Trump proposes 90% cut to funding of tribal colleges
Trump proposes 90% cut to funding of tribal colleges
“I’m shivering in my boots. This would basically be a knife in the chest. It’s a dagger, and I don’t know how we can
survive these types of cuts.” – Manoj Patil, president of Little Priest Tribal College (Winnebago, Nebraska), responding to the Bureau of Indian Education’s request to the United States Congress to cut support for Tribal Colleges and Universities by 90%.
Dr Twyla Baker, president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in northwest North Dakota, and the more than 30 other Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) presidents, lie awake at night – because of the numbers on page three of the Bureau of Indian Education’s (BIE) budget for the US government’s fiscal year beginning 1 October (FY2026).
The BIE is the agency tasked with “provid[ing] quality education opportunities from early childhood through life in accordance with a tribe’s needs for cultural and economic well-being” and for fulfilling part of the nation’s treaty obligations with sovereign tribes.
For FY2026, it has asked Congress to cut funding for TCUs, which it largely funds, from US$127.4 million to US$22.1 million – a reduction of 90%.
“Several of our institutions went into this fiscal year (FY2025) with very thin budgets and are working on a shoestring as we speak,” Baker, a citizen of the Hidatsa & Nu’Eta tribes, told University World News. “Going forward, if we have to cut more, we’re losing programmes. We are probably already losing students. Schools will have to close their doors.
“My institution has built an endowment of US$5 million to insulate ourselves for at least a short while. But, if these cuts go through, we are looking at serious decisions in perhaps one-and-a-half to two years.”
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