August 07, 2025 12:54 PM UTC

Gabe Evans' Tour Of Destruction Plows Into Aims Community College

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• by: Colorado Pols

With Congress adjourned for the August recess, vulnerable Republicans like Colorado’s Rep. Gabe Evans are holding impromptu photo-ops with various institutions and stakeholders in their districts–since publicly announcing these events in advance would lead to protests–and in Evans’ case, trying to force a script on locals to avoid the hard questions about the policies of the Trump administration and the budget bill Evans wrote putting the Trump agenda into statute.

Last week, Evans dropped in on Aims Community College in Greeley with a Trump administration official to see how bigly and beautifully things are going:

We don’t know exactly what Evans discussed at Aims Community College on the subject of artificial intelligence, but we do know that community colleges like Aims are under severe duress at the moment as federal funds are frozen and/or withheld, student aid faces major cuts, and anything with even a scintilla of deference to the once-cherished goals of diversity and inclusion faces an ideological purge. As the New York Times reported Tuesday:

Since January, the Trump administration has waged war on the nation’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities, freezing billions of dollars in research grants to Harvard and blasting away at Columbia’s institutional autonomy.

But collateral damage from these attacks has engulfed schools of all types, including the country’s 1,100 community colleges, which educate about 6.4 million undergraduates each year — roughly 40 percent of the national total and more than twice as many as are enrolled at every highly selective college and university in the country combined.

Like their four-year counterparts, community colleges are grappling with disappearing federal grants, shuttered D.E.I. offices, eliminated programs, canceled cultural convocations and panicked students and staff…

By accepting everybody, community colleges were on the front lines of serving students with legacies of exclusion. These schools then had to do the hard part of developing talent — helping their historically un-college-educated students actually catch up. They had to make decisions about tailored supports for their diverse student bodies and the different barriers specific groups faced, about basic academic programming and affordability; they had to figure out whether faculty and coursework and campus life reflected the makeup of the students in ways that helped them succeed. With the sweeping attacks on D.E.I. — the all-encompassing, catchphrase notion of it — that fundamental core of what community colleges do was now in jeopardy.

From the Weld County Food Bank to hospitals across Evans’ district, it’s the same story: Gabe Evans drops in for a visit, and then says whatever he wants about what he heard from his constituents. The only way to get the truth is to circle back with the people Evans uses as a photo-op backdrop and ask them if Evans’ version of their discussion is accurate.

That’s when you find out either Evans lied, or never bothered to listen.