By Graham Lee Brewer For the second year in a row, the Trump administration is proposing slashing federal funding for tribal colleges and universities. President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal calls for a $1.5 trillion increase to defense spending and would carve billions of dollars out of programs that fulfill trust and treaty responsibilities to tribal nations, including entirely eliminating funding for the Institute for American Indian Arts, the country’s only federally funded college for contemporary Native American arts. The budget proposal released last week also calls for cutting funding for TCUs, as well as funding for two schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education: Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico. Students at both colleges sued the BIE…











