President Donald Trump has signed a second executive order aimed at fixing college sports, this time laying out specific transfer and eligibility rules, limiting how athletes can be compensated for their name, image and likeness and threatening schools that violate rules with financial penalties, the White House announced Friday.
The order was signed on Final Four weekend for the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments and less than a month after the president convened a roundtable of college sports and business leaders to discuss concerns, big-picture solutions and potential federal legislation.
Whether many aspects of the order could stand up to legal challenges is uncertain, but multiple sources who have contributed to the document told The Athletic before the order was released that its goal was to spur legislative action. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the executive order before its release.
The order’s mandates — such as limiting athletes to one unrestricted transfer as undergraduates and placing a five-year cap on college eligibility — would not take effect until August 1.
Most notably, the order poses the possibility of federal funding being withheld from schools that do not comply with the rules, a hammer the Trump administration has held over institutions of higher education throughout the first 18 months of his second term.
An executive order cannot establish new laws or override existing state laws, some of which are contradicted by the directives of this order. The order also conflicts with previous court rulings and NCAA decisions, such as the ones allowing multiple immediate transfers. A number of Trump’s executive orders have been struck down in court, including one that would have barred federal funding for NPR and PBS; a federal judge recently blocked that order, ruling it in violation of the First Amendment.
For several years, college sports leaders have been lobbying lawmakers in Washington for a federal law to help regulate compensation, eligibility and other parts of college sports that have been thrown into upheaval by antitrust lawsuits and state laws.
The SCORE Act, a bill that would provide antitrust protections, preempt state laws that target rules set by the NCAA and conferences and prevent college athletes from being deemed employees, has been in limbo in the House of Representatives since last summer. The bill has some bipartisan backing in the House, but even with a Republican majority, it has not generated enough support to reach the floor for debate and a vote.
The SCORE Act also stands little chance of making it through the Senate, where it would need 60 votes and significant Democratic support. But many college sports leaders are still pushing for the passage of the SCORE Act to provide legislative momentum and attention on their issue.
“This Executive Order identifies some of the key issues facing college sports, including continued funding for women’s and Olympic sports,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), an opponent of SCORE who has introduced two other college sports bills.
An executive order can’t provide an antitrust exemption, and Trump’s order didn’t broach the subject of employment, instead offering more targeted solutions to particular problems.
The order would roll back transfer rules to the way they were before a federal judge shot down the NCAA’s one-time exception policy and launched perpetual free agency for college athletes. The order calls for athletes to be permitted to transfer just once as undergraduates and be immediately eligible to play for the new school. A second transfer would require the athlete to give up a year of eligibility without competing. Graduate students would get one additional free transfer once they have obtained a four-year degree.
With the NCAA facing a wave of lawsuits challenging eligibility rules, the order would install a new rule giving athletes five years to compete in college, with no exceptions. Currently, most athletes have five years to complete four full seasons of competition. The NCAA also has a waiver process that allows schools to request additional years of eligibility for athletes whose college careers are interrupted by circumstances beyond their control, usually due to injuries.
The NCAA has had more success in court defending its eligibility rules than defending its compensation rules, but all the legal challenges have created uncertainty and encouraged athletes to take their shots with judges if their waiver requests are denied by the NCAA.
The order states, “professional athletes cannot return to college athletics.”
Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss is set to play this season for the Rebels after a Mississippi judge granted his request for a preliminary injunction, essentially overruling the NCAA’s decision to deny him a sixth year of eligibility. Meanwhile, judges in Tennessee and Virginia denied similar requests from quarterbacks Joey Aguilar and Chandler Morris.
Trump’s order would also end NIL collectives, the donor-fueled organizations that rose to prominence after the NCAA lifted its ban on college athletes cashing in on sponsorship and endorsement deals. Collectives have already been marginalized and wound down in many places once schools were permitted to pay athletes up to $20.5 million directly in 2025-26 via a new revenue-sharing system, but schools are finding new ways to attempt to circumvent that cap through multimedia rights agreements and deals with apparel companies. The order steers clear of mandates related to how much schools can pay athletes.
This order is intended to be more comprehensive and instructive than the prior executive order on college sports that Trump signed last summer, which was titled “Saving College Sports” and touched on some of the same topics. That initial order made recommendations on how athletic departments should operate and directed government agencies to weigh in on things such as the employment status of college athletes and how to give more governance and enforcement power back to the NCAA. The order attempted to establish scholarship benchmarks for women’s and Olympic sports and ban “pay for play” compensation.
There have been no substantive changes in college sports as a direct result of that order, which was signed in July 2025.
At a White House roundtable on March 6, Trump promised to produce a new order within a week “because that’s the only way this is going to be solved.” Nearly a month later, this order is more comprehensive in scope. It was largely a result of the president’s frustration with the challenges of passing legislation through Congress and the way past court decisions have reshaped college sports, but he also acknowledged that the order was likely to be challenged in court.
“Let’s see if we can get it through the court system, which we might not be able to do,” Trump said at the roundtable.
The roundtable also led to the formation of presidential committees that began meeting this week to focus on and inform potential legislation. The committee’s focus on five areas — antitrust legislation, rules, NCAA reform, media rights and player representation — with an oversight group that includes university presidents, as well as New York Yankees president Randy Levine, Texas Tech board chair and Trump advisor Cody Campbell and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Many of the committee members also attended the roundtable, including conference commissioners, athletic directors and business executives, as well as NCAA president Charlie Baker, NBA commissioner Adam Silver and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“This action is a significant step forward, and we appreciate the Administration’s interest and attention to these issues,” NCAA president Charlie Baker said in a statement. “Stabilizing college athletics for student-athletes still requires a permanent, bipartisan federal legislative solution, so we look forward to continuing to work alongside the Administration and Congress to enact targeted legislation with the support of student-athlete leaders from all three divisions.”