President Trump Signs Executive Order to ‘Save College Sports’

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday, bringing sweeping changes and reforms to college sports, including a prohibition on third-party, pay-for-play payments.

Additionally, the law classifies college athletes as amateurs rather than employees.

The executive order (EO) comes a the end of a lengthy process in which collegiate sports executives sought relief and stability from Congress in their fervent yet fruitless effort to rein in the exploding salaries of players and massive disparity of budgets between universities, that accompanied the advent of the name, image, and likeness (NIL), era.

While Trump’s executive order, titled the President Trump Saves College Sports, prohibits third-party pay-for-play payments, it “does not apply to legitimate, fair-market-value compensation that a third party provides to an athlete, such as for a brand endorsement.”

In addition to saving women’s sports by banning men from competing against females, Trump comes to the aid of female athletes again with this executive order by requiring “the preservation and, where possible, expansion of opportunities for scholarships and collegiate athletic competition in women’s and non-revenue sports.”

Due to ballooning budgets fueled by NIL in some of college athletics’ most lucrative sports, such as football and basketball, sports conference executives were concerned that less lucrative sports, especially women’s sports, could suffer significantly. The risk of those adverse effects on women’s sports is now greatly diminished by this executive order.

The EO also codifies and puts into law one of the earliest actions of President Trump’s National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) general counsel, which was to rescind an order from the Biden-era NLRB general counsel that stated that college athletes were employees of their schools under the National Labor Relations Act.

The recently settled House v. NCAA case last month not only empowered institutions to share money directly with athletes, including some $2.8 billion in back pay, but it also established the creation of a new enforcement arm, the College Sports Commission. A regulatory body overseeing revenue sharing and NIL deals in college athletics, and ensuring fair compensation for student-athletes.

“Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Education, in consultation with the Attorney General, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Education, and the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, shall develop a plan to advance the policies set forth in subsections (a)-(c) of this section through all available and appropriate regulatory, enforcement, and litigation mechanisms, including Federal funding decisions, enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, prohibiting unconstitutional actions by States to regulate interstate commerce, and enforcement of other constitutional and statutory protections, and by working with the Congress and State governments, as appropriate,” the order reads.

One of the items college sports administrators had pursued in the past was an ati-trust exemption, which appears not to be included in the executive order.