Federal Policy Update: December, 2025

Introduction:
Welcome to the Trusteeship Podcast from AGB, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. In this episode, AGB’s Joe Brenckle dives into policy developments with Alex Nock from the Penn Hill Group. From a fraud hub at the Department of Homeland Security and shifting accreditation oversight, to court rulings on undocumented student access and the stalled SCORE Act, 2025 is ending with more questions than answers. Plus, what might 2026 bring? Let’s get started. Joe?

Joe Brenckle:
Welcome back to the AGB Public Policy Podcast, where we break down the most important policy developments shaping higher education governance. I’m your host, Joe, and today we’re going to talk with Alex from Penn Hill Group about a December that’s packed with regulatory shifts, political interventions, and legal decisions. These are all big things that are going to affect us as we head into 2026.

Alex, how are you? Do you want to give us a recap of all the crazy stuff? I’m reminded of that interesting blessing/curse, may you live in interesting times. And boy, are these interesting times.

Alex Nock:
Yes, they are. Hi, Joe. Nice to be with you and good morning, good afternoon for everyone who’s listening. So I think higher ed certainly has been impacted by both Congress and the administration in pretty dramatic ways. When you think back to where we were even just a couple of months ago or a year ago, Joe, we’ve certainly had a great deal of oversight action from the Trump administration, whether it be on civil rights or other issues. It’s not just related to that international students and subjects like that. Then there’s been a lot of court activity because of that and related activities.

At the same time, Congress passed what’s commonly referred to as the One Big Beautiful Bill. And that essentially changed loan limits and has set up a new earnings test accountability system, brought us Workforce Pell, lots of new federal financial aid aspects.

In addition to that, we’ve had massive changes just at the department structurally with less employees, different programs being funded. Some programs that have been funded for many, many years not funded anymore, like Hispanic serving institution programs and things like that.

So pretty dramatic change in the scope of higher ed. And higher eds used to change, Joe. So when I’m saying pretty dramatic, that means it’s pretty significant.

Joe Brenckle:
Boy, we’ll have to see what 2026 holds. Let’s jump right into what is currently going on. We know DHS recently announced a new fraud hub. What do you think that means for colleges and universities?

Alex Nock:
So this fraud hub or Department of Homeland Security Fraud Hub is really focused on student visas and international students and compliance across the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, or SEVP. I think it’s consistent with this administration’s policy of being very focused on what non-citizens that come into this country, foreign nationals come into this country, whether it’s to study or for other reasons, and look for institutions to have more compliance because of this, more compliance issues and more compliance demands on them. And I think especially looks for boards to think about what sort of risk analysis this impacts them with. What are the considerations that boards need to have in terms of doing oversight? Are there institutions able to look at and comply with the requirements of this new fraud hub?

Joe Brenckle:
Yeah. Something that I think folks will really have to pay close attention to. I know there’s been a lot of talk about accreditation and some new accreditation agencies. I know there were some new appointments at NACIQI. Can you give us a little bit of background on that?

Alex Nock:
Yeah. The Department of Education actually postponed a meeting that would’ve taken place, I believe, in October during the government shutdown. And then when the government opened back up, they appointed five new individuals, all of which have a higher education background, but probably are more in line with this administration’s thinking than other folks that could have been appointed to NACIQI. NACIQI could take on a pretty outsized importance because of that, Joe. Remember, NACIQI is the body that helps the department oversee and judge what accreditors function in that role for Title IV purposes. And certainly appointing five individuals, I believe there’s a sixth opening as well that still hasn’t been appointed. It’s a congressional one, I believe.

So you’re seeing a lot of change with NACIQI and this administration looks to try to use it robustly. I think we’re going to have to see how that plays out in the coming months, but accreditation is definitely a focus. And we know too, Joe, that a new accreditation regulatory effort is probably on the horizon in 2026 as well.

Joe Brenckle:
Interesting. Obviously that’s something we’ll have to follow closely. In your opening, you talked about not only federal regulations, we also have some judicial developments. And one of those is access for undocumented students. I know there’s been a lot of news around that. I know there’s a court ruling in Kentucky and there have been some other ones as well. Can you give us a little bit of background on that?

Alex Nock:
The court ruling in Kentucky preserved in-state tuition for some undocumented students. That’s pretty significant in the sense that the Trump administration opposes that sort of policy and is looking to bring further scrutiny on it, as well as lots of outside actors, Joe. So the big story here is this is not the last stop on the train of this decision, and you’re going to see continued judicial action and probably administration oversight or at least focus on this to try and drive the outcome that they want, which is not allowing in state tuition for undocumented students.

Joe Brenckle:
Yeah, I think these court cases are really interesting just by the precedence that they set. And so obviously you’ll have one that in theory will only affect one small area, but then the precedence that it sets can affect everyone nationwide. So I think that’ll be something that’s really interesting.

One of the things that we’ve noticed obviously is a lot of the ideological and political intervention for universities, especially the agreements that these universities are coming up with and agreeing to. I know Northwestern just agreed to pay $75 million to get their federal research funds back. What do you think about that? And is that going to set the trend going forward, do you think?

Alex Nock:
And that is, as you know, that’s, I think you said most recently, right? That is not the most recent agreement, right? There’s been several now, Northwestern being the most recent.

And that agreement, in some ways, Joe, brought in some of the concepts of the compact that we saw. It is not the compact that was much ballyhooed by the administration and got … I can’t have a higher ed conversation without the issue of the compact coming up. So it’s not exactly the compact, but there were elements in that agreement of the compact.

Now, Northwestern, I’m sure did the deal they need to make, I’m not questioning what they did, but it certainly, I think, sets a trend. If you have institutions like Northwestern, and the others, that have agreed to settlements to restore access or to alleviate certain investigations of civil rights matters and things like that, you’re probably going to see other institutions entertain this. And it certainly creates momentum for the administration in terms of their goal, which has been having these agreements put in place.

Again, different from the compact, but it certainly has some elements and look for this action to continue. Now, I doubt every school out there that accept Title IV aid would be subject to one of these, Joe, but certainly some of the more prominent brand-name institutions are getting this sort of focus and could be subject to these.

Joe Brenckle:
Well, I wonder if in the beginning of the year too, we’ll see the compact kind of resurface, but maybe in a new and different way. I know that the White House has been meeting with different universities and getting some input from them. So I wonder if they’re going to tweak that a little bit to see if they can get more folks to sign on. So I think that might be interesting as well.

Let’s turn to collegiate athletics. Name, image, likeness I know has been a big thing that’s been on the radar all year. There was a big bill in the house that they thought were going to pass, but they ended up pulling it. Can you give us a little bit about that? That’s the SCORE Act.

Alex Nock:
Yeah. The SCORE Act was a very prominent piece of legislation, strongly supported by the NCAA and certainly has its roots in all of the different settlements and activity around here around what are you doing to police the process here, to police college athletics and deal with the NIL sort of issues that have cropped up. House Republican leadership was very bullish on passing the SCORE Act last week, so much so that they created what they call as a rule for floor committee consideration of the bill, which is a necessary thing to do in the House. The rule barely passed the House, which to quote a famous show from many years ago, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger.” If you can barely pass a rule, that’s a problem.

Now, the House has very slim margins, right? It’s just a few GOP members that make up the majority in terms of the total count, but they actually did something that’s kind of unprecedented. They pulled the bill before even debate on the bill. They didn’t get to a vote. They didn’t go through with debate. They pulled it before the debate and certainly the vote.

And when is this coming back? It seems like it’s unclear in the House right now. I don’t think it’s coming back before the end of the year, and it’s possible this legislation can’t come back on the House floor.

Now, with the partisan nature of the SCORE Act, whether it was going to be voted on or not, Democrats were almost universally set up to oppose it, it was going to be a challenge to see how that bill would get 60 votes in the Senate. So the real question is, is there a path forward now for this type of legislation in some fashion? And that’s questionable. It was definitely not a good thing for the legislative effort to get the SCORE Act or something like it passed that the House could not bring it up and vote on it.

Joe Brenckle:
Thanks, Alex. That’s a great update. Let’s switch gears a little bit and pull out our magical crystal ball. And obviously there are no right or wrong answers. I would love to get your thoughts on what you think might be coming up in 2026. For instance, let’s start with federal regulation. What are you thinking is going to be something that we can look forward to next year?

Alex Nock:
So there are a couple of really big things. First, we will see the department’s rules from the RISE committee and the AHEAD committee. The RISE committee was the one that dealt with regulations pertaining to loan limits that were part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, most notably the definition of professional versus graduate student, which certainly has gotten a lot of attention in the past couple of weeks. In addition, we’re going to see regulations regarding Workforce Pell, which is a new Pell Grant authority for short-term courses. But also really important for institutions, programmatic earnings test accountability. There’s a provision in that One Big Beautiful Bill which requires program completers to, depending on their level of degree, that they’re seeking over at least the median high school graduate or the median bachelor’s school graduate in terms of earnings. The department will put out regulations on those as well this spring, all for implementation on July 1, 2026.

In addition, Joe, I foreshadowed this a little bit earlier on the call, we are very likely, possibly as soon as this week, depending on when you’re listening to this podcast, we will see an official call by the department for rulemaking on accreditation. So that’s pretty significant.

And then lastly, in terms of what the Department of Education may do, they have teed up a broad title for eligibility negotiated rulemaking effort that will look to look at all of the issues that probably the last administration did around administrative capability and things like that and really, what are the rules and nuts and bolts pertain to how institutions become Title IV eligible? There’s been less definition on that, Joe, but it could be pretty significant as well. And all of this has really big implications for boards in terms of students and borrowing and what programs are eligible, and certainly what the rules of the road are on accreditation and Title IV eligibility.

So really, really busy spring into the summer, into the fall on regulatory matters.

Joe Brenckle:
That’s great, Alex. Are there any outstanding court cases that we should be watching or have on our radar screen for next year?

Alex Nock:
Joe, what outstanding court cases shouldn’t we be watching? We obviously talked about the Kentucky case. There are much ballyhooed cases on certain institutions. I think UCLA has a case, other cases are out there. There are cases pertaining to the Department of Education’s funding and its programs and its employees, and whether or not OCR employees can be laid off. There are a ton of court cases out there that affect the higher education landscape that we’re going to have to watch all of them. So literally every big issue we’re talking about probably has some judicial activity connected to it right now.

Joe Brenckle:
Interesting. And this one might be the toughest because I feel like there’s just no way to see what kind of action they’re going to take, but what do you think on political intervention? What do you think might be the next big thing that the White House and Department of Ed might try to jump into next year?

Alex Nock:
I think they’re going to continue a lot of what they have already jumped into. I will say the one caveat with that is we haven’t seen their accreditation regulatory proposal. And you could definitely see something there being beyond just the normal nuts and bolts of let’s have more accountability, let’s have more transparency. As accreditation has become a bit of a thing, I’ll remind our listeners that President Trump, then candidate Trump, actually recorded a campaign video on accreditation.

And Joe, I have a lot of gray hair. I used to have more hair than I do. So I’ve been around this business a long time. I’ve never seen a political candidate for any office record a video on higher education accreditation. So I think that speaks volumes about where this is. And I don’t mean that with any value judgment. I think it’s just something, it shows the level of import politically on this. So I don’t think we should discount political intrusion being an issue with accreditation.

Joe Brenckle:
That’s great. I think that’s all I have for today. Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share with anyone?

Alex Nock:
Joe, what an exciting time to track higher ed issues.

Joe Brenckle:
Absolutely.

Alex Nock:
I know that our listeners are probably like, “Oh my gosh, there’s a lot of stuff.” But I’m so glad that AGB provides the service, as well as top public policy issues to its listeners, so they can help make sense of what is going on.

Joe Brenckle:
That sounds great. And what we like to say at AGB is, yes, there are a lot of challenges, but we also believe a lot of opportunities. So I think it’ll be important to take advantage of those.

Alex, as always, thank you so much. Your wisdom and knowledge, it really is, I think, very insightful and we really appreciate it.