Pocket Rescissions, Language Education, and National Security, by Deborah Cohn

On September 25, 2026, the White House released a statement, “President Trump Takes Historic Action to Eliminate Wasteful and Harmful Spending,” which begins: “President Trump is committed to utilizing all possible tools to cut wasteful and harmful government spending that does not benefit American citizens.” In this case, he was announcing a pocket rescission to cut “nearly $1 billion of the most harmful government spending.”

Among the programs that, according to the statement, “your tax dollars [are] being wasted on” are “Ed Funding for Woke International Education ($70 million): These programs provide grants and fellowships to support institutions bringing foreign students and faculty to the United States to study or teach language, conduct research, and provide professional and curriculum development. These programs have deviated from their core mission and instead support wasteful and divisive projects, including doctoral dissertations on queer and trans community building in foreign countries.”
 
The funding being rescinded was allocated for the Centers Aligned with Areas of National Need programs, a collaboration between the Department of Education and the State Department. The federal government announced a grant competition for CAANN in June, 2026, in place of a Title VI competition (CAANN was to be funded under the same authority as Title VI: Title VI, Part A, Section 602(a)(4) of the Higher Education Act of 1965). On September 10, 2025, the Department of Education issued a “Notice of Non-Continuation of Grant Award” to Title VI awardees, citing the department’s FY 2026 budget request, which claimed that the programs “are inconsistent with Administration priorities and do not advance American interests or values.”
 
Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from supporting “woke international education,” these programs have, throughout their history, “benefit[ted] American citizens” by underwriting training in critical languages and area studies that was indispensable to the national defense--as the revamped program title, with its emphasis on “areas of national need,” reflects. Rescinding the funding undercuts U.S. national security, economic, and public health interests, as I show in what follows.
 
Title VI originated as part of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, which itself was passed in the wake of the 1957 launching of Sputnik to strengthen the U.S. educational system to allow it to keep up with the Soviet Union’s technological advances (it was later moved under the Higher Education Act of 1965).
 
Language education (along with area studies) was included in the NDEA alongside of math and sciences because it provided access to information on Soviet scientific and technological accomplishments—and because the U.S. educational system, after years of neglect of modern language curricula and pedagogy, offered few opportunities to study Russian (or many other languages). 
 
For over 65 years, Title VI provided support for faculty and students at U.S. universities who studied and taught modern languages and area studies through grants for Language Resource Centers, National Resource Centers, and Foreign Language and Area Studies programs, among others.
 
The federal government long recognized the program’s contributions to U.S. national security. According to an Office of Post-Secondary Education website that has been taken down in the past year, Title VI helped to constitute “the framework for building and expanding U.S. expertise and capacity for understanding other geographic world regions, cultures, peoples, and gaining advanced skills in less commonly taught languages.” According to the same defunct website, Title VI has “prepar[ed] highly qualified individuals with critical skills to meet U.S. national security, education, business, diplomatic, and economic competitiveness needs.”
 
These “national security, education, business, diplomatic, and economic competitiveness needs” have not, of course, disappeared. The U.S. ability to meet them, however, has sharply declined, and this pocket rescission will inflict even greater harm on the nation’s ability to defend itself and keep its economy strong. (Note that the GAO has found pocket rescissions to be illegal in any case.)
 
Language study in the U.S. has been declining since 2009. A 2024 report from the Modern Language Association (MLA) shows that university enrollments in languages other than English fell by 16.6% between 2016 and 2021. To give but one example to put this into perspective, in 2021, there were just 1500 more enrollments in Russian (17,598) than there were in 1958 (16,042), despite the fact that the current war between Russia and Ukraine, as well as Russia’s role as a top cyberthreat, makes knowledge of the language indispensable to protecting national security. (The MLA is preparing a report on its 2024 census of language enrollments that is eagerly awaited for information on further developments in these trends.)
 
And yet, even as language enrollments decline, there is, as Dan E. Davidson has observed, a “staggering shortfall across all federal agencies in personnel competent in critical languages and strategic world areas, including the absence within government of a linguistic ‘surge capacity’ for responding to crises in areas of the world not necessarily previously identified as strategic” (133). In 2016, nearly a quarter of the State Department’s overseas positions were held by people who did not meet the language proficiency requirements for their jobs. The numbers were even higher for positions requiring critical languages such as Arabic, Dari, Farsi, and Urdu. These language gaps have hindered officers’ ability to protect embassies, manage emergency situations, and more.
 
Language barriers have also been fatal obstacles to obtaining crucial scientific and medical knowledge. For example, early research on avian flu was published in Chinese in January 2004, but the World Health Organization and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization did not learn about the research until August of that year—and then still had to get the work translated (Cyranoski). And the COVID-19 pandemic further underscored how devastating language barriers can be to public health.
 
These barriers also negatively impact businesses and the economy. The 2017 annual report of the now disbanded International and Foreign Language Education office in the Department of Education began by declaring that “Perhaps more than at any other time in American history, our citizens’ preparedness to engage with other nations is vital both to our country as a whole and to individual career success. Global trade accounts for 1 in 5 American jobs, and exports by U.S. firms reportedly drove 8 percent of U.S. job growth and 30 percent of Gross Domestic Product growth in 2014” (1). Many U.S. jobs depend on global trade, and many employers have reported lost opportunities due to a lack of language skills and international competence.

Until recently, Title VI funds supported the teaching of over 200 less commonly-taught languages. Many of these are critical languages that are important to U.S. national security, and many would not be taught in U.S. universities were it not for Title VI funds. Indeed, since the program has terminated, many language courses have been canceled and various programs and centers closed. At the same time, these programs create a pipeline of language teachers for future generations of students. Additionally, universities with language and area studies expertise share their expertise with the federal government by, for example, sending faculty to teach in the Language Training Centers program, which “provides language and regional expertise training for Department of War (DOW) personnel.” Having a continuous pipeline of language speakers and teachers is thus crucial: languages viewed as critical to national security require hundreds to thousands of hours of study to reach professional proficiency, so any gaps will take a long time to fill.

In the years following the First World War, language study declined sharply as a result of political isolationism and anti-German sentiment (22 states even implemented laws that prohibited or restricted the teaching and public use of German and other foreign languages). The onset of the second World War quickly pointed out the shortsightedness of this approach: U.S. soldiers and diplomats were unable to communicate with their counterparts, prompting the rapid development of an intensive army language training program to address the situation.
 
The characterization of CAANN as “woke” and “wasteful and harmful” is miles off the mark, while the rescission of these funds is an own goal that harms the U.S. national interest, damages our economy, and will continue to leave us unprepared for years to come. This is a lesson that we do not need to learn again.
 
REFERENCES
 
Cohn, Deborah. “Fewer U.S. college students are studying a foreign language − and that spells trouble for national security.” The Conversation (Nov. 16, 2023).
https://theconversation.com/fewer-u-s-college-students-are-studying-a-foreign-language-and-that-spells-trouble-for-national-security-198135
---. “Breaking down the “language curtain”:  Language Study in the United States during the Cold War.” ALD Bulletin 48.1:12-34 (2024).
---. “Higher education, research, and the international image of the U.S. under the second Trump administration,” Public Diplomacy Council of America’s blog, June 2025. 
 
Cyranoski, Davis. “Bird flu data languish in Chinese journals.” Nature, 24 August 2004, n.p.
 
Davidson, Dan E. “Ensuring US National Capacity in World Languages and Cultures for the Twenty-First Century: More Learners, More Languages, Better Results!” International Education at the Crossroads, edited by Deborah Cohn and Hilary Kahn, Indiana University Press, 2021, pp. 132-44.
 
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education. International and Foreign Language Education Annual Report 2017, February 2019.
 
I am grateful to LaNitra Berger, the former president of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, for her input on this piece.
 

Deborah Cohn