A renegade member of Donald Trump’s own party has blasted the president’s attempts to pressure the nation’s top universities to comply with his MAGA agenda.
“The surest way to ruin the best technical school in the world is to let the federal government tell them how to run it,” Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie wrote on
His late-night message comes after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday became the first university in the country to reject White House proposals tying federal funding to a set of MAGA administration requirements.
The Department of Education sent a memo this month to nine major U.S. universities outlining a number of conditions those institutions would have to meet, such as limiting international student enrollment and barring transgender people from playing sports in a way that matches their gender identity, in exchange for priority federal funding.
“By signing the pact, universities gain a competitive advantage,” a White House spokesperson told NBC News. “The administration does not plan to limit federal funding to only compact schools, but they will receive priority for grants where possible, as well as invitations to White House events and discussions with officials.”
MIT didn’t have it. “In our view, American leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In this free marketplace of ideas, people at MIT willingly compete with the best, without preferences,” the school’s president, Sally Kornbluth, wrote in a response to the DOE on Friday.
“Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to solving the problems facing higher education,” she concluded.
Rep. Massie has increasingly become a rare dissenting voice in Republican ranks during the second Trump administration. He joined MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in seeking greater transparency in the White House’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case.
Massie co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act with Democratic counterpart Ro Khanna, requiring the Justice Department to make public all unclassified files relating to Epstein’s crimes.
Those efforts, alongside his votes against Trump’s spending proposals and his criticism of the president’s use of his war powers without congressional approval, have placed him firmly in Trump’s crosshairs, with the MAGA leader calling him “big time” and a “loser” and even threatening to support a primary challenge against him in the midterms.