As the nation prepares to witness the swearing-in of its 47th president next week, preparations are also underway at Duke for a second Trump administration.
The Duke Office of Government Relations is the University’s primary representative in Washington, D.C., advocating at the federal level for the policy interests of students, faculty and staff. The office’s staff frequently meets with policymakers and other government stakeholders to lobby on behalf of the University and also sets up meetings for University administrators — and sometimes students — to advocate for the issues they care about.
“We’re in constant communication, mostly with the North Carolina delegation in Washington, but also other delegations, agencies and people in the executive branch, talking about our priorities and building those relationships,” said Chris Simmons, vice president for government relations. “… For our members of Congress to hear directly from students and people that are doing the research here is extremely important and something that we find highly, highly effective.”
In advance of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, The Chronicle spoke with Simmons to hear his insights into what Duke’s approach to engaging the federal government may be over the next four years.
How does the OGR typically approach a presidential transition?
Simmons has been with the OGR for 19 years, spanning four presidential administrations across both major parties. Although 2024 delivered an unprecedented election cycle, he explained that the office’s setup process to engage with this eventual winner isn’t much different from previous years.
“We prepare for every election, no matter who is running,” Simmons said.
He explained that “one of the benefits” of a Trump being reelected president is that the OGR already has experience with the incoming administration from his first term. Although some of Trump’s policy stances and the political environment of the day may have changed, many of the people working in the White House will be the same — and as Simmons stressed, “building relationships is the most important thing.”
Still, the first hours of a new presidency are always filled with uncertainty, as the country waits to see how much of the campaign rhetoric the candidate will stick to once in office.
Simmons emphasized that much of the preparatory work involves analyzing which policies an incoming administration campaigned on, and then figuring out how and when those policies might be implemented — or sidelined — once they take office. Then, the OGR can strategize how to push for outcomes that benefit Duke.
“We don’t know exactly what’s going to come out of the gates the first week, first month, first couple months,” Simmons said. “They’re going to have to decide on their priorities, so in a way, it’s a little bit of a ‘wait and see.’”
That said, Trump and his team have already outlined several policy goals that have the potential to impact Duke — namely regarding student aid, the endowment tax, research funding, immigration and federal support for education.
Student aid
Student aid has been a contentious issue at the federal level in recent years.
Though Trump’s official 2024 campaign platform doesn’t make explicit mention of student loans or debt forgiveness, Project 2025 — a set of ultra-conservative policy proposals put forth by The Heritage Foundation that has been tied to Trump, despite his attempts to distance himself from the plan — does. The document calls for the elimination of the Biden administration’s student loan programs, ending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program — which cancels student loans for various public and non-profit sector employees after 120 qualifying payments — and the privatization of all lending programs.
Outgoing president Joe Biden introduced the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan in August 2023 — which limits monthly student loan payments to 5% of borrowers’ discretionary income — as a step toward his campaign promise of canceling student debt. However, the program was blocked in the courts last summer after several Republican-led states filed requests to pause its provisions.
There are currently 8 million Americans who signed up for SAVE and are now waiting for the courts to make a final determination on its legality. If the program is deemed acceptable or they fail to make a decision before Inauguration Day, Trump could strike down the legislation.
Simmons did not comment on either administration’s approach to student loan policy, instead reaffirming Duke’s stance that “the federal government needs to have loan programs that are as affordable as possible to students.”
“We continue to advocate … [to ensure] that there are economical and fair ways for students and their families to pay back those loans, that we eliminate origination fees, that the interest rate is as low as possible [and] that students can … refinance [their] loan[s] if interest rates go down,” he said. “The federal government has done its best to make that more and more difficult.”
Endowment tax
The OGR has, however, taken a more hardline stance against another of the incoming Trump administration’s possible new funding-related policies: an endowment tax.
University endowments are large stores of funds that are invested — often by outside management firms, like DUMAC — to generate returns that support strategic goals like financial aid programs and endowed professorships. As of June 2024, Duke’s endowment amounts to $11.9 billion.
During his first term, Trump approved the first-ever federal university endowment tax at a rate of 1.4% for private institutions with at least 500 students and $100,000 or more in assets per full-time student. President Vincent Price came out against the policy in a November 2017 statement, arguing that it would “directly threaten” the Duke community.
Trump has since indicated his intent to expand such taxes. In a November 2023 campaign video, he promised to collect “billions and billions of dollars … by taxing, fining and suing excessively large private, university endowments” with the aim of establishing a new “nonpolitical” institution known as the American Academy, a stance he has since held to.
Simmons did not mince words regarding the office’s stance on a proposed endowment tax increase.
“The endowment tax is pretty backwards thinking,” he said. “It is a poke in the eye to colleges and universities that, frankly, I think a lot of members of Congress publicly disdain.”
He’s not wrong on that point — Senate Democrats defeated a similar proposal in 2023 from Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, that would have raised the existing tax for private colleges and universities with endowments of at least $10 billion in assets — including Duke — from 1.4% to 35%. But many Republicans in Congress have since expressed support for such a move, especially in light of recent protests on college campuses amid the ongoing war in Gaza that have led many in the GOP to challenge university leadership.
“If [university administrators] don’t correct this quickly, you will see Congress respond in kind,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., said in April regarding increased reports of antisemitism on college campuses. “You’re going to see funding sources begin to dry up. You’re going to see every level of accountability that we can muster.”
Still, Simmons maintained that raising the university endowment tax would take away funding from valuable educational programs without giving a significant boost to the federal government to support other spending priorities.
“If they were really interested in making money off of endowments, there are other endowments that are bigger than some of the ones that they collect from at other nonprofits, foundations, other universities — things like that,” he said. “They’re not really interested in good policy.”
Simmons noted that he is “hopeful” that OGR can succeed in making the case that “those dollars are better spent on campus than sending to the government.”
Research funding
As a private institution, Duke is not affected by much of the federal regulation public colleges and universities must contend with. But one of the areas where the University interacts with the federal government the most is through research grants.
According to the OGR’s reports from fiscal year 2021 — the most recent year for which data was available — Duke received $649 million in federal funding to support research, student aid and health reimbursements. The University’s top four sponsors were the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, each at over $15 million.
Although Trump’s team has pledged wide spending cuts across the federal government, Simmons noted that the office isn’t particularly concerned about losing grant funding for research.
“One of the great things about research funding in the United States … is that there is an incredible amount of bipartisan support,” he said.
Simmons added that “the Trump administration alone could not completely cut off research funding,” as even though the president has the power to propose the federal budget, it is ultimately up to Congress to approve it.
He also pointed out that research funding from several agencies actually increased during Trump’s first term and decreased under Biden, showing that “what’s going to happen to it depends on who’s president.” Though, Simmons maintained that the general trend for such funding has been “stable or increasing under every party.”
Immigration
One of the few policy issues of interest to Duke that doesn’t center around funds is immigration.
A significant proportion of Duke’s student population is foreign-born, particularly those enrolled in graduate and professional programs. But Trump has long advocated a restrictive approach to immigration policy that has remained largely the same since he first entered the political scene a decade ago, which could affect these students and international faculty members.
Early on in his first term, he sought to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which currently allows over 500,000 undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as children, known as “DREAMers,” to remain in the country. Price sent a letter to Trump in 2017, urging that he not terminate DACA in 2017, though Trump’s decision was later overturned by the Supreme Court in 2020.
Notably, the Trump administration implemented the controversial “Muslim ban” in 2017, which blocked the entry of all nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen into the country. Duke filed an amicus curiae brief in opposition to the policy.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump also issued a directive preventing international students enrolled in full online courses or programs at U.S. universities from entering the country or obtaining visa status, which Price condemned as “a misguided effort that will only harm talented young people and the colleges and universities that are vital to our society.”
The president-elect’s current immigration agenda is bolstered by many of the same goals underpinning these prior policies — many of which were designed by Stephen Miller, Trinity ‘07. Miller has since been appointed deputy chief of staff for policy in the incoming administration and was named by CNN as a “lead architect” of Trump’s new immigration agenda, which is likely to include mass deportations, the deployment of federal troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and slashed funding for sanctuary cities.
Some colleges and universities have issued statements asking international students to return before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration to avoid being affected by possible travel bans imposed on his first day in office. Duke has not released any such statement, in part — according to Simmons — because classes began Jan. 8, meaning most community members are already back on campus well in advance of Trump taking office.
Simmons also pointed out that Duke’s position on immigration policy aligns with a number of Trump’s more recent statements — ones that go against his traditionally restrictive immigration platform. The president-elect claimed in a December interview that he wanted to allow DREAMers to stay in the country despite his other deportation plans, saying he “want[s] to be able to work something out” with Democrats once he takes office. He has also expressed support in the past for giving green cards to all international students who graduate from U.S. colleges and universities, a policy that Simmons described as “very much in line with [Duke’s] policy belief.”
“I think that the president[-elect] and many members of Congress understand the importance of our higher education system being competitive globally and being the best in the world globally,” Simmons said.
Though he acknowledged concerns raised by some legislators about national security issues, Simmons maintained that policies already on the books are sufficient to “safeguard our research and protect our intellectual property” without further limiting foreign access to the U.S. education system. The OGR officially stands in favor of “progressive visa policies,” which Simmons labeled “a huge priority.”
“I think any policymaker’s concern should be if people don’t want to come here and study, then we’re doing something wrong,” he said.
Federal support for education
Finally, one of the developments that makes the incoming administration a bit of a wild card is the proposed government restructuring Trump has alluded to in recent months.
In the first week after he was elected, Trump announced his intention to create a new “Department of Government Efficiency” that he claimed would “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.” He would need support from legislators to do so, as official government agencies can only be created by an act of Congress, but the GOP currently holds the coveted trifecta — control of the presidency and majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate.
Trump has eyed education as a prime target for such cuts, going so far as to pledge to abolish the Department of Education and return full control over curricula — and funding — to the states. However, many policy experts have cast doubts on the feasibility of his promise, as he would once again need congressional support and near-complete unity from his own party, which holds slim margins in both chambers.
Simmons said there hasn’t been “serious discussions” within the OGR about the possibility of an eliminated federal education department. Should that outcome become more likely, he explained that the next steps for Duke would entail determining which programs would still remain and ensuring that the University’s main priorities — such as continued provision of student aid — would remain “well protected.”
While he allowed that the prospect of funding cuts was “concerning,” Simmons said he was “confident that Congress and the new administration will make wise choices about the investment in research and student aid, as they have in the past.”
“Our job at the University is to make sure that our members of Congress and the next administration know that when money is taken away — whether it’s in tax[es], whether it’s reduction[s] in research funding, whether it’s disrupting student aid funding — that that’s not good for students, [and] that’s not good for North Carolina,” Simmons said. “… When Duke does well, when the University of North Carolina [system] does well, when Wake Forest does well, North Carolina the state does well.”
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Zoe Kolenovsky is a Trinity junior and news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.