CLASP
The Center for Law and Social Policy
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.
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.
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.
By Christian Collins
The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act, H.R.4312, is the culmination of a multiyear effort from colleges and universities to preserve an outdated and unjust economic system. Following the landmark House v. NCAA federal antitrust settlement, which brought roughly $2.8 billion in back damages to former college athletes from uncompensated labor and established the first revenue-sharing model for institutions to directly pay students for athletic labor, Congress is attempting to permanently wipe out those hard-fought gains.
The SCORE Act conflates two distinct issues: the inequitable state of college athletics and the financial insecurity of institutions due to federal funding cuts. Taking rights away from students won’t solve either issue. This legislation is just an attempt by Congress to pass the blame from its own inaction onto students who are only seeking the right to be paid for their labor.
Seeking to comprehensively address inequities in college athletics is no excuse to codify the greed of institutions into federal law. The SCORE Act doesn’t create a more equitable college athletics system; rather, in its current form, it contains multiple provisions that directly harm college students by preserving the ability of institutions to profit off them without fair compensation, including:
- An antitrust exemption protecting institutions from liability for collusion to limit earnings of college athletes and their ability to freely transfer schools.
- Permanently barring college athletes from employment status, which prevents students from being protected by federal employment law.
- Preserving the ability of institutions to charge students athletic fees. This is a common practice; Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision schools alone raised $668.5 million this way in 2023. The bill bans this practice only for institutions that earn more than $50 million in annual media revenue from athletics, which applies to less than 1 percent of all Title IV colleges and universities across the country.
- Pre-emption of existing state laws related to college athletics, which is a likely constitutional overreach by Congress going beyond its current legal jurisdiction over public education.
The SCORE Act’s Narrow Perspective Will Have Widespread Consequences
The bill’s primary objective is to deny college athletes basic federal labor protections and codify severe economic restrictions on current and future athletes that no other students on campus face. From smaller private schools that utilize athletic programs as an enrollment tool to large public universities that use athletics as public marketing and donor engagement opportunities, the labor of athletes extends far beyond their time on the field. Instead of providing additional protection for students from harassment and abuse brought by gamblers, preventing states from relying on gambling taxes to make up for larger federal funding shortfalls and fund athletic programs, and how institutions often spend more on coaching and staff compensation than on all financial aid for athletes, Congress has used the SCORE Act to prioritize allowing schools to pay their own students as little as legally possible.
Concerningly, the authors of this bill failed to address the racialized impact it would have on marginalized students, especially Black men. The SCORE Act undercuts the notion that college athletics are a primary driver of socioeconomic mobility for young Black men, who represent majorities and pluralities of athletes competing in the highest revenue-generating sports (football and men’s basketball) across Divisions 1 and 2. This bill would codify academic institutions being able to reap billions in annual revenue from the uncompensated labor of Black students through a “plantation” economy, but not having to support their academic and professional development.
The SCORE Act Would Protect Institutions from the Consequences of Exploiting Their Own Students
Limiting the income potential of, and labor protections for, student workers on college campuses only signals that institutions care more about what money they can extract from students versus how they can best educate students. Institutions have made no complaints over the rampant revenue generation and athletics-related spending that they’ve embarked on for years, but are now begging Congress to stop athletes from receiving a fair share.
The SCORE Act is an attempt by a small subset of universities to preserve an inequitable economic system due to pure greed. Members of Congress should oppose this legislation and instead work to advance policies that support students by crafting legislation that includes the following provisions:
- Guaranteed collective bargaining rights and employment status for college athletes.
- Federally guaranteed health and safety standards for athletes regardless of competition level.
- Prohibiting public institutions from entering financial relationships with gambling companies, along with increased protections for students from being harassed by gamblers.
- Increasing federal spending on higher education so that states aren’t incentivized to promote sports gambling for fiscal sustainability.
Other CLASP publications on the exploitation of Black male college athletes include:
This statement can be attributed to Isha Weerasinghe, Director of Public Benefits Justice at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP)
Washington, D.C., July 1, 2025—The budget reconciliation bill passed today by the Senate on a vote of 51-50, with Vice-President Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, will cause significant harm to millions of children and families, all for the sake of providing more tax breaks for the wealthy. The bill includes substantially more funds to accelerate the devastating immigration enforcement actions that are tearing families apart and undermining the safety and well-being of vulnerable children, including those who are U.S. citizens and asylum seekers.
The Senate’s version of the bill contains deeper cuts to Medicaid than the version passed by the House last month, excludes many lawfully present immigrants from eligibility, and expands the House’s work requirement to include some parents, which will cause millions more people to lose health insurance. This means that children and seniors, along with millions of middle-class and working families, people who need long-term care, and those who live in nursing homes will be at risk of losing their health insurance. An estimated 17 million people will lose health insurance, and 8 million people will be at risk for losing food assistance–in the same bill that gives tax breaks to billionaires and corporations.
In addition to these harmful Medicaid cuts, the bill also adds dangerous provisions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that will restrict access, tighten eligibility, and shift major costs from the federal government to states, potentially forcing them to end their SNAP programs entirely. This represents a major threat to the health care and food assistance that millions of families depend on for their health, well-being, and stability. The bill also denies immigrants key federal benefits like Medicaid and SNAP that they contribute to, and creates barriers for them to apply for legal or permanent status by raising fees.
The bill will also cut off access to the Child Tax Credit for an estimated 2.6 million U.S. citizen children simply because their only caregiver(s) lack a Social Security number. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy indicates that, under this bill, the wealthiest households in the country will see an average tax cut of about $65,000, while the households with the lowest incomes will only receive an average tax cut of $110. This disparity is particularly stark, given that this bill does nothing to support the needs of families with low incomes who are especially harmed by the lack of affordable child care and increased cost of living.
The Senate bill also affects college affordability and the financial well-being of students by limiting student loans for programs and eliminating repayment options for new borrowers facing economic hardship or unemployment. The bill would also restrict access to Pell Grants for over 4.4 million students, making it harder for students with low incomes to cover costs and finish their programs.
The bill will now go to the House, whose leadership has made it clear that they will push it through as quickly as possible to meet a self-imposed July 4th deadline. Given the disregard for children, workers, immigrants, and families shown in the House’s reconciliation bill, provisions targeting the most vulnerable are likely to remain intact.
Like the House bill, the Senate’s version will harm the health, security, and well-being of communities across the country. CLASP urges House lawmakers to reject this damaging bill and focus on policies that prioritize workers, children, and families over billionaires.
This statement can be attributed to Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director and president of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP).
Washington, D.C., May 22, 2025—CLASP is outraged that the U.S. House of Representatives voted today to pass its reconciliation bill. This bill guts health care, restricts access to food, sacrifices our higher education system, and punishes immigrant families, all to provide more tax breaks for wealthy people and corporations. The legislation will now go to the Senate, where further changes are expected to be made.
The reconciliation bill contains numerous policies that will make life even more difficult for millions of children, families, and people living on the margins. Cuts to essential benefit programs will cause disproportionate hardship to communities of color, individuals with disabilities, immigrants, U.S. citizen children with one or more undocumented parents, and college students with low incomes. If signed into law, states across the country will see costs shift to them as the federal government pulls back funding for important programs. This will negatively impact state budgets and force states to push people off Medicaid, SNAP, and end other public services.
Proposed changes to the Child Tax Credit could lead to an estimated 4.5 million children who are U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents no longer benefiting from this credit. Medicaid could see $715 billion in cuts, and an estimated 13.7 million people are at risk of losing health insurance. The new provisions to SNAP would cut nearly $300 billion from the program—marking the largest reduction in its history—meaning 11 million adults and children may receive less food assistance or lose it entirely. A proposed increase of $45 billion in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement puts millions of mixed-status immigrant families at risk of being detained and deported as part of the administration’s devastating mass deportation plan. And education-related cuts include severe restrictions on federal student aid for students with low incomes.
These numbers only include people who will be directly harmed by funding cuts. They don’t account for the local economies that will be destabilized by residents having to choose between buying groceries or paying rent, missing work out of fear of immigration raids, or forgoing needed health care because they are no longer covered by Medicaid or afraid to access it even if they are eligible.
Millions of families will lose their health care, access to food, and the Child Tax Credit if this bill is passed into law, and more immigrant children and families will suffer long-term harm. CLASP is opposed to this bill and calls on the Senate to do everything it can to stop this bill from becoming law.
CLASP’s budget reconciliation blog series examines the policies put forward that have particular resonance for children, families, and communities with low incomes. The series can be found here.
CLASP submitted this statement for the record in response to the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions “Hearing on Fiscal Year 2026 Department of Health and Human Services Budget.”
CLASP submitted this statement for the record in response to the May 14, 2025 “Budget Hearing-Health and Human Services” of the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations.