We are facing a financial reckoning in the United States under President Donald Trump. Acknowledging that reality is not an endorsement of Elon Musk’s hack-and-slash approach at the Department of Government Efficiency. Rather, it’s an important first step in having an honest, nonpartisan conversation about an issue Americans care deeply about. Let’s start with the basics. Unsurprisingly, American voters want lower taxes and smarter government spending. A recent Cato Institute poll found 89% of Americans supporting auditing all government spending for possible waste, fraud and abuse. Meanwhile, most Americans support making the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent which would avoid a massive tax increase when most of the act’s provisions sunset at the end of 2025.

Government officials shriek at the prospect of tax cuts and for good reason. We don’t have enough money to fund the federal government as it is, even if the grandiose promises of DOGE come to fruition. Yet policymakers often turn a blind eye to a massive reserve of wealth sitting largely unnoticed and untaxed. That wealth lies in more than 1,700 private non-profit American colleges and universities. These private schools, some sitting on enormous endowments totaling $837 billion, are given a free pass on a slew of taxes that most multi-million and multi-billion-dollar enterprises would be forced to surrender to the government.

But these institutions are, in many ways, non-profit in name only. Their executives enjoy exorbitant salaries. They charge students debt-inducing tuition for attendance. They spend generous amounts of money on athletic programs for the purpose of making even more money off of television deals and merchandise. All the while, they sock money away into massive endowments that, for most of American history, have gone untaxed.

We say “most of American history” because the aforementioned 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took a monumental step by instituting an excise tax on annual private university endowment profits. Needless to say, that provision should be extended at the very least. But we believe the focus on collecting tax revenue from private institutions needs to go even further.

Take, for example, Johns Hopkins University here in Baltimore. Hopkins owns 176 different properties across the city. But because Hopkins is a non-profit institution, those properties are exempt from taxation. Meanwhile, Baltimore homeowners are forced to pay the highest property tax rate in the state. Let’s be clear, Johns Hopkins and universities like it are tremendous assets for both our region and the country as a whole. The research they conduct and the expertise they provide are invaluable. But it is reasonable to ask them to pay their fair share, especially when their educational services, at least in the case of Hopkins, are cost-prohibitive for most of the population of Baltimore. Many Baltimoreans derive no real benefit from Hopkins enjoying tax-exempt status. That should change.

Some experts have floated the idea of eliminating the non-profit sector altogether. We aren’t prepared to go that far. But it shouldn’t be controversial to point out the Internal Revenue Service has become extremely generous with handing out non-profit status to organizations since 2010. That trend deserves scrutiny beyond academia.

Baltimore is home to many universities, and there’s no doubt some will see our call for universities to pay their fair share as an attack on universities themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need to take a long, hard look at any sector of American enterprise where new tax revenue can be generated. Academia just happens to be the most clear and obvious industry to meet that description.

Might some payment in lieu of taxes be presented as a compromise? In Baltimore, PILOTs have sometimes been offered voluntarily by nonprofits to at least cover the direct services they use. A landmark 10-year $60 million PILOT agreement covering 14 large Baltimore nonprofits signed in 2016 is set to expire next year. The arrangement has netted the city just $6 million per year (with $1.86 million coming from Hopkins) but it might prove a useful starting point for a better, fairer arrangement.