One of President Donald Trump‘s latest executive orders is aimed at tapping what he called his “secret weapon” to crack down on DEI initiatives at colleges and universities.
Of the seven executive orders related to education that Trump signed on Wednesday, one was aimed at changing the college accreditation process. Accreditors are independent agencies that review colleges every few years to determine if they meet the necessary standards to continue receiving federal aid, including student achievement and diversity on campuses.
If a college meets the accreditor’s standards, it can take part in the billions of dollars of student loans and federal grants for low-income students that the Department of Education disburses each year.
Trump’s executive order said that accreditors have allowed schools to continue receiving federal funding based on their DEI standards and have “abused their enormous authority” by accrediting schools that engage in “ideological overreach.”
“America’s higher education accreditation system is broken,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement, adding that accreditors push schools “in ideological directions when they should be focused on core subjects.”
“The result is more bureaucracy, less innovation, sprawling DEI administrative complexes, and burdensome oversight by unaccountable accreditors rather than state education leaders and duly appointed governing board members,” McMahon said.
The order directs McMahon to monitor and potentially terminate accreditors who she finds are violating civil rights law by granting accreditation to colleges with DEI initiatives. It also directs McMahon, in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services, to investigate DEI at medical schools that receive federal funding.
Trump has previously called college accreditation his “secret weapon” to overhaul higher education in his vision. In a campaign video from 2023, Trump said that he will “fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”
“We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all,” he said.
It’s unclear how McMahon will move forward with implementing the executive order. It was accompanied by six other orders related to education, including one to boost the number of apprenticeships in the US, and another aimed at educating students on artificial intelligence.
The move comes amid Trump’s broader plans to reshape the US education system. He has launched dozens of investigations into both K-12 and higher education institutions over practices that don’t align with the administration’s beliefs, like diversity policies. More broadly, Trump signed an executive order calling for the entire Department of Education to be eliminated.
Some advocates criticised Trump’s moves to reshape accreditation. Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said in a statement that Trump is “weaponizing the accreditation process to gain the leverage he seeks.”
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