For those who value American universities for their essential contributions to both knowledge production and education on a global scale, these are tough times. In my view, the problem is not only or primarily the current president, but the expansive vision of a plebiscitary president—a “unitary executive” in control of every decision-making body in the federal government—that the Federalist Society has advanced for decades. This vision is especially dangerous when combined with the ambitions of many in the present Republican Party to extend their power from the political sphere to all manner of other spheres, including knowledge production and education. Those spheres depend on the delegation of federal government decisions to independent expert bodies that can engage in stable, long-term, reasoned decision-making as they make complex multi-year bargains with their applicants and grantees. Such delegation is part of a fundamentally capital-P Progressive conception of government. It is in profound tension with the vision of presidential power that six Supreme Court justices are currently inscribing into American law.

However, American courts other than the Supreme Court have sometimes been able to use the limited tools available to them to stand athwart this unfolding historic disaster and successfully yell “stop.” In 2025, when the Trump administration attacked my own institution, UCLA, with several waves of federal grant cancellations and a demand for a $1 billion payment (and more), the response from the University of California itself was passive, but two independent lawsuits by faculty, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and labor unions representing UC employees were remarkably successful, resulting in federal district court orders that restored nearly all the “suspended” federal grants and put in place injunctions against the continued federal government harassment of the university.

It is not an accident that courts played this role. Trial courts read the statutes lawmakers write. The core norms of the rule of law and the professional culture of judging are inherently receptive to the key things universities want: regularity, reasoned decision-making, consistency, impersonal judgment, expertise. So: What could we do to more effectively enable courts to use their powers to constrain executive actions that undermine these things?

First, we need statutes. On the model of an anti-SLAPP Act, we need a federal statute that creates expedited procedures (and standing, see below) for individual professors, researchers, and universities—if only they’d ever stick up for themselves—to sue and win quick injunctions and damages for government actions that may have other pretexts but whose real purpose is to strategically suppress government-disfavored speech or viewpoints by grantees (or people or institutions associated with grantees). An anti-SLAPP Act for DOGE would not solve everything, but what such a statute would do that is important is focus the judicial inquiry in the right place: not on whether there’s a sufficient basis for the government’s asserted pretexts, but rather, on whether the government’s actual motivation was to exert political control over speech or viewpoints at (or of) the university. Some judges find their way to this inquiry already, but a statute would help a lot.

There is also a broader statutory change that would support an anti-SLAPP Act for DOGE but would also affect a broader range of cases: Congress should make clear that researchers and others whose work is funded by federal grants have standing to sue when the government acts unlawfully in making, renewing/nonrenewing, suspending, or otherwise administering federal research grants. Courts have been mixed on this issue. If 2025 and 2026 have taught us anything about federal grantees, it is that many large institutions are too paralyzed by their own fears and stakeholders to defend their rights adequately. Thus, it is essential that those with the most at stake—the individual researchers whose careers depend on the grants—unambiguously have standing to sue for grant-related decisions that violate federal law.

Second, we need new norms and rules about how government grantmaking works and where money resides during the course of a multi-year funded project.1 1. This includes, most obviously, scientific grantmaking, but it should also include student financial aid, which should be awarded prospectively on a multi-year basis as well.  Possession is nine tenths of the law in part because possession determines which side must go to court. We should restructure grantmaking across many agencies so that once a multi-year funding decision is made, the funds for the full grant go in the first year from the Department of the Treasury to an independent entity, which then releases the funds on an appropriate schedule to the grantee unless the government requests that the independent entity rescind the grant. If the independent entity finds the government’s reasons for rescinding the grant unpersuasive then the government must go to court. Instead of grantees needing to obtain a court order to restart a “suspended” grant, this burden will fall on the government.

In our federal system, the only way to set up an independent governmental entity that is truly and unambiguously outside the control of a plebiscitary president is for that entity to be created by the states. Thus, federal law should authorize, and state governments should create, state entities to act as repositories for federal grant funds and distribute them over time to universities and other grantees within their states. These independent state entities should not have any discretion to refuse to distribute funds that both the federal government and the grantees want distributed. But they should be allowed to invest the money sitting in escrow in U.S. Treasurys, and use any interest to make their own small grants aimed at building institutional infrastructure, such as at universities, to better apply for federal grants.

There are large transition costs involved in switching from funding, say, 20 percent of five different five-year grants in a year to pre-funding 100 percent of a single five-year grant in a year. Indeed, this sort of temporal shift has recently been a tool of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut science funding. There is a way around the problem, however. A Congress that is authorizing a new regime of state holding institutions should take the opportunity to spend much more annually for several years on each federal grant program in order to make this transition without reducing the total amount actually distributed to grantees each year. The large temporary transition cost will pay lasting dividends in building sources of independent expert authority over these matters that sit firmly outside the political control of any future “unitary executive.”

Third, we need statutory reforms of the Tucker Act and more generally the procedures of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (USCFC). Currently, the federal government’s strategy of moving fast and breaking contracts is enabled by the way claims against the federal government for breach of any contract are funneled into a court whose procedural and substantive differences from federal district courts make it impossible to enjoin or quickly remedy lawless decisions.2 2. This situation looks significantly worse after several recent Supreme Court interventions. I am currently agnostic about whether the better strategy is to drastically improve the USCFC (granting the power to issue injunctions, reforms to increase speed and flexibility), move grants for knowledge production and education out of the USCFC by expressly authorizing federal district court litigation about these matters, or both.

Fourth, we need reforms that build the capacity of the recipients of federal grants to band together to use courts when necessary. The past year or so at UCLA has taught me that the central challenge faculty and other grantees have in bringing legal claims against the federal government—or intervening when the federal government has brought a claim against a university—is simply money. Litigation is expensive, especially if done well. Congress could help by creating and broadening fee-shifting provisions for certain categories of lawsuits against the federal government.3 3. Specifically, categories of lawsuits where the plaintiff has successfully proved that the federal government failed to satisfy its procedural or substantive statutory obligations to make decisions on the basis of reasoned judgments backed by appropriate expertise. States could help by creating offices within the state attorney general’s office to provide direct legal help to faculty and others attempting to use litigation to challenge arbitrary or discriminatory decisions by the federal government. Law firms could engage in more of this work pro bono. Faculties could organize themselves into AAUP chapters or faculty associations. States could facilitate such organizing by legally recognizing such groups through law separate from general labor law. And so on.

The capital-P Progressives who championed independent expert agencies a century ago would be surprised and likely horrified by this list of reforms that rely on courts. In their view, much of the point of creating expert executive agencies was to get their decisions out of the hands of courts. But it turns out that the courts were not the most dangerous branch to the goal of building the informed, stable, expert government decision-making bodies on which global scientific and educational progress depends.