How the Trump Administration Is Quietly Defunding HBCUs
Despite Donald Trump's false claim that he "saved HBCUs," he is overseeing the biggest economic attack on historically Black college institutions in U.S. history.
AT&T had a billion-dollar diversity problem.
In 2019, the company’s WarnerMedia division created the role of chief diversity officer to address the company’s lack of women in the upper ranks. After the George Floyd protests shined a spotlight on corporate inclusion, AT&T invested more than $3 billion to make its 74% white, 7% Black leadership more reflective of the company’s consumer base.
In 2022, AT&T appointed Michelle Jordan, who served as vice president of talent and leadership development, to fill the role of chief diversity officer. Jordan helped launch Equality First+, an employee app focused on making the workplace more inclusive. She began publishing the company’s diversity statistics. And, as an alumnus of Florida A&M, Jordan knew exactly where to go to find talented workers and leaders.
Historically Black colleges and universities.
By November 2024, the corporate giant’s Rising Future Makers initiative had awarded $500,000 in scholarships to 100 community-minded students at historically Black colleges and universities. It sponsored the NBA’s HBCU classic during All-Star Weekend in 2022. And, although AT&T spun off WarnerMedia in a merger with Discovery+, its Warner Bros. division partnered with the NAACP to award $100,000 in scholarships to HBCU students in 2022.
Apparently, diversity didn’t hurt AT&T’s bottom line. Then again, $940 million of the company’s $12 billion profits in 2024 came directly from U.S. taxpayers. Plus, the global communications giant finalized a $1 billion all-cash deal in November 2024 to acquire a portion of UScellular’s 5G spectrum. Not satisfied, the behemoth made another $23 billion deal with Echostar and entered a $5.75 billion agreement with Centurylink. Pending regulatory approval, the deals would increase AT&T’s already huge cellular network in every region. There was just one problem.
“Pending regulatory approval.”
Two days before AT&T and UScellular announced the billion-dollar deal, America elected Donald Trump as president of the United States. On Dec. 2, 2025, 11 months after Trump issued an executive order banning "Federal contractors who have provided DEI training," FCC chair Brendan Carr tweeted a letter from AT&T promising that it was out of the diversity business.
“We have closely followed the recent Executive Orders, Supreme Court rulings, and guidance issued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission … including ending DEI-related policies as described below, not just in name but in substance,” wrote the cowardly corporate lion. “Further, consistent with the current law, we removed training related to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ as well as any references to it from our internal and external messaging.”
Days after publicly fellating capitulating, AT&T took ownership of a billion-dollar, FCC-approved, slightly used cellular network.
And just like that, the Equality First+ app disappeared. For some reason, the Warner Bros. HBCU scholarship no longer appears on the NAACP site. The AT&T Future Makers Award and the entire Dream In Black initiative are also things of the past. And in case you’re interested, the NBA is still searching for sponsors for the formerly named “HBCU All-Star Game presented by AT&T.”
Stephen A. Smith will be there.
He loves what Trump is doing for HBCUs.
AT&T’s surrender is just one example of the Trump administration’s backdoor defund HBCUs strategy.
Not only is the survival of HBCUs important, but when it comes to educating Black students, the data show these schools are better than their white counterparts. But under the guise of fighting wokeness, DEI and waste, fraud and abuse, the president’s public policies and secret pressure campaigns have withheld hundreds of millions of dollars from Black institutions of higher learning. Or, as one historically Black college president told ContrabandCamp:
“He’s led the biggest defunding program in the history of HBCUs. And it isn’t even close.”
How to Defund HBCU Without Really Trying
Smith is not the only one who believes Trump’s claims that he “saved historically Black colleges and universities” by signing the FUTURE Act, which provided annual funding for HBCUs.
In reality, the Trump administration funded HBCUs at the same rate as the Obama administration. In fact, every single one of the previous Trump administration’s budget proposals tried to decrease federal spending on HBCUs. Plus, most of his fellow Republicans voted against the FUTURE Act. And, according to Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), who wrote the bill, “The only words the president contributed were his signature.”
But that doesn’t mean Trump hasn’t done anything for HBCUs.
While his current proposal for 2027 actually increases HBCU funding (by stealing money from other minority-serving institutions), Trump’s policies have actually resulted in historic financial losses. Not only did the administration find creative ways to gut these schools, but Trump’s underlings also found ways to kill these institutions while keeping their hands clean.
Elon Musk might be the biggest burglar.
As head of the made-up Department of Government Efficiency, Musk helped lead the effort to terminate nearly $9 billion in grants and federal funding as of July 2025. These cuts have affected every area of society, from preschool programs to elderly care. While the efforts to strip Harvard and other Ivy League schools have made headlines, the attacks on these elite institutions are a drop in the bucket compared to HBCUs.
“As a subset, land-grant universities and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been particularly affected, with more than two-thirds of all land-grant universities and nearly half of all HBCUs targeted for funding terminations,” writes the Center for American Progress. “Indeed, the administration may be trying to target institutions it believes are antithetical to its policy agenda, but faculty, students, and researchers across the country are bearing the burdens of grant terminations.”
The Department of Health and Human Services also contributed to the defunding effort by placing a number of programs on the chopping block, including:
$2,392,381 for Spelman College’s “Next Generation of Black Women Scientists” program.
$478,977 to the Morehouse College of Medicine’s initiative aimed at “reducing racial disparities and achieving health equity in lung cancer treatment.”
$225,886 for Meharry School of Medicine’s “Structural Biology of Human Pathogens” research program.
$299,881 to Alabama State University for partnering with Auburn University to promote diversity in aging research.
The cuts that affect HBCUs are not exclusive to education or research. Morehouse will have to find a way to preserve Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers after the U.S. Park Service ended its “Save Our Treasures” grant. Administrators will have a harder time finding faculty after grants for the Teacher Training Partnership disappeared. Thanks to the current administration, students at rural HBCUs like Fort Valley State won’t have up-to-date access to broadband internet. Tennessee State University will have fewer engineering students, Florida A&M will produce fewer Black pharmacists, and Trump’s attempt to freeze the USDA’s 1890 HBCU scholarship affects every Black institution of higher learning.
“This is pocket change to schools like Harvard and MIT, but it’s a death knell to HBCUs,” one HBCU president told ContrabandCamp on the condition of anonymity. “Our institutions can’t replace these losses by increasing our tuition or reaching into our endowment. Most of our students receive financial aid, so losing scholarships is just like losing federal funds.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Diversifying the Racism Portfolio
This is not all Trump’s fault.
In many ways, the anti-Black efforts of this authoritarian regime are just one part of a yearslong Republican attack on HBCUs. And, while federal grants and funding are the executive branch’s weapons of choice, the GOP has enlisted red state legislators and private corporations in the defunding effort.
In 2023, Florida lawmakers allocated millions to Florida A&M for initiatives like the Environmental Equity and Justice program, the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum, and the Center for Disability Access and Resources (CeDAR). But after the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a DEI law, the school had to cut 15 programs that fit the description of DEI.
Tarheel State DEI laws also forced Fayetteville State University’s Division of Student Affairs to reject a grant supporting the mental health of male students, WRAL reports. North Carolina Central University had to turn down $75,000 that supported men of color after administrators determined it didn’t comply with the state’s DEI law. Corporations like AT&T and Warner Bros. didn’t just end scholarship programs. By ending their efforts to recruit HBCU graduates, they joined government agencies like the FBI and private companies like Intel.
We live in a country where public HBCUs are funded at lower rates than their white counterparts. Black colleges receive less than 1% of federal research and development expenditures. HBCU students are more likely to borrow money to attend college and carry student loan debt longer than white college grads.
According to the United Negro College Fund, HBCUs make up only 3% of America’s colleges. But ContrabandCamp’s analysis of funding cuts from six governmental departments (EPA, HHS, DOGE, Interior and USDA) found that Black colleges account for nearly 14% of the total grant money that DOGE and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have targeted for termination. For comparison, in 2023, the USDA calculated that white land-grant colleges stole about $13 billion from Black land-grant universities between 1987 and 2020, a loss that amounts to more than $393 million per year.
In his first year, Trump cut $3 billion.
So what can you do about it? Fight. Student organizations, community groups and others have successfully beaten back some of these attacks in federal court. A federal judge reinstated the 1890 scholars program. And, because Trump always chickens out, expressing outrage has proven to be an effective strategy.
For some, the effort to defund HBCUs is a product of white supremacy. Others theorize that it is an attempt to help mediocre white students compete by tilting the playing field even more in their favor.
“I don’t speak racism, so I won’t speculate on their intentions,” the HBCU president noted. “I care about results. And the result is that they are dismantling institutions we built and taking tax dollars that we paid for. When they say ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’ well, HBCUs are the bootstraps they’re talking about.”
Now they’re coming for our boots.