The 1994 Equity Act made 35 colleges land-grant institutions. Their research budget is zero.

The U.S. land-grant university system has three tiers.▸ The 1862 Institutions — the original 57, chartered under the Morrill Act — and the 1890 Institutions, 19 historically Black colleges added when Southern states refused to integrate the first tier, each draw a dedicated federal funding stream for agricultural research and extension, paid out by formula every year. In 1994, Congress added a third tier: 35 tribal colleges, made land-grant institutions under a law called the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act. Three decades later, the formula-funded research-and-extension category that feeds the other two tiers has no entry for this one — the line reads zero, in the Congressional Research Service's own tally of appropriations law.

The land-grant system runs dedicated formula ("capacity") programs for agricultural research and extension: the Hatch Act for the 1862 tier, the Evans-Allen program for the 1890 tier.▸ For the tribal tier, there is no equivalent. The Congressional Research Service's most recent full comparison of all three tiers, covering FY2020 appropriations under P.L. 116-94, puts capacity funding at $574 million for the 57 1862 colleges and $124 million for the 19 1890 colleges. For the 35 1994 tribal colleges, the corresponding cell in the CRS's own table is a dash — no comparable program has ever been authorized.

In place of a capacity program, the 1994 tier has four small, separately authorized line items: an endowment, a competitive research grant, a competitive extension grant, and a flat per-institution "equity" grant.▸ Combined, the CRS counted $28.9 million in FY2021 appropriations across all four — spread across 35 colleges. The largest piece, the Tribal College Endowment Program, doesn't pay out directly: Congress's appropriation feeds a Treasury-held fund, and the colleges split whatever interest that fund earned the prior year — $5.0 million in FY2020, the last figure CRS reports.

That endowment's annual appropriation has barely moved since.▸ The Continuing Appropriations, Agriculture, Legislative Branch, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Extensions Act, 2026, enacted November 12, 2025, set it at $11,880,000 for FY2026 — a nominal $11.9 million, the same figure CRS reported for FY2021. Five budget cycles, the same number, no adjustment for inflation. USDA's Rural Development arm separately earmarks $8 million a year for tribal-college facilities — construction and repair, not instruction or research — under the same FY2026 law.

How thin that funding cushion is showed in early 2025, when the Trump administration froze USDA grants nationwide, including money already committed to tribal colleges.▸ ProPublica reported at least $7 million in suspended grants, among them a five-year, $9 million award to the College of Menominee Nation in Wisconsin — one year into it — that had been paying tuition for about 20 students. USDA told the outlet only that the grant programs were "under review."

The 35 tribal colleges serve a fraction of the students the other two tiers do — 23,754 against 1,980,539 at the 1862 tier and 104,278 at the 1890 tier.▸ But they are also, for many of the students they serve, the only accessible pipeline into agricultural science, natural-resource management, and veterinary and food-science work on or near tribal land. Smaller enrollment is the reason the statute gives for funding this tier differently. It is not, on its own, a reason to fund it at zero.

Capacity-funding and enrollment comparisons reflect the Congressional Research Service's most recent full three-tier tally (FY2020 appropriations and 2019-2020 enrollment); the endowment and facilities figures reflect the FY2026 enacted appropriation under P.L. 119-37.