After decades of partnership with the U.S. government, American colleges are facing new doubts about the future of their federal funding.

President Donald Trump has reopened a debate in the fight over the federal government’s role in education policy after signing an executive order to dismantle the U.S. Education Department.

The Education Department’s civil rights branch is losing nearly half its staff in the Trump administration’s layoffs, effectively gutting an office that already faced a backlog of thousands of complaints from students and families across the country.