President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget blueprint would eliminate or sharply reduce multiple federal education access programs, including TRIO and Gear Up, Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, and large cuts to Federal Work-Study. The plan also proposes trimming major agency functions tied to campus compliance and education research, including the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences. Higher education would face additional pressure as the proposal targets $354 million in grants for minority-serving institutions and would slash discretionary Department of Education funding overall. Trump’s plan frames reductions as part of shrinking the Department’s footprint, but it also raises the likelihood that campus financial aid, student support, and civil-rights enforcement resources would be constrained if Congress adopts the proposal. The proposal also seeks to collapse Title II teacher professional development funding into a smaller block-grant structure for states—another access and capacity lever for school systems that feed the K-12-to-college pipeline. Separately, the administration’s budget revives consolidation proposals that would fold smaller programs into a new “MEGA” grant framework. For colleges and universities, the immediate impact is twofold: near-term uncertainty for recruiting and persistence initiatives that rely on federal dollars, and longer-term risk to data collection and compliance capacity through reductions tied to OCR and education research functions.