Northwestern’s lobbying spending swelled to more than $1 million in 2024, the most it’s spent in nearly three decades and a roughly 150% increase from the previous year.
It comes as no surprise in a year when NU was embroiled in investigations of campus antisemitism from federal lawmakers and preparing for additional guardrails with President Donald Trump’s then-looming return to the White House.
“Like many of our peer institutions, as scrutiny of higher education has increased on Capitol Hill, we have increased our lobbying efforts to address legislative issues that could impact University research and operations,” a University spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily.
NU’s lobbying expenditures in the second half of 2024 totaled more than $800,000, significantly more than any of its total annual spendings in the last decade.
Out of the eight recorded lobbyists, double the previous year’s amount, NU appeared to have enlisted a new throng of lobbyists from Harbinger Strategies, composed mostly of former staffers to Republican congressional leadership.
NU lobbied on a range of issues, stretching from research funding, endowment tax to patents rights and student-athlete compensation.
Many of these issues have already become flashpoints in the new Trump administration. Republican lawmakers have continuously floated the idea of raising universities’ endowment tax. And in the coming months, funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation could face further freezes and cuts.
In an expense report for $517,000, NU lobbied on bills including the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, College Transparency Act and College Cost Reduction Act. There were also contributions to issues related to research securities, artificial Intelligence and the NAIRR program, a pilot program aimed to lay out nationwide infrastructure for AI research.
The report also indicates there was lobbying activity for “issues pertaining to House Education and Workforce May 23, 2024 hearing ‘Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos.’”
Joining several other U.S. colleges, NU appeared to have lobbied on a homeland security bill that would restrict funding to institutions of higher education that had been funded by the Chinese government.
In 2024, few other top-ranked universities in the country recorded as much lobbying as NU — let alone such a drastic increase in spending. Harvard University and Princeton University’s lobbying spending hovered around $620,000 and $460,000, respectively, a slight fluctuation from the previous year.
Email: jerrywu2027@u.northwestern.edu
X: @Jerrwu
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