The Trump administration’s proposed funding cuts of 90% for tribal colleges and universities surprised many, especially for a tribal university already impacted by federal layoffs since February.

Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, has faced numerous challenges since President Donald Trump took office in January, including losing nearly a quarter of its staff on Valentine’s Day, when the administration laid off all probationary federal employees. The layoffs cost the university 37 employees, including kitchen workers, custodians, teachers, administrators and academic advisers.

The university is one of two tribal colleges and universities that is federally controlled by the U.S. Department of Interior.

However, two federal judges later ordered those employees, as well as all federal probationary employees from six federal agencies who had been laid off, to be reinstated.

According to an Interior Department budget overview, the Trump administration has requested $22 million for all 37 tribal colleges and universities for federal fiscal year 2026, which starts Oct. 1, compared to the $196 million appropriated for those programs in 2025.

Congress has yet to decide on the details of the budget bill.

“This is incredibly concerning,” said Moriah O’Brien, who serves as the vice president of Congressional and Federal Relations for the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the 35 accredited tribal colleges and universities and two developing institutions.

Tribal colleges and universities receive 74% of their total revenue from federal funding, the consortium said in February.

More than 30,000 jobs are created across the local and regional economies near the tribal colleges and universities in 16 states where all these institutions are located: Montana, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Alaska, California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

The majority of these jobs are tied to federal funding and would affect faculty and staff positions.

This federal funding cut would impact 80% of Indian Country, the approximately 160,000 Native students and community residents that these institutions serve, plus the more than 245 federally recognized tribes that have students studying in these postsecondary institutions.

Unlike Harvard University or other major schools, tribal colleges and universities don’t have massive endowments, O’Brien said. Rather, they heavily rely on federal funding.

A Bureau of Indian Education spokeswoman and the Bureau of Indian Affairs public affairs office declined to comment on the president’s proposed cuts. The Department of Agriculture’s public affairs office also declined to comment.

For Oglala Lakota College in western South Dakota, this funding loss could mean less financial aid for students, said college president Dawn Frank.

“We are part of one of the poorest counties in the United States,” Frank said. “These policies widen existing gaps and threaten educational attainment and workforce development. They also threaten tribal sovereignty by reducing access to higher education, particularly among low-income, non-traditional, first-generation students.”

Oglala Lakota College has campuses in Rapid City, South Dakota, and on the Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River reservations, and has an enrollment of 1,188. A significant percentage of the students are non-traditional, meaning they’re working full-time or part-time jobs and caring for families of their own.

“(Tribal colleges) are change agents,” Frank said. “They change individual lives. They provide stability to families and also work in the form of employment on the reservation. … They provide hope.”

Haskell students who learned about the president’s proposed budget cuts expressed shock and dismay at the news.

“It’s an amazing school and I think cutting the funding is way out of line, especially for Native Americans,” said Creighton Youngbird, a Cheyenne Arapahoe and a sophomore paraprofessional education major.

Stopping before the Haskell dining hall, Youngbird said the university provides an affordable education to Indigenous students who might otherwise not be able to afford college. It also serves as a powerful cultural education center for Native students seeking to reconnect to their cultures.

Ryan Kingfisher, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation and a junior social work and Indigenous studies major, said he worried the cuts could force Haskell to close.

“The students and the employees have been walking on eggshells knowing that we’re hanging by a thread,” he said. “I really don’t know what to think about it.”

One of the schools specifically targeted is the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, O’Brien said. IAIA is a living institute of Native art, a public tribal land-grant college that serves anyone interested in the study, creative application, preservation and contemporary expression of Indigenous arts. Along with Haskell, IAIA is the second tribal college that is federally controlled.

Within the thousand-page appendices in the fiscal year 2026 budget released by the Trump administration, a line specifically requested to completely zero out funding for IAIA, O’Brien said.

“This is shocking,” she said.

“IAIA exists because our ancestors signed treaties in exchange for education. To defund IAIA is to undermine a sacred promise. More than 4,000 graduates have carried forward our cultures, stories and leadership — this is what’s at stake.”