Trump Signs Executive Order Tying Grant Money to Free Speech

It’s yet unclear how the order will be implemented and whether it will be used to cut off research funding to institutions found lacking in their free speech protections. Trump had announced the possibility of such an action in a speech on March 2. 

See “Trump Threatens to Cut Federal Research Funding Over Free Speech”

To critics, the new policy appears to be a solution in search of a problem. “Public universities are already bound by the First Amendment and work each day to defend and honor it,” says Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, in a statement, calling the order “plainly unnecessary” and a “very concerning federal overreach.”

Because of the President’s language in the statement and in his speeches and tweets, the measure appears politically motivated. “It reads to me more like a declaration and a message to some parts of the voting population than an actual regulatory or legal change,” Sigal Ben-Porath, a political philosopher at the University of Pennsylvania, tells Nature. Also, because the President has referenced incidents at the University of California, Berkeley, involving conservative activists, it looks like what “the administration is trying to protect is not, in fact, free inquiry, but the enhancement of conservative voices,” she says.

Ultimately, the courts may determine the order’s fate, reports Nature. However, without clear guidelines from the government on what it means to protect free speech and the consequences for institutions that do not, it will be hard for anyone to sue the Trump administration over this policy, Frederick Hess, American Enterprise Institute’s director of education-policy studies, tells Nature.