America's largest Christian university triumphs over Biden administration's 'coordinated lawfare'

The Federal Trade Commission gave up the last vestiges of its lawsuit against Grand Canyon University and its President Brian Mueller nearly two years after accusing them of deceptive advertising and illegal telemarketing, putting an end to what the nation's largest Christian university called two years of "coordinated lawfare" by the Biden administration.

The three Republican commissioners, serving without any Democrats while an appeals court determines if President Trump lawfully fired commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, cited a string of court losses for the government and the Department of Education already rescinding its earlier $37.7 million fine for alleged misrepresentation of the cost of its doctoral programs.

"In its reduced form, this case presents consumers very little upside relative to the cost of pursuing it to completion," Chairman Andrew Ferguson and commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Mark Meador said in a joint statement. "We view it as imprudent to continue expending Commission resources on a lost cause."

President Biden's Education Secretary Miguel Cardona vowed to shut down GCU but the effort ran into legal roadblocks even before Donald Trump's second election victory. 

The only remaining defendant was GCU's "largest service provider," Grand Canyon Education, after a district court twice dismissed GCU itself in 2024 and 2025. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled against Cardona a year ago, finding the department wrongly denied GCU's nonprofit application by "relying on IRS regulations that impose requirements that go well beyond" Higher Education Act requirements.

"They threw everything they had at us for four years, and yet, despite every unjust accusation leveled against us, we have not only survived but have continued to thrive as a university"  Mueller said.

GCU noted then-FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra announced a joint effort with the departments of Education and Veterans Affairs nearly four years ago to further probe for-profit institutions, a designation that Education "controversially kept GCU in 2019 despite prior approvals from all other regulatory bodies." 

They "collectively launched five investigations" of "fishing expeditions requesting voluminous amounts of information in hopes of uncovering wrongdoing," each triggering "copycat lawsuits and investigations by the other agencies for the same claim," forcing GCU to "expend thousands of employee hours and millions of dollars to defend itself" against duplicative allegations.

The university noted every other institution that recognized GCU's return to nonprofit status since 2018 as Biden officials refused, including the IRS, state of Arizona, Higher Learning Commission, Arizona Board for Private Postsecondary Education and NCAA.