Skip to main content

By Christian Collins

Last month, the push for college athletes to collectively bargain gained significant momentum with the news that football players at Stanford University, the Oregon State University women’s basketball team, and over 100 women’s college basketball players have publicly expressed their desire to bargain as employees and taken key steps toward unionizing. Unionization would allow players a direct say in key terms of their athletic participation, from health and safety to transfers, eligibility, and compensation.

These developments come at a time when Congress is actively considering legislation to dramatically reshape college sports. Last year, a bill that would prevent college athletes from being recognized as employees and enshrine antitrust protections for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) into law—the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act—was introduced in the House and gained 21 cosponsors. This summer, the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) passed the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on a 19-9 vote. The PCSA cleared a major hurdle this week after winning a Senate cloture vote 74-24, despite the bill text not being finalized or released to the public at the time of the vote and with several legal questions on bill provisions that have yet to be addressed.

College Athletes Meet the Legal Standard to be Labeled Employees

Two pathways—collective bargaining and federal legislation—represent the possible avenues by which current tensions in college sports may be resolved. Collective bargaining would guarantee protection under federal law through allowing college athletes to jointly negotiate with colleges and the NCAA over the terms and conditions of their athletic participation. To avoid going to the bargaining table with athletes, colleges and the NCAA have sought intervention from Congress to instead be protected from federal law for past and present exploitation. PCSA, like its predecessor SCORE, seeks to place the blame of financial gaps squarely on the shoulders of athletes and solidify the longstanding advantages that have enabled colleges to profit handsomely off the talent and hard work of those athletes—without having to compensate them fairly or grant them the rights and protections that employees are entitled to.

The system that has persisted for decades in which athletes generate billions of dollars in revenue for colleges, the NCAA, and media companies, yet see a small share returned to them in the form of scholarships is now threatening to collapse. In recent years, courts have increasingly recognized athletics participation as work and athletes as employees. In NCAA v. Alston in 2021, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that “amateurism” is a valid defense against the NCAA complying with laws that ensure fair market competition. Following the decision, the NCAA eliminated its rules restricting athletes from receiving compensation from endorsements, ushering in the new era of “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) deals. Relatedly, the House v. NCAA settlement in 2025 awarded current and former Division I athletes $2.8 billion in damages due to denying them NIL compensation and established fairer compensation for future athletes at schools that agreed to the settlement through direct revenue sharing of $20.5 million per year, rising 4 percent annually.

Similarly, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under Biden in 2024 determined that a group of Dartmouth college basketball players met the common-law definition of employee, which “requires that the employer have the right to control the employee’s work, and that that work be performed in exchange for compensation,” pointing to the non-monetary benefits that athletes receive—even in the absence of scholarships, per Ivy League rules. While the players voted to unionize following this decision, they withdrew their petition to be recognized after the 2024 election in anticipation of an incoming NLRB that would be more likely to reject their petition.

Congress Can’t “Protect College Sports” by Ignoring the Participants

While the PCSA is neutral on its face concerning the question of athletes’ employment status, it would enshrine into law a range of terms and conditions of athletic participation, eliminating athletes’ opportunities to bargain over these terms and in many cases setting terms that are favorable to schools, conferences, and the NCAA. As the American Economic Liberties Project wrote in its memo opposing the legislation, the bill “puts Congress in the shoes of the players and makes choices and tradeoffs they wouldn’t necessarily make in a true collective bargaining process, where health, safety, wellness, and economic terms would all be on the table.” These terms impact not just players’ experience in sports, but also in academics and their personal lives. Transfer rules, for example, seek to prevent frequently changing rosters and athletes easily seeking better contracts elsewhere. In doing so, it also limits athletes’ choice about which schools and teams are best for them as students to, for example, pursue a new major or be closer to family. In addition, it allows schools to use the transfer portal as a weapon to wield against students by kicking them into the portal as punishment, like if they’re suspected of organizing other athletes. Rather than allowing athletes a voice in the process, the PCSA locks into law the major terms of their participation, preventing athletes from winning better terms in the future and extending anticompetitive immunity to the NCAA that few industries enjoy.

Most concerningly, college sports legislation has been crafted with little to no input from the college athletes themselves. As one current University of Utah football player observed during a Senate committee hearing on the PCSA, “It’s like there’s no student-athlete in those conversations at all.” In recent weeks, current and former college athletes across the country have come out against the bill. A letter with signatories from a range of schools argues that the PCSA would make it “substantially more difficult for student-athletes to receive legitimate compensation,” while athletes from the United College Athletes Association have said they favor collective bargaining as a way to settle key questions in college sports. One former college athlete argued in an op-ed that “players, coaches, schools and communities that made these sports great in the first place” should be the ones to make decisions about the future of college sports—not Washington. As the joint letter states, the fact that “the issue of conference alignment and media rights pooling have been among the most contentious, and also seems to involve student-athletes the least” is very telling: right now, Congress and the NCAA are negotiating over the distribution of the $19 billion in annual revenues the college athletes generate through hours of practices, competitions, travel, and hard work without allowing them a seat at the table. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the AFL-CIO Sports Council, a collaboration between labor unions that represent professional athletes, similarly reject the PCSA.

Congress should step aside from attempting to govern the minutiae of college athletes’ daily lives and lock in further advantages for powerful entities such as the NCAA. Schools don’t need to wait on Congress to act; if they chose to, they could negotiate with athletes to build a fair and equitable college athletics system tomorrow by voluntarily recognizing athletes as employees. The athletes whose hard work and dedication are the raw material for the enterprise beloved by millions of Americans should be fairly represented in the process as the workers they are.

Other CLASP publications on the exploitation of college athletes and related public policies include:

 

By Christian Collins

Ohio’s higher education system faces mounting pressure from federal funding cuts, long-term state disinvestment, restrictive state policies, and institutional mismanagement. Federal changes could make college less affordable, while Ohio continues to underinvest in public higher education. Senate Bill 1 further restricts DEI efforts, collective bargaining, and some academic programs, disproportionately affecting marginalized students and public-service career pathways. The brief calls for greater state investment, stronger basic-needs supports, protections against institutional misconduct, more meaningful student input, and full repeal of Senate Bill 1.

>>Read the full brief

By Rachel Wilensky, Shira Small, and Stephanie Schmit

Beginning in the summer of 2025, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) engaged with the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) to support a workgroup of administrators of the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) Child Care program. CalWORKs Child Care is a critical supportive service associated with California’s Welfare-to-Work program. It is funded by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) dollars and the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), as well as supplemental state funding.  

Since 1997, CalWORKs Child Care has had three stages designed to provide care and to facilitate paths to self-sufficiency for CalWORKs participants. Stage One is currently administered by county welfare departments, and Stages Two and Three shift the family’s child care from county social service and welfare offices to Alternative Payment Programs (APPs), contracted organizations that administer child care vouchers. 

The focus of the workgroup was to solicit feedback on factors that would be important for the state to understand when considering consolidation of the existing program. The administrator workgroup was established to enable CDSS and the State to learn from the expertise and experience of the counties and child care contractors to create a program that is more supportive for families and easier to administer—giving administrators more time to focus on the families they serve. The workgroup aimed to elicit insights and ideas using various feedback strategies, with the goal of informing a consolidation proposal for CDSS. 

This report, drafted by CLASP, reviews the context for how the workgroup was initiated, outlines the feedback that was elicited in the workgroup, offers considerations and insights from CLASP based on the workgroup’s feedback, and documents the work materials from the group. 

>View the report here.

>Learn more information about the CalWORKS Child Child Consolidation Project. 

By Christian Collins

Authoritarian war machines are fueled through the sacrifice of young adults in service of empire. Presently, that fuel is refined through policymakers purposefully destroying the national education system and economy. Last year’s widespread cuts to Medicaid and SNAP leave states responsible for covering $450 billion in lost federal benefits over the next ten years, which will slow down and potentially reverse recent expansion of state-level education funding across the country. Restricted state-level education funding directly reduces the ability of students with lower incomes to enroll in and complete postsecondary educational opportunities, which in turn limits their access to good jobs.  

The U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) actions only exacerbates these funding issues with a rash of policies and decisions, including their ongoing rulemaking to reduce available financial aid for career fields with higher rates of enrollment from women and students of color; leaving large portions of the country’s 43 million student loan borrowers in limbo by laying off roughly half of the Federal Student Aid Office workforce; illegally moving student loan collection responsibilities to the Treasury Department to account for Secretary McMahon’s failures in managing the national student debt portfolio; and disruptions of existing federal education and workforce training programs via their illegal relocation from ED to the Department of Labor. These are all coordinated actions to cut vital economic lifelines and funnel people into military service. 

This deliberate destruction of federal public services is concerning for both its impact on the national economy and its specific impact on men, the primary target for increased military enlistment. Though women are eligible to enlist, and their educational access is being threatened, the administration has specifically focused on increasing enlistment for men and actively discouraging enlistment from marginalized groups like transgender people. Over the last five months, adult men across all measured racial demographics have lost employment at a higher rate than the overall workforce. As unemployment rates are improving, this means more men are dropping out of the labor force altogether. 

Adult Male Employment Level by Race: December 2025 through April 2026 (U.S, Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Demographic
Dec. 2025
Jan. 2026
Feb. 2026
Mar. 2026
Apr. 2026
Total Change
% Change
All Adults
163,992,000
163,097,000
162,912,000
162,848,000
162,622,000
-1,370,000 
-0.8 
>20 White Men
64,411,000
61,734,000
61,574,000
61,684,000
61,199,000 
–3,212,000 
–5.0 
>20 Black Men
9,938,000
9,402,000
9,407,000
9,328,000
9,464,000 
–474,000 
–4.8 
>20 Hispanic/Latino Men
17,935,000
17,700,000
17,618,000
17,621,000
17,542,000
–393,000 
-2.2 

 

Adult Male Unemployment Percentage by Race: December 2025 through April 2026 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Demographic
Dec. 2025
Jan. 2026
Feb. 2026
Mar. 2026
Apr. 2026
Total Change
All Adults
4.4
4.3
4.4
4.3
4.3 
-0.1 
>20 White Men
3.4
3.3
3.4
 3.2
3.5 
0.1 
>20 Black Men
6.9
7.4
7.0
7.3
6.9 
0.0 
>20 Hispanic or Latino Men
4.3
3.9
4.5
3.9
4.2 
-0.1 

Note: data for Hispanic or Latino men is taken from this link. 

A national economy careening toward recession, potential global food insecurity, the intentional removal of affordable educational and training opportunities, and the loss of public benefits at the federal level forces young men to choose between the morality of participating in an illegal war or socioeconomic survival for themselves and their families.  

However, male veterans’ increased access to higher education through the GI Bill and additional benefits like widespread tax exemptions have not protected their employment levels relative to nonveteran men. Along with not being immune from the administration’s cuts to public benefits, these are important factors to communicate to young men as they weigh participating in international war crimes as a socioeconomic lifeline. 

Adult Male Employment Level by Veteran Status: December 2025 through April 2026 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Demographic
Dec. 2025
Jan. 2026
Feb. 2026
Mar. 2026
Apr. 2026
Total Change
% Change
All Adults
163,992,000
163,097,000
162,912,000
162,848,000
162,622,000
–1,370,000 
–0.8 
>18 Veteran Men
6,883,000
6,739,000
6,743,000
6,735,000
6,727,000 
–156,000 
–2.3 
>18 Nonveteran Men
78,634,000
78,742,000
76,923,000
76,337,000
77,458,000 
-1,176,000 
–1.5 

 

Adult Male Unemployment Percentage by Veteran Status: December 2025 through April 2026 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Demographic
Dec. 2025
Jan. 2026
Feb. 2026
Mar. 2026
Apr. 2026
Total Change
All Adults
4.4
4.3
4.4
4.3
4.3 
-0.1 
>18 Veteran Men
3.8
4.3
3.9
3.3
3.5 
-0.3 
>18 Nonveteran Men
4.1
4.8
4.9
4.4
4.1 
0.0 

 

Policymakers shoulder the blame for this current system, but institutions have also made affordability pathways harder to navigate for students and families with lower incomes. For example, New America recently published research on how institutions have been working with enrollment management consultants to free up financial aid resources for wealthier students by pushing other families into taking Parent PLUS loans. These loans can go well beyond the $7,500 federal loan limit for dependent students, can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, and are subject to wage garnishment amongst other governmental debt collection methods. Colleges and universities are also using online education as a fundraising tool rather than a quality opportunity for an adaptable and less expensive on-ramp for students; treating housing as a profit-driven asset instead of a basic need; using consulting firms to identify programs to cut to hide other areas of financial mismanagement; and outsourcing the work of professors to artificial intelligence companies while closing departments and halting supportive services programs for students. These are factors for why public pushback from institutions against policymaker attacks is so rare, because some institutions have been willful participants. 

The overall employment levels for young men regardless of race have remained relatively stable since December 2025 but with high variance between age groups, which means that policymakers should be especially concerned about young men entering adulthood. This data is also irrespective of the fact that less than 30 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds hold quality jobs that offer fair pay, growth opportunities, and are at safe and respectful workplaces, so job gains for other age groups do not excuse a lack of urgency in offsetting the deliberate cratering of the economy and postsecondary education. 

Total Young Adult Male Employment Level by Age: December 2025 through April 2026 (Federal Reserve of St. Louis)
Demographic
Dec. 2025
Jan. 2026
Feb. 2026
Mar. 2026
Apr. 2026
Total Change
% Change
All Adults
163,992,000
 163,097,000
162,912,000
162,848,000
162,622,000
–1,370,000 
-0.8 
16y-17y Men
925,000
920,000
904,000
860,000
842,000 
–83,000 
–9.0 
18y-19y Men
1,689,000
1,650,000
1,740,000
1,707,000
1,829,000 
140,000 
8.3  
20y-24y Men
7,310,000
7,489,000
7,445,000
7,632,000
7,382,000 
72,000 
1.0 
25y-34y Men
19,307,000
19,398,000
19,291,000
19,171,000
19,431,000 
124,000 
0.6 

 

State governments and institutions have a variety of policy tools at their disposal to meet the public’s demand for increased financial investments in postsecondary education and reduced financial barriers to educational opportunities. States that act would also disrupt the Trump Administration’s efforts to sacrifice young men in an unnecessary conflict. One top priority should be to remove the tuition barrier, which nearly 1,000 institutions across the country have already done. Additional policy tools include:  

  1. Implementing fiscal strategies like Massachusetts’ DRIVE Initiative to offset federal divestment from public postsecondary education. 
  1. Updating existing state-level financial aid programs to better meet current and future needs of students, including transitioning from “last-dollar” to “first-dollar” programs.  
  1. Diverting public resources from exploitative for-profit institutions and substandard online schools to institutions that have proven results in providing upward socioeconomic mobility to students with lower-income or middle-income backgrounds.  
  1. Continued expansion of dual enrollment opportunities to help students accumulate credits earlier and at a lower cost.  

Postsecondary education is a pillar of American democracy, not a blunt tool to foster authoritarianism. Trump’s policy agenda has already been an abhorrent moral failure committed by policymakers and higher education leaders, a fatal domestic failure with the adaptation of these tactics for ICE recruitment, and now a tool fueling a global conflict and the destruction in Iran.  

The Trump Administration is consciously creating a K-shaped war economy wealthy benefactors profit off the suffering of the lower and middle classes. This is all to support the president’s impulsive bombing of other nations, and the Trump Administration has even resorted to mocking  those who have concerns about these actions. State policymakers cannot make the same mistakes as their federal counterparts. They cannot abandon the responsibilities of democratic leadership. 

On April 10, 2026, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) submitted the following responses to the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee’s request for information on the changing rules of governance in college sports and potential pathways for Congressional intervention. Our responses outline the challenges students currently face in a lopsided labor market where they lack federal labor protections, why attempting to offset federal student aid restrictions based on potential name, image, and likeness earnings is flawed and specifically disadvantages Black male students, and why the ability to collectively bargain must be linked with employment status instead of attempting to segregate those rights, amongst other responses.

>> Download file

Op-ed by Kevin B. Blackistone

Excerpt:

As Christian Collins, a Center for Law and Social Policy analyst in Washington, wrote three years ago about the racial economics of college sports: “From 2005 to 2019, Black college athletes across men’s and women’s basketball and men’s football in the largest five athletic conferences are projected to have lost between $17 [billion] and $21 billion in compensatory theft, or roughly $250,000 per athlete per year, if revenue sharing in collegiate athletics modeled that of professional sports leagues. College athletic programs are often complicit in the economic exploitation of underrepresented student populations.”

Read the full op-ed on MS NOW here. 

By Elyse Shaw and Lorena Roque

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, we should reflect on how far women’s rights have come over the years. However, that’s difficult to do when the Trump Administration has spent the past year engineering a wholesale attack on women’s rights. This onslaught has included attacks on the federal workforce, gutting the Department of Education and the proposed loan caps and loan forgiveness changes, clawing back EEOC guidance on harassment and discrimination at work, canceling grants that support women and LGBTQ+ individuals, and attacks on DEIA and trans people. Taken together, this has allowed the conservative movement to use its authoritarian playbook to strip women of their rights, economic security, and health and well-being. These are not one-off issue areas or separate attacks: this is a coordinated campaign to exert power and control over every aspect of women’s lives. 

Instead of promoting policies that support all working women, such as paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and equal pay, a new report from the Heritage Foundation outlines what type of women they actually want to support: cisgender straight white women who stay home to raise kids while their husbands work. Writers of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation have gone into detail about their pronatalist policy agenda for women in their latest report, Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. The Trump Administration has taken this playbook as its own and already begun to dismantle policies, setting women back half a century. All of these policy decisions are intentional and lead to the Trump Administration’s goal: restricting women’s autonomy and freedom in the United States. 

Controlling Women’s Lives: The Pronatalist Movement

Since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the conservative movement has been working to strip reproductive rights from women across the U.S. The fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 through the Dobbs decision signified an opportunity for the conservative movement to further erode access to basic reproductive health care and control women’s lives. Since Dobbs, women have been denied basic reproductive health care, with the delay or denial of care even leading to death. Some Southern states have sought to criminalize and violate women in regards to their reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. For example, a brain-dead woman in Georgia was forced to stay on life support against her family’s wishes, in an attempt to maintain her nine week pregnancy to viability and was forced to give “birth” while coma-induced. In another case, a Texas woman who suffered a miscarriage was charged with “abuse of a corpse” and jailed for five months. Just weeks ago, a sexual assault survivor in Tennessee, who was hours into pre-surgery preparation for sterilization, was denied that procedure at the last minute when hospital staff decided they had a “duty to protect her sacred fertility.” 

These types of cases are part of a larger playbook for the right-wing movement on who should be given government support. In the new playbook, “Saving American Families,” the Heritage Foundation authors acknowledge the high cost of child care, but instead of investing in universal child care or funding Head Start, they instead focus on incentivizing women to leave the workforce and stay home to raise children. They recommend limiting child care credits, programs, and tax benefits to families with one working parent and one stay-at-home parent. The paper details many other policies aimed at increasing the U.S. birthrate by restricting women’s autonomy – such as limiting public benefits to heterosexual married couples and banning no-fault divorce – while punishing single women and mothers. The report recommends creating stricter work reporting requirements for single mothers who access basic needs programs, rolling back access to higher education, eliminating all government-run registered apprenticeship programs, and eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit. All of this would disproportionately impact single mothers, who are more likely to be women of color and paid low wages, further marginalizing them. 

Limiting Access to Higher Education 

Postsecondary education is a key pathway to economic security for women, given that women with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, only slightly more than men with a high school diploma. At the same time, women rely on professional and post-baccalaureate programs for career advancement and economic mobility. In 2024, the Heritage Foundation made it clear that they believe education, especially higher education, is to blame for the nation’s declining birth rates. Their solution: restrict access to education for women. As a result, the Trump Administration is attempting to dismantle the Department of Education by restructuring departments and reassigning higher education grant programs to other federal agencies. In addition, the administration is threatening funding for colleges that maintain their commitment to DEI and proposing to overhaul student loans and loan forgiveness programs. These combined actions will make it much more difficult, if not impossible, for women to attend undergraduate or graduate degree programs. 

Federal Attacks on DEI/Gender Ideology 

On the first day of his second term, Trump launched an attack on DEIA and transgender and gender-nonbinary people, leading to the shuttering of federal offices and agencies, ending of programs and initiatives, and discontinuing of grant activities or entire grant programs that supported women. Across the federal government, even mentioning the term “women” was enough to get a project, program, or grant cancelled – from workforce development grants to grants for research into women’s health. And critical initiatives to advance women continue to feel these impacts. According to recent research, women scientists were disproportionately impacted by the NIH grant cancellations, as they were leading almost 60 percent of de-funded projects. These attacks will have long-lasting impacts on women’s health, well-being, and economic security. 

Economic Impacts

These policy decisions by the Trump Administration are driving women out of the workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 455,000 women left the labor market from January to August 2025. For the rest of 2025, only 184,000 women re-entered the workforce compared to 572,000 men during the same time period. A national survey revealed that 42 percent of women who left the workforce last year did so due to caregiving responsibilities, 37 percent left due to inadequate workplace flexibility, and 18 percent left because of insufficient wages to meet the high cost of child care. Strikingly, Black women have been the hardest hit by the labor market in the past year. By December 2025, Black women’s unemployment rate hit 7.3 percent, double that of white women and the highest it has been since the Covid-19 pandemic. The Trump Administration’s shrinking of the federal government has had the biggest impact on Black women’s unemployment rate. That’s because Black women represent 6 percent of the labor force and 12 percent of the federal labor force. With almost 330,000 federal jobs cut in 2025, Black women represent 33 percent of those job cuts. The Trump Administration will only amplify these numbers by eliminating minimum wage and overtime protections for millions of home health care and domestic workers. 

At the same time, women can’t achieve economic security without access to comprehensive health care. Abortion bans reduce women’s earnings and labor force participation, especially among Black and Latina women. In fact, when including in-state restrictive abortion policies, such as mandatory waiting times and unnecessary restrictions for providers, the U.S. economy has lost over $133 billion annually since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The economic cost of restrictive reproductive health care transcends abortion access because it also includes maternal mortality, the absence of cancer screenings and treatment, and the lack of access to pre/post-natal and doula care. Just to offer two examples: 81 percent of Black maternal deaths in Michigan are preventable and 40 percent of counties in Colorado are considered maternal health care deserts, meaning they lack a hospital, birth center, or obstetric care providers.

With Project 2025 as the playbook of the current Trump Administration, the newest Heritage Foundation’s report is alarming and should not be taken lightly. Additionally, with the rise of ‘tradwives’ and ‘princess treatment’ getting more traction on popular media platforms, the normalization of women’s subjugation hides what these conservative policies actually promote: the dangerous and violent reality of the government controlling women’s lives and bodies. 

By Christian Collins, Teon Hayes, Kaelin Rapport

2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the United States, and this February brings the 10oth  anniversary of Black History Month. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which founded Black History Month, calls us to celebrate Black history across the African Diaspora and how that history is tied to Black people’s current material conditions. Those conditions have become more precarious as the Trump Administration enacts its agenda to”Make American Great Again.”

Considering these two anniversaries, we should ask ourselves what great means, and great for whom? In the first year of Trump’s second term, his administration has enacted explicitly discriminatory policies reversing the progress made by civil rights leaders and activists in the struggle for equity. These actions disproportionately harm Black communities and destroy measures implemented to right historical wrongs.

Acknowledging the past through reparations is a necessary step toward building a future where the white supremacy undergirding the MAGA movement is stamped out. While there has been abundant research on racial inequality, more direct examination on how best to address harm and evaluate the impact of existing reparative policies and programs is needed. We can learn from those that have gotten off the ground so that all communities, especially ones still dealing with the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, can thrive.

>> Download the Brief Here.

January 20, 2026, Washington, D.C. – The first year of Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by unprecedented attacks on economic, racial, and gender justice. In a new report titled “The First Year of Trump’s Second Term: Harms to Children, Families, and Workers,” the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) provides a sampling of how the Trump Administration has pushed immigrants, workers, LGBTQ+ communities, and people of color further to the margins. 

CLASP’s report is not intended to be a comprehensive list. Rather, it highlights a number of specific actions and executive orders in the areas of immigration, child care and early education, nutrition, economic supports, health care and mental health, housing, higher education, and workers’ rights. In addition to documenting the harms of this past year, the report offers an overview of responsive actions taken by communities, policymakers, and courts to withstand and counter the  administration’s constant attacks on children, families, and workers. Finally, it provides ways that individuals and communities can fight back against these attacks. 

“We know Trump’s playbook,” said Wendy Chun-Hoon, president and executive director of CLASP. “We know that firing federal workers and slashing the federal government is a blow to the health care and public services that all our families count on.” 

“We know that the funding bait and switch that’s canceled food and nutrition programs in order to expand ICE and ‘protect’ us is making all our child care centers and communities less safe. And we know that this playbook of harm, hypocrisy, and hate lines the pockets of Trump’s billionaire cronies while all the rest of our families struggle to pay for groceries and rent,” said Chun-Hoon.  

“CLASP is paying attention to the harm and fear being inflicted by the very people who should be supporting us. Our communities are paying attention. And we won’t stop fighting for what we know everyone needs to thrive,” she said  

The report is downloadable here.  

 

 

 

By Christian Collins

The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act, H.R.4312, is a prominent example of the dangers in crafting broad legislation based on outliers instead of on the common experiences of students. Though the SCORE Act is a dedicated effort from Congress to punish college athletes for seeking the ability to be compensated for the labor they provide, this is not the first bill this year to directly target college athletes. H.R. 1, the reconciliation bill passed in July, includes a provision that removes Pell grant eligibility for any student receiving non-federal aid that equals or exceeds their full cost of attendance. This means that starting in fall 2026, every full-ride scholarship athlete across all college sports will be ineligible for Pell Grants: 

“(6) Exclusion.—Beginning on July 1, 2026, and not withstanding this subsection or subsection (b), a student shall not be eligible for a Federal Pell Grant under subsection (b) during any period for which the student receives grant aid from non-Federal sources, including States, institutions of higher education, or private sources, in an amount that equals or exceeds the student’s cost of attendance for such period.”

The SCORE Act and Reconciliation Bill Limit College Affordability Pathways for College Athletes 

For schools that opted into the House v. NCAA settlement, NCAA Division 1 level sports are now all treated as “equivalency” sports regarding the financial aid offers given to athletes. The term “equivalency” means that scholarships are allowed to be divided into partial scholarships split among multiple athletes. Prior to the settlement, six sports were deemed as “headcount” sports where only full-ride scholarships could be allocated: football and basketball for men’s programs, and basketball, volleyball, tennis, and gymnastics for women’s programs. 

Fifty-four institutions decided not to opt into the House settlement, which means that the old system of “headcount” versus “equivalency” sports remains in place. But beginning next year, every football and men’s basketball player attending one of those 54 institutions will lose Pell Grant eligibility. For the nation’s remaining 311 Division 1 institutions, as of fall 2026, their athletes will have to choose between receiving a full athletic scholarship or having access to Pell Grants. 

The Impact of this Pell Grant Provision Will Disproportionately Affect Black Men 

Access to Pell Grants, even for students who receive full scholarships through athletics, is critical for students with lower incomes to fund out-of-classroom expenses not covered by scholarships, including transportation, child care, and classroom supplies.  

This provision is almost surgically targeted at Black male students who participate in athletics due to the rates that they qualify for Pell Grants compared to other demographics. From the latest National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey data, nearly 69 percent of Black male college athletes on athletic scholarship received Pell Grant awards, compared to 53 percent of all Black male students and just 36 percent of all college athletes. Football and men’s basketball, the former two “headcount” sports which have the historical precedent of athletes being offered full-ride scholarships to participate in those programs and are the highest-revenue generating programs among all college sports, are represented by majorities and pluralities, respectively, of Black men. 

In their rush to guarantee the ability of institutions and third parties to profit off the labor of college athletes without consequence, the authors of the SCORE Act are sandwiching primarily Black male students into a cost-of-attendance trap. These athletes will now be forced to use revenue share payments and name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals to make up for losing Pell Grant dollars. Revenue share payments are currently capped, with schools also refusing to share publicly how much athletes are receiving from these payments or if they’re receiving payments at all. NIL deals are rare for most athletes and purposefully being delayed by institutions via the College Sports Commission, so even if athletes successfully land a deal, there’s no guarantee they get the money in a timely manner. 

Though the average disclosed NIL deal for Division 1 football and men’s basketball players through 2025 is $6,112, nearly 66 percent of all NIL deals for these athletes are worth $1,000 or less, which is nowhere near what athletes stand to lose in Pell Grant awards. 

Fixing College Athletics Requires Giving and Taking, But Congress Is Only Taking from Students 

The flawed logic behind the Pell Grant reconciliation provision—that athletes are now able to earn enough money through NIL deals and revenue sharing payments to not need Pell Grants—is the exact same flawed logic behind the SCORE Act provisions that clamp down on total compensation and federal labor protections of college athletes. 

Federal policymakers have two immediate pathways to reverse their present course of forcing college athletes to seek rare third-party generosity to afford cost-of-living expenses. One pathway can be exercised by the executive branch, which should provide clarity on how the Pell Grant changes within H.R. 1 will be enforced by using the upcoming negotiated rulemaking sessions led by the Accountability in Higher Education and Access through Demand-driven Workforce Pell Committee. The other is for Congress to craft legislation that truly supports athletes, which requires centering these students in the policy creation process to understand their actual circumstances.