of this,” he said.

Strayhorn said it’s too early to fully assess how much funding has been cut or paused, or the ripple effects on HBCUs, but federal funding losses could easily “translate into staff cuts and compensation recalculation and furloughing of personnel,” responsible for everything from academic advising to career services, which will hurt students. He added that federal grants often fund student research opportunities and other forms of experiential learning that would otherwise be inaccessible to many students.

“Some people come out of high school and they’ve been exposed to the most complex microscopes. They already have had some sort of research experience,” he said. “That’s not always the case for students who come to historically Black colleges, who come to college looking for those opportunities.”

He also believes federal funding losses—especially if paired with the possible demise of the Department of Education—could pose “existential threats” to some of the smaller, less resourced HBCUs.

HBCUs could hardly survive the kinds of funding blows that Ivy League institutions like Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University have sustained under the Trump administration, which has cut them off from hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions, in federal contracts and grants, said Harry Williams, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents public HBCUs.

Harvard—which has resisted federal demands and sued the government in response—and other institutions with sizable endowments can afford to “take a real hard stance” and launch a “public fight” over suspended funding, Williams said. But if an HBCU faced a federal funding loss of a similar size, “it would be devastating to our institutions, and it would be devastating to the country, too, because the students that we’re serving are students who are underserved, who are seeking access and who are moving their families and their communities to a higher level and creating a middle class.”

For wealthier institutions, “the reality is they will weather it, and they will be fine,” he added. “We can’t afford a hit like that.”

A ‘Step in the Right Direction’

But Williams and other HBCU advocates are hopeful that Trump’s new executive order, which pledges to continue the White House Initiative on HBCUs and a President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs, is a positive sign that the administration ultimately supports them and sees their value.

The initiative, housed in the executive office of the president, will focus on fostering public-private partnerships that support HBCUs, upgrading HBCU infrastructure and implementing the HBCU PARTNERS Act, signed by Trump in 2020, which requires some federal agencies to submit plans for how they’ll make grant programs more accessible to HBCUs, according to the order.

Williams described the executive order as “a major step in the right direction.”

Lodriguez Murray, senior vice president of public policy and government affairs at the United Negro College Fund, which represents private HBCUs, said every president since Jimmy Carter has signed a similar executive order. But he believes the message is particularly powerful right now because it signals to federal agencies and federal and state lawmakers that the administration doesn’t view HBCUs and DEI as interchangeable.

The order is “stating support for HBCUs … at a time when the institutions could wrongfully be confused with DEI,” Murray said. “Making sure that there’s a distinction, and making sure that support is reaffirmed, for us, is the important thing.”

He noted that some HBCUs have had grants pulled because of “overzealous bureaucrats who mistakenly believe that HBCUs are DEI, and DEI are HBCUs” but he’s hopeful the executive order will serve as a correction to them and other lawmakers. He also hopes the president’s budget directs more federal dollars to HBCUs.

Williams emphasized that some grants to HBCUs that were previously frozen have been reinstated, adding to his sense of hope. He highlighted that the Trump administration initially suspended the 1890s Scholars program, a federal scholarship program for agriculture students at historically Black land-grant institutions, but reinstated it within weeks. So, he encourages institutions to think of pulled grants as on “pause,” not permanently lost.

“We work with both sides, and we have an open dialogue with the administration,” he said. “And keeping that dialogue open is very important so that we can make calls when things occur, and we can get access to the people who are in the decision-making chain of command.” It’s important that “we are talking [to each other] and people are listening and they’re responding.”