Cornell spent $444,000 on federal lobbying in the second quarter of 2025, which is the University’s highest-recorded investment in one single quarter, according to data from the U.S. Senate. The University has already spent nearly $700,000 this year, which is a 69 percent increase from the same period in 2024.
This surge comes amid a clash between higher education and the Trump administration, as universities around the United States face funding cuts and political attacks on academic freedom; diversity, equity and inclusion programs and international students.
Cornell’s “doubling down on lobbying” is part of a broader “shift [that] can be seen throughout the university community,” wrote Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist with Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., in a statement sent to The Sun.
“Northwestern University has increased its lobbying expenditures more than fivefold. Columbia has more than tripled its lobbying expenditures over the same period in 2024, while Pennsylvania, Harvard and Yale have roughly doubled their expenditures,” Holman wrote.
Holman wrote that the Association of American Universities, a consortium of leading research institutions that includes Cornell, “has spent a record $9 million on direct and grassroots lobbying so far this year.”
“Universities have [also] sought to hire Trump-related lobbying and PR firms to gain an inside track,” Holman added.
Notably, the University paid client Miller Strategies, founded by Trump’s 2025 inauguration finance chair Jeffrey Miller, $140,000 last quarter. The firm works to influence executive and legislative policy on behalf of its clients.
“University leadership knows how proposed regulations or policies might affect them and their institutions, and they want their perspectives to be heard and understood,” wrote Prof. David Bateman, government, who taught a class about the legislative branch in the spring.
The recent federal endowment tax hikes, part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” serve as an example of the effects of university lobbying. Many colleges, including Cornell, successfully lobbied to reduce the maximum proposed rate from 21 percent to eight percent and to change eligibility formulas, according to Bateman.
Bateman wrote that Cornell “should not expect to be hit by the endowment tax” as a result.
Bateman worries that under the current administration, university lobbying has become “at the very least an implicit, and perhaps explicit, negotiation, in which universities are told what they need to do to avoid further or new attacks."
"Every institution knows that it can be made the target of an extortion campaign, and so lobbying becomes negotiating over terms in the vain hope of avoiding extortions now or in the future," Bateman wrote.
While lobbying can influence policy details, it is unlikely to substantially change political priorities, according to Bateman. He wrote that recent actions against higher education are driven primarily by ideological motives of the Trump administration.
Cornell and other nonprofits remain subject to federal lobbying limits and public reporting requirements. But Bateman wrote that those protections have weakened under the current administration.
"I believe the University Faculty, charged under state law and basic principles with determining educational policy, and for whom academic freedom is the very condition of their work, is ready to stand and fight to ensure Cornell leadership holds the line, and reject any effort by the federal government to undermine academic freedom such as seen with Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania," Bateman wrote. "Because it is fighting back, not lobbying, that is our only hope."
Cornell Media Relations did not offer additional information when asked by The Sun about Cornell’s recent lobbying activity.
Anant Srinivasan is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a staff writer for the News department and can be reached at asrinivasan@cornellsun.com.
