The Trump administration withheld McNair funding throughout August and September 2025, part of a broader freeze of $660 million in TRIO grant funding that began in summer 2025. Legally, they do not have to release this funding until Sept. 30, but in previous years, the Department of Education (DOE) has notified institutions of their grants by mid-summer. In response, some McNair scholars and supporters at Trinity contacted representatives, appealed to Trinity for financial assistance and questioned the future of jobs and research opportunities.
The McNair Scholars Program is a federally-funded initiative by the DOE that prepares undergraduate students who are either first-generation, low-income or from underrepresented minority groups for graduate school and doctoral programs. Every year, the DOE releases funding for McNair programs across the country, receiving a Grant Authorization Notification (GAN). Kelly Lyons, director of the McNair Scholars Program at Trinity, said that once congressional funding is allocated, it should only be a matter of paperwork to release the GANs.
This year, the DOE did not release Trinity’s GAN until Sept. 22, and the department cut other McNair programs entirely. Lyons said she believes that the Trump administration targeted McNair specifically because they not only serve first-generation, low-income students, but also because one-third of their scholars are underrepresented minority students. A lawsuit was filed last year that argued the McNair program is discriminatory, but a federal district court dismissed the case. Associate Director of the McNair Program at TrinityTeresa Morrison said that the DOE used this pending case as an excuse to not release funding.
“The Department of Education was claiming they were going to hold all the GANs on purpose, wait for all of that legal stuff to fall out as it may,” Morrison said. “And then they were going to evaluate whether McNair grants even aligned with the objectives and the plans of the current administration.”
Since Trump proposed budget cuts to the DOE, some members and leaders of the McNair program have questioned the program’s future. The Council for Opportunity in Education (COE), a non-profit that advocates for programs such as McNair, funds an annual policy seminar in Washington, D.C.
Through the McNair program, Trinity students have taken part in the seminar. Alexis Ibarra, senior political science, global Latinx studies and Spanish triple-major, attended last semester, along with Lyons and McNair scholar Blaine Martin, class of ‘25. Lyons said the seminar’s purpose is to lobby for funding programs like McNair. At the event, Ibarra and Martin asked questions about the McNair program’s future to the first Trump administration’s Under Secretary of Education.
“What they said originally was that it [McNair] wouldn’t be affected,” Ibarra said. “And now you’re seeing their actions of what they’re doing. So we didn’t really talk about budget cuts then, because we were really hopeful that they would pass their preparation bills.”
While Congress passed the bills allocating these funds to McNair, the DOE had still not released the GANs by its typical release date from August to mid-September.
COE led a public “Day of Action” on Sept. 16, in which McNair scholars called their Congressional representatives to ask for support. Teresa Morrison said that pressure from calls may have been the trigger for releasing GANs. However, she said that while the majority of the 216 McNair programs did receive their GANs, the DOE cancelled 18 of them with no explanation.
Every five years, the DOE calls for an Annual Performance Report (APR) that McNair programs must submit in order to continue receiving funding. The APR outlines the success and progress of the program, and the DOE must agree with the assessment for programs to continue operating with congressional funding. U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon argued before the Senate that the DOE is unable to see the effectiveness of programs like McNair.
“My office is closed down for a whole month, just to collect data and report in our annual report, and every program is required to do that. So they have plenty of data on how successful the program is and who we serve. So that’s all not true,” Lyons said.
According to Lyons, the McNair program at Trinity has been very successful, with almost 20 scholars receiving their Ph.Ds over its 14-year span. Shumyla Lopez, senior psychology major and McNair scholar, said that through the program, she has gained a lot of insight into how to navigate the graduate school application process.
“One of the main things is that a lot of the resources that they [McNair] provide isn’t just funding for conferences and research and things like that. They also provide some opportunities to actually be able to engage in research,” Lopez said. “We would be losing out on a lot of research opportunities, which is kind of critical in better understanding what you want to do for the long term.”
Lopez said that waiting for the GAN to be released was nerve-wracking, especially because the Trump administration can be unpredictable. While funding has been released for this fiscal year, the future of McNair programs remains a worry for some faculty such as Morrison and Lyons.
*This article was updated on Oct. 7 to correct the photo credit.
