Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Trump’s Attacks on Higher Education
Washington, D.C. (June 4, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust hearing on President Donald Trump and Republicans’ quest to quash independent voices by attacking higher education, students, and researchers.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s subcommittee hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust
Hearing on “The Elite Universities Cartel: A History of Anticompetitive Collusion Inflating the Cost of Higher Education”
June 4, 2025
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to our witnesses for being with us today.
Republicans convened in the middle of the night two weeks ago to pass their billionaire tax break bill which even Elon Musk now calls a “disgusting abomination,” another class-war tax scam that will not only throw 14 million Americans off Medicaid but increase the national debt by three trillion dollars. In case our friends missed it, Elon Musk, who you have been praising since the administration began, has a message for you today: Shame on (you), “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong,”
So I was pleasantly surprised to see we were going to have a hearing on antitrust because there used to be Republicans like progressive trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt who actually believed in protecting the American people against price-fixing conspiracies, monopoly, and industrial collusion, runaway corporate power.
I thought, Mr. Chairman, we could finally get together to protect our personal data, stop price-fixing for concert fees, and lower prices on everything from eggs and other groceries to credit card junk fees.
Silly me. Like everything else, antitrust in the hands of our friends is just one more chance to attack America’s colleges and universities that recuse to surrender control to that luminary academic scholar Donald Trump, who wants to personally take over faculty hiring, student admissions and academic affairs at every university in the country. I don’t know why Trump is so mad at Harvard—they let in his son-in-law Jared Kushner after the Kushner family donated $500,000 to Harvard, just like Trump pardoned Kushner’s father Charles, a major Trump donor who is our new Ambassador to France, for his multiple convictions for tax evasion and witness tampering.
Now, that would be a worthwhile hearing, Mr. Chairman, how wealthy people like the Kushners and the Trumps buy their way in to America’s “elite institutions,” as Donald Trump calls them.
But antitrust is now just a weapon of political attack, not economic analysis. When businesses advocate sustainable investing, House Republicans accused them of violating antitrust when consumers want to exercise the right to boycott. Republicans accused them of violating antitrust. Gee, if you don’t support their monstrous ugly tax break bill for billionaires, they will accuse you of violating antitrust. We’ll probably be having a hearing on how Elon Musk is now violating antitrust. he’s turned against Donald Trump and their appalling bill.
So today, they’re accusing just eight universities—who represent less than one half of one percent of the undergraduate students enrolled in America—of engaging in some vague but massive antitrust conspiracy.
Republicans actually trotted out this pathetically weak theory in the first Trump Administration and of course no antitrust scholars took it seriously, and even their own Department of Justice didn’t do anything with it. They control the Antitrust Division again. Why do they need another hearing in this Committee? Why don’t they just bring their case if there’s a case? They’ve got the power. That’s what they’ve been talking about.
Look, this is pure power politics. President Trump’s attacks on higher education reflect a standard move by authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. This is right out of the dictator’s playbook: subdue and control any institution that could provide a check on your lying and your corruption, prevent any possibility of opposition and dissent from forming against the autocrat in his regime, clear a path for the agents of propaganda and disinformation and destroy the institutions that have given us great advances in scientific discovery and intellectual inquiry, as Mr. Nadler points out.
J.D. Vance gave the whole game away, by the way, when he repeatedly quoted Richard Nixon to say, “The professors are the enemy.” Nixon said, “The professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”
As Department of Education head Linda McMahon ominously warned, if schools want to continue to do their research they must fall in line with the Administration and its goals, they must be, “in sync, with the administration and what the Administration is trying to accomplish.” That’s a federal government takeover of every private and public university and college in America.
Harvard has stood up to the Administration’s attempted hostile takeover, rejecting its blatantly unconstitutional demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the “ideology” of its faculty and students. In response, the Administration has come after the University’s grants and, more recently, even its ability to enroll foreign students—only to be shut down by the courts, and not “left-wing rogue Democrat judges”, but Republican judges too—for violating the University’s First Amendment Rights. It has threatened to come after the university’s tax-exempt status as well and asked all federal agencies to cancel its contracts with Harvard.
We’ve got academic freedom in America under the First Amendment. And now the Trump Administration ridiculously threatens to come after the University’s tax-exempt status. They want to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and they’ve asked all federal agencies to cancel all of the contracts they have with Harvard to get the work of the American people done.
But Trump is losing in court every day and Harvard is winning as it stands up for academic freedom and it’s right to make scientific and academic progress, and hundreds of colleges and universities across the country are standing with Harvard.
DHS head Kristi Noem has already said that its actions against Harvard should “serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions.” After Trump canceled more than $1.5 billion in federal research grants, we know that state universities and community colleges have been hit hard. At smaller schools, researchers are going to lose their jobs, labs will close and important work will go undone.
Our Republican colleagues have no interest in making higher education more accessible and more affordable. In their big, beautiful bill, they are cutting programs that help students pay for college, all to fund their tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Those cuts include limits to Pell eligibility; the end to subsidized loans; and a host of other destructive changes that will push college out of reach for thousands of Americans. The Administration also proposed nearly an 80 percent reduction in federal work-study funding and eliminating support for childcare for students who are parents.
What world are these people living in? This is breathtaking duplicity to claim that the Ivy League schools are conspiring against their consumers to make tuition unaffordable when House Republicans are complicit in the largest setback in access to education in decades.
Not content to directly undermine American students through direct cuts to education, the Republicans also propose cutting $880 billion from Medicaid and $300 billion from SNAP, the nation’s primary anti-hunger program. Do you know what happens to millions of low-income students who do not have health care and cannot afford to eat? Most of them are going to drop out of school.
Today’s hearing just regurgitates MAGA agenda: to persecute and punish anyone who refuse to submit to Trump and Donald Trump’s right-wing ideological agenda or gets in the way of their plan to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans on the backs of everybody else. It is a cruel, dangerous program, and it’s got nothing to do with antitrust law.
I yield back.