The Republican takeover of Washington was advertised as a solution to quell the turmoil in college sports by lassoing the “Wild West” of NIL with federal legislation and ending the existential risk of college athletes gaining employee status.
Indeed, for all its fervor in the dismantling of established systems, MAGA Republicanism has shown an increasingly conservative bent when it comes to the post-NIL future of college sports.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the newly minted chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, has repeatedly warned that the mounting “uncertainty” surrounding intercollegiate athletics has put the future of the entire system at risk. Similar points have been made by other GOPers, including Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), the former University of Miami football player who now chairs the House higher education subcommittee, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), the former college football coach.
Though Republicans have not necessarily taken kindly to the NCAA in the past, their rhetoric of stability is in line with that of the association and the college sports interests it represents. Last week, in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, NCAA president Charlie Baker applauded it for creating a “clear, national standard.”
However, while that order may have brought some clarity, it is accompanied by a series of other education policy initiatives that are injecting new uncertainty into a college sports landscape already grappling with legal and financial instability. Among these initiatives are Trump’s Jan. 21 executive order directing, in part, the Office of Management and Budget to freeze federal grants to recipients, including universities, that continue to support diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs; deep cuts to NIH research funding, which many universities rely on; the revocation of the Department of Education’s Title IX guidance on NIL; and the president’s broader push to dismantle the department altogether.
This has set the stage for Thursday’s Senate confirmation of Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education—a cabinet position whose success, according to the president, will be judged by its commitment to self-destruction.
During a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Trump described the department as a “massive con job” that should be shut down “immediately.” (The NCAA did not respond to requests for comment about its position on this potentiality.)
It remains unclear how far any of these disruptive efforts will ultimately go. As of this week, federal judges have temporarily blocked Trump’s NIH and DEI-related funding freezes, following lawsuits. Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education are likely to encounter even greater legal challenges. Moreover, the president has intertwined his calls to abolish the $268 billion bureaucracy with attempts to leverage it to advance his own agenda.
Last week, for example, the department’s acting assistant for civil rights, Craig Trainor, announced investigations into two universities—University of Pennsylvania and San Jose State—for having each allowed a male-to-female trans athlete to compete on their women’s teams.
The Department of Education’s primary roles in college sports are overseeing Title IV student financial aid and Title IX gender equity, the federal law that ensures gender equity in educational programs and activities, including athletics. The civil rights statute passed in 1972 mandates schools that receive federal monies provide opportunities and resources for both male and female athletes that are proportionate to their representations in student bodies.
Seven years later, the department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) was established through Congressional action to be the point on enforcement of and guidance for statutes like Title IX. To aid in its efforts, Congress in 1994 passed the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA), establishing a database of annual reports, which federally funded universities must provide each year detailing the participation, staffing and revenue of men’s and women’s athletic programs.
Critics contend that Trump’s proposed agenda not only threatens the stability of higher education—and intercollegiate athletics—but also undermines the recent Republican rhetoric centered on protecting female athletes.
“By shutting down the only department responsible for enforcing Title IX, Trump is stripping away opportunities for women to compete in college sports and leaving them more vulnerable to stalking, harassment and sexual assault,” said Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), who has co-sponsored legislation, the Fair Play for Women Act, aimed at beefing up Title IX enforcement and education. “What parent wants to send their daughter to school knowing she’ll have fewer protections and opportunities than generations before her?”
Others, however, point to OCR’s history of fecklessness as noted last April in a report by the Government Accountability Office, on the 50-year anniversary of Title IX, which found myriad and systemic problems in OCR’s handling of gender-equity complaints.
Nancy Hogshead-Makar, the former Olympic swimmer and women’s sports advocate, said that from 2023 to 2024, she filed 101 “very detailed” Title IX complaints with OCR, none of which ended up materializing into action. Hogshead-Makar, who championed Trump’s executive order on trans athletes, said she is “hopeful” the current administration’s interest in women’s sports will extend to Title IX enforcement, and is agnostic as to whether the Department of Education is the best place to handle that responsibility.
“I would not mind it moving to the Department of Justice, because this has not worked,” she said.
But Donna Lopiano, the former college athletics administrator and sports management consultant, argues that even if Title IX enforcement were moved to another federal agency, it would still leave a gap in the government’s support of the statute.
“Who is going to give guidance about the implementation of laws?” Lopiano told Sportico. “That is what government executive agencies are supposed to do. You can say OCR has been miserable in enforcing, but that has issued guidance and education … DOJ is not built to educate.”
Beyond Title IX, Paia LaPaolombara, a sports lawyer who previously worked in compliance roles at the NCAA and Ohio State, emphasized the crucial role the Department of Education’s federal student aid program plays in the college sports ecosystem.
“Generally people think if you are a college athlete you are getting a full ride, but that is not the case for many student athletes,” said LaPaolombara, an attorney who now provides regulatory guidance to schools as a partner at Church Church Hittle + Antrim. According to the NCAA, of the 204,000 Division I college athletes, only 59% receive some kind of athletic scholarship—and many of them are still also likely recipients of federal student aid. According to a federal government study from 2015-16, the most recent year for which data is available, nearly half of college scholarship athletes received some kind of need-based aid, while 31.1% were Pell Grant recipients.
“I know our clients are having a hard time even keeping track of everything,” she said. “Athletics is one small cog but does have a very big financial impact and is seeing ramifications of the executive orders.”
Per Trump’s Jan. 21 order for “restoring merit-based opportunity,” schools and their departments face an April 21 deadline to declare that they have eliminated any DEI programs in order to continue receiving federal funds. The issue is particularly acute for college sports because of its historic emphasis on the precepts of diversity and inclusion, at both the campus, conference and NCAA levels.
However, in this new “Wild West” of DEI and Title IX, LaPaolombara said, “institutions may be willing to take more risks because they are seeing how things are aligning at a national level.”
While DEI policies are at the forefront of the current political debate, other federal policy changes are also creating financial turbulence for higher education institutions. For example, Trump has proposed capping “indirect cost rates” for NIH research funding at 15%, whereas a number of institutions have previously been able to negotiate much higher rates based on their unique needs and cost structures. The consequences of this change could have a ripple effect throughout the country’s major research institutions. In a post on X last week, Katie Davis, an athletics department financial consultant, flagged this as a financial concern for athletic departments, more and more of which are turning to university subsidies to help fund the $20.5 million pools of revenue-share monies they can pay athletes next year under the the House v. NCAA settlement.
“You’ve got (athletic departments) that have either never had to ask for institutional support or only asked for a little that now are trying to plug a $20.5 million gap,” Davis said in a phone interview. “So I think the timing is just unfortunate for athletics, because they are already in crisis mode. It is possible some athletic departments have started coming to an agreement with their campuses [over House funding], and the campus might need to go back to the drawing board.”
