A college degree remains one of the surest pathways to economic security, particularly for low-income students. Yet there remain significant, stubborn gaps between students from lower-income and higher-income families in their likelihood of enrolling in and graduating from college. For decades, federal policymaking has invested in college access support on the grounds that we have a public interest in helping these students succeed.
The Trump administration’s actions over the first year of this second term have marked a sharp break from that commitment. Rather than strengthening or reforming the federal role, the administration has worked to shrink it. The clearest sign of this shift is the administration’s attempt to eliminate the TRIO and GEAR UP college success programs, alongside a broader pattern of cuts and legal reinterpretations that collectively make it more difficult for low-income students to get to and through college.
How does the federal government support college success?
The largest federal investment in college success is through the financial aid portfolio, including Pell grants and student loans. However, the federal government also awards grants to school districts and institutions of higher education to provide programming to help students apply to, matriculate at, and graduate from college. Referred to as TRIO, these programs date back to the War on Poverty and subsequent Higher Education Act reauthorizations. GEAR UP is a similar initiative administered separately, awarded to states and school districts.
These programs primarily support low-income students from families earning less than 150% of the federal poverty level. TRIO is a small pot of federal dollars – the recently passed Fiscal Year 2026 budget allotted $1.19 billion to the Federal TRIO programs (and $398 million to GEAR UP), compared to $38.1 billion in Pell grants anticipated in the 2025-26 school year. However, investments are large on a per student basis, often over $10,000 per student. These significant investments require careful examination to ensure federal dollars are being used effectively.
Why does the Trump administration want to cut TRIO and GEAR UP?
The administration’s FY 2026 budget request proposed fully eliminating TRIO and GEAR UP. Congress ultimately rejected that proposal, in large part due to Senator Susan Collins’ forceful defense of the programs, and instead funded them at their FY 2025 levels.
Previous Republican administrations have also proposed TRIO cuts. President George W. Bush recommended cutting the programs in 2006 to reallocate funds for No Child Left Behind priorities. And President Trump’s first-term budgets recommended either reducing TRIO “in areas that have limited evidence” or consolidating TRIO and GEAR UP into a state formula grant to support postsecondary pathways. These critiques focused on the evidence and efficiency of TRIO and GEAR UP.
But the rhetoric has now shifted. The current administration argues these programs are “relic[s] of the past” and claims, against substantial evidence, that low-income students no longer face meaningful barriers to college. This goes beyond claims of what works and instead suggests college access and completion efforts for low-income students are not priorities.
Does TRIO work?
During FY 2026 budget hearings, Secretary McMahon argued that evidence shows TRIO doesn’t work and that the Department of Education lacks the ability to hold programs accountable and evaluate them. These claims misrepresent both the evidence and the law.
The evidence on TRIO is mixed, but mostly it is limited. Upward Bound is the only TRIO program evaluated via a large randomized controlled trial in 2009, finding mostly null effects of the program. That study’s statistical choices and interpretation are disputed. However, federal policy should not be made based on one single impact evaluation, regardless of its conclusion, particularly for a program as varied in its implementation as TRIO. We simply don’t have enough evidence about TRIO to make a conclusive statement. We do, however, have ample research on what generally works in college success interventions (see more below), and many TRIO and GEAR UP sites incorporate those practices into their programs.
Further research could help understand how features of these programs mediate their impact. Unfortunately, the infrastructure for evaluating these college success programs has been weakened. The education research industry that would be best poised to evaluate the effectiveness of TRIO and other federal education outlays has been decimated by federal research grant and contract cancellations. Further, ED redirected 2025 funds appropriated specifically for rigorously evaluating college success interventions through the Postsecondary Student Success Grant (PSSG) Program, limiting further research on this topic.1 In response to the executive branch’s actions, Congress clarified in the FY 2026 Joint Explanatory Statement that ED may no longer reallocate these grant funds across programs.
As for accountability, TRIO statutes do give existing grantees a significant competitive advantage in renewals, and most funds go to returning programs, limiting ED’s ability to phase out ineffective programs. This is a reasonable policy debate, but one that points to additional legislation or regulations, not eliminating TRIO altogether. ED is also required by HEA to submit to Congress a report on TRIO metrics, and in a review during the first Trump administration, GAO recommended that ED engage in more rigorous evaluations of the TRIO programs. ED officials at the time agreed that would be desirable and allowable under existing statute.
How do we spend federal funds to better support college success?
Critiques of federal investment in college access and completion are not new to the Trump administration. In 2013, Brookings colleagues advocated for consolidating TRIO into a single college success grant program and requiring grantees to use evidence-based strategies and evaluate their impact.
Since then, the nonprofit landscape has exploded with organizations focused on helping low-income students get to and through college, and the evidence base has grown with it. A recent Brookings report by Sarah Reber and a similar report that she and I, along with colleagues Lindsay Page and Aizat Nurshatayeva, authored show what effective programs have in common: intensive supports, light-touch nudges to boost task completion, in-person coaching, and careful attention to implementing proven strategies with fidelity.
We know what works, and the federal government could strengthen college success simply by helping TRIO and GEAR UP grantees adopt these practices, rather than dismantling the infrastructure that delivers them.
This isn’t about evidence
Building an evidence base around college access interventions and finding ways to incorporate those practices into federally funded programs would be a sensible policy goal for an administration genuinely interested in ensuring students have access to the postsecondary education best poised to advance social mobility. However, those do not appear to be the goals of the current administration, which has instead taken steps that directly undermine federal college-access efforts:
These actions are part of a broader strategy to reshape higher education through executive policymaking and grant cancellations.
Central to this strategy is the administration’s strict interpretation of race- and ethnicity-specific eligibility criteria, which they use to justify cutting programs or changing eligibility criteria. For example, December 2025 guidance from the Justice Department argued that considering race or ethnicity in TRIO’s McNair program violates the Fifth Amendment, another step in the administration’s unlawful interpretation of racial discrimination. Most recently, ED launched an investigation into the Louisiana Board of Regents for simply naming increasing graduation rates for underrepresented minority students as a system goal, claiming Title VI violations. These efforts constrain who can participate in federally supported pathways to higher education.
The administration has also proposed budget cuts to the financial aid system that enables low-income students to afford college. In addition to the proposed elimination of TRIO and GEAR UP, the FY 2026 budget would have reduced the annual Pell Grant by 23%, eliminated a supplemental need-based grant program for “fund[ing] leftist ideology,” and cut the federal share of work study funds by 80%. As with TRIO and GEAR UP, Congress rejected these cuts and funded each program at its FY 2025 levels.
Taken together, these actions appear to point toward a broader effort to narrow college access by reducing federal support for the students who rely on it most. While we cannot know the full extent of the administration’s internal strategy, the pattern is hard to miss: repeated attempts to eliminate core access programs, reinterpretations of civil rights law that constrain eligibility, and significant proposed cuts to Pell and other need‑based aid. These moves collectively signal an apparent effort to reshape higher education by limiting opportunity, weakening institutional autonomy, and steering colleges toward a narrower and less inclusive vision.
