A 1978 law set what tribal colleges are paid per student. The 2027 budget proposes paying none of it.

In 1978, Congress created a formula to fund tribally controlled colleges: $8,000 per Indian Student Count, adjusted annually for inflation, written directly into the Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities Assistance Act.▸ Two budget cycles now show how that promise is actually kept. Congress just rejected an 83% cut to the program for fiscal 2026. The administration's fiscal 2027 budget, submitted four months ago, proposes eliminating the program's funding line entirely — a request Congress has not yet acted on. Between those two budget fights, one of the two colleges the federal government runs directly cut roughly a quarter of its own staff in a single week.

The Bureau of Indian Education groups its higher-education spending into one budget activity, "Post Secondary Programs (forward funded)."▸ For fiscal 2026, the Department of the Interior's own budget justification shows that activity funded at $127.4 million — identical to fiscal 2025's actual spending, meaning Congress rejected the administration's original request to cut it to $22.1 million. That $127.4 million splits three ways.

$30.3 million runs Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI), the two postsecondary schools the bureau operates directly.▸ $9.2 million funds two tribal technical colleges, United Tribes Technical College and Navajo Technical University. The largest piece — $87.9 million — is the formula grant that reaches 29 tribally chartered colleges under the 1978 Act, working out to $9,182 per Indian Student Count, according to the colleges' own fiscal 2026 appropriations request to Congress.

The administration's original fiscal 2026 budget proposed cutting that $127.4 million activity to $22.1 million — an 83% reduction that would have dropped Tribal Colleges and Universities funding to zero along with the two technical colleges.▸ Congress rejected it and funded the activity at the prior year's level instead. Four months before this piece published, the administration submitted its fiscal 2027 budget — and made the same request again, in a more absolute form.

The FY2027 justification states plainly that "the budget does not request funding for the Tribal Colleges and Universities program" — a $87.9 million cut to zero — and separately zeroes the $9.2 million Tribal Technical Colleges line.▸ Haskell and SIPI, the two schools the bureau runs itself, would lose $8.2 million, about 27% of their combined budget. American Indian Higher Education Consortium president Ahniwake Rose warned in May 2026 that "if this budget was to pass, our TCUs would be forced to close within a year." AIHEC counts 35 tribally chartered colleges and universities nationally, serving over 160,000 Native and other rural students annually and supporting an estimated 40,700 jobs, per the group's own economic-impact figures.

The 1978 statute did not just set a dollar figure — it built in an inflation escalator.▸ That escalator has not tracked actual prices in nearly five decades of appropriations.

ProPublica's 2024 investigation found that if the 1978 base had actually kept pace with inflation, tribally controlled colleges would be receiving roughly $40,000 per student today — instead, funding bottomed out at $5,235 per student at one point since 2010 and, per AIHEC's own figures, sat at $9,182 per Indian Student Count across fiscal years 2023 through 2025.▸ ProPublica calculated the gap between actual appropriations and the inflation-adjusted formula at roughly $250 million a year, even before the elimination proposed for fiscal 2027. Actual per-student funding today covers well under a quarter of what the law's own escalator implies it should be.

None of this is abstract to the people employed by it.▸ On February 13, 2025, Haskell Indian Nations University — one of the two schools the $30.3 million Haskell/SIPI line funds directly — announced that 35 probationary employees, about 30% of its roughly 146-person staff, would lose their jobs that week, under an Office of Personnel Management directive to terminate probationary federal employees government-wide. The cuts hit "basically every department," from instructors to custodians to academic advisers, and 34 courses lost their instructors outright.

On March 7, 2025, three tribal nations — the Pueblo of Isleta, the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes — joined five Haskell and SIPI students in suing the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Education in federal court, represented by the Native American Rights Fund.▸ The complaint puts the termination count at 37 and argues the bureau cut staff without the government-to-government consultation tribal nations are owed under treaty law. "They keep saying that these cuts won't impact individuals and services," Haskell freshman Ella Bowen said in the case filing, "but they do — they affect us a lot." Fourteen of the terminated employees were later offered their jobs back, on a basis the bureau itself described as potentially temporary.

Dollar figures for fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027 are drawn from the Bureau of Indian Education's FY2027 Budget Justification, the most recent official document to show both years side by side. Per-student figures blend AIHEC's own FY2026 appropriations request (the current rate) with ProPublica's 2024 inflation analysis (the historical low and the inflation-adjusted counterfactual) — two different vintages of the same chronic-underfunding story. Haskell staffing figures reflect the university's own February 2025 count of 35; the pending federal lawsuit's complaint puts the figure at 37.