I’ll admit it – two months of DOGE has made me a little inured to stories about outlandish things that the Federal Government spends our money on.  

Promoting DEI in Serbia?   Transgender comic books in Peru?  Yaaawn.   Get back to me when you’ve got something interesting.  

So when I heard that there was a fracas about funding universities in Australia, a part of me thought of course there is.   Why would we not be funding universities in Oz?”

What I didn’t figure on was that there would be so much of it the risk of losing it would cause a national emergency down under.  The Trump administration is asking seven Australian universities, not to do without all that American aid money, but to justify the aid money they are getting, in terms of American nationional interest.  According to the Guardian:

The Trump administration told Australian university researchers a push to promote administration priorities and avoid “DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal” was behind a “temporary pause” of funding, according to a memo seen by Guardian Australia.

University sector sources say the US has severed research funding at six universities – Monash University, Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and University of Western Australia – since Donald Trump came to power, including some as early as January. ANU is the first university to publicly acknowledged it.

Which is, according to Sky News, an urgent enough matter that Australian PM Tony Albanese is being urged to drop everything and get on the case:

A memo sent by the US office of managament and budget to an Australian university project on January 27 and retrieved by The Guardian, declared financial assistance for the researchers was a waste of taxpayer money and explained federal spending priority would go towards “the will of the American people”.

“Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again,” the memo said.

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”

The cuts would leave a $600M hole in Australian research budgets. 

And if you guessed some Ozzie academics would refer to Americans wantintg American money to serve American interests as “foreign interference” – well, you’ve been paying attention this past four years (and you know that public unions are pretty much the same around the world):

“The Federal Government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms.” – Alison Barnes, NTEU National President

Read the full media release here 👉 https://t.co/vUg4if1lJw@AlisonBarnes25 pic.twitter.com/rGDB2mUIlY

— NTEU (@NTEUnion) March 13, 2025

The National Tertiary Education Union’s (NTEU) national president Alison Barnes slammed the missive, and said the Albanese government had to “guarantee Australian researchers would be protected.” “The federal government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms,” she said.

Not to mix my metaphors, but “the first three weeks of a new diet are the. hard part” seems appropriate under the circumstances.