The University of Virginia spent roughly $250,000 on federal lobbying in 2025 — about 25 percent more than in 2023 and 2024 — according to quarterly disclosure reports filed with the U.S. Senate. The increase in federal lobbying spending came as research universities nationwide confronted federal funding pauses, proposed cuts to research cost reimbursements and experienced a sweeping overhaul of federal student aid. The University has one federal lobbyist, Julia Smith, who leads the University’s Office of Federal Relations. Smith is the only lobbyist named in the University’s disclosure filings, and she described herself to The Cavalier Daily as the primary liaison between the University and federal government. Her role is to advocate for the University’s interests in front of Congress and federal agencies. According to Smith, she spends most of her time in Washington meeting with members of Congress — specifically with the Virginia delegation — and staff from committees of jurisdiction over University priorities. … The University reported approximately $200,000 in federal lobbying in both 2023 and 2024 before the 2025 increase to roughly $250,000. Virginia Tech, by comparison, reported $140,000 in early 2025, while Virginia Commonwealth University spent roughly $472,000 across 2023 to 2025. Harvard spent $950,000 on federal lobbying in 2025, while Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University and the University of Michigan each spent more than $1 million.

A new court filing from a former juror in the Alex Murdaugh murder trial reveals her continued efforts to make public the alleged jury tampering evidence from the 2023 trial. Juror Myra Crosby, known as the “egg juror,” filed documents saying that the public should have access to the state’s investigation into Becky Hill, who is the former Colleton County, South Carolina, court clerk, court filings show. Crosby earned her nickname after she was dismissed just hours before deliberations and famously asked a judge if she could retrieve a carton of a dozen fresh eggs and her purse that she had left behind in the jury room.

When U.S. Navy personnel are killed or wounded, Hampton Roads and other military communities across the nation want timely and accurate information. But the Trump administration, loath to respect the First Amendment and the public’s right to know, continues to constrain the ability of news outlets to do their job. Briefly last week, it appeared the Pentagon would begin severely restricting access to the service histories of Navy personnel, reversing a longstanding practice of sharing the records when requested, especially after a newsworthy event abroad. … The public has the right to know basic facts about the men and women leading our military as well as about the personnel they lead. As taxpayers, we all deserve accurate information about how our military is run and who’s running it and, importantly, essential details when something goes wrong — or right. While it’s good to see the Navy back off a change in releasing the service histories of sailors, there’s ample reasons for everyone — especially military families — to watch this closely. The Trump administration’s word on many matters, including this one, cannot be taken at face value.

In February of 2025, as college students across the country settled into their spring semesters, administrators at four major public universities in the Midwest received public records requests about their policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which arrived on the same day from a network of sites that looked like local news outlets, asked for all emails employees had sent the previous year containing the words “BIPOC, Indigenous, Latinx, Diversity, and Non-white.” The requests, from sites owned by a paid partisan network called Metric Media, were part of a strategic, ongoing effort to expose and castigate public universities for teaching with an eye on diversity. Around the same time, a nonprofit called Accuracy in Media began uploading gotcha-style hidden-camera videos to YouTube of school administrators talking about their continued efforts to foreground diversity and equity. The videos sought to highlight the contrast between those efforts and school rules that, in some cases, ban educators from talking about gender and identity. And last summer, the Oversight Project, an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, sent FOIA requests to the North Carolina public university system, seeking all syllabuses that contained any of a long list of terms, including “gender identity,” “racial equity,” “white privilege,” and “restorative justice.”