In 2020, when serving as President of the International Association for Political Science Students (IAPSS), I established contact with Chris Gannon, a former Vice-President of the United States Student Association (USSA), the national student government in the United States. IAPSS had been trying to establish contact with the USSA for about a year. At that time, the USSA’s website was down, its Facebook page had not been updated since 2018, and its phone number listed on Facebook went to a law office. Gannon informed me that the USSA, which can trace its origins to the 1940s and whose previous iterations had made substantial contributions to global student politics, had essentially gone inactive, save for a small group of alumni trying to revive it. It made me wonder how this could be; how the USSA could have fallen so far.
The USSA and its predecessor organizations are known for contributing to the development of extracurricular activities beyond mere campus levels and for sustaining long-term student advocacy and activism for much of the twentieth century when other US student movements tended to quickly burn out. The USSA’s predecessor, the National Student Association (NSA), was likely influential in US President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to not run for a second term, and it was foundational in establishing the International Student Conference that competed, albeit ultimately unsuccessfully, with the Soviet-backed International Union of Students during the Cold War. The NSA was criticized by student activists in the 1960s as not being progressive enough, and there was a notable scandal when in the same decade, it was revealed that the NSA received considerable funding from the US Central Intelligence Agency. However, despite the shortcomings of national student governments in the US, the USSA and its predecessors in my view have long seemed the best option for national student representation in the country.
From what I gathered from my communications with Gannon, the USSA had been weakened by policies in a number of states akin to voluntary student unionism in other parts of the world, which hindered its ability to reliably collect membership fees from students via campus student governments. This made the USSA reliant on external grants until one day, the grant issuing organization(s) decided to direct their funds elsewhere, plunging the USSA into inactivity.
Student government in the United States has also suffered from a lack of autonomy. Unlike student governments in Canada and elsewhere that achieved independence from higher education institution administrations largely in the mid-twentieth century and achieved non-profit status that allowed them to substantially grow their capacities, US student governments for the most part do not seem to have made this jump, or at least not fully, remaining subject to college and university administration vetoes and with limited potential to increase their capabilities for service provision, advocacy and activism, and extracurricular activities.
In 2020 when I had established contact with Gannon, IAPSS was building a coalition with student governments around the world to form what would become the Global Student Government (GSG) in 2022. The USSA remnant, as my IAPSS and GSG colleagues and I referred to it, ended up in the GSG coalition and became part of the GSG’s network, though it did not contribute. When the GSG joined forces with the Global Student Forum (GSF) in 2024, the USSA remnant came along with it.
After my time as a student had concluded, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the USSA appears to have been revived. Its website and social media have returned. It is organizing conferences and even has staff members. The USSA reports that at its March 2025 Legislative Conference where “150 students representing 39 campuses from 18 different states” attended, “students drafted and passed a charter to create roles and processes to operate the organization over the next year.” In December 2025, I reached out to the USSA to congratulate them on reviving their organization and to see if they needed any help. USSA staffperson Tiffany Dena Loftin replied with a hopeful and optimistic message, mentioning that the GSF had attended the Legislative Conference virtually.
USSA sponsors listed in its 2025 report include the Freedom Together Foundation, Black Voters Matter, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Inatai Foundation, tides, Piece by Piece Strategies, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the Accra Foundation, Black Star Network, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Oak Foundation. This suggests that the USSA currently relies on external funders rather than student membership fees.
The USSA’s revival is good news for students in the United States and globally. In addition to giving US students more options to improve their quality of life, US students can now contribute to the GSF’s global advocacy efforts and work with students from around the world.
As the USSA rebuilds, there are some things I am curious about. Who are the elected student representatives running the USSA? Where are its annual budgets and financial statements? Where are the minutes of its conferences and relevant meetings where its decision-making takes place? Making this information publicly accessible would help confirm that the USSA is really back, is student-led, and has enough autonomy to carry out its representative functions. More importantly, this transparency would help US students better understand their national student government, how it makes a difference in their lives, and how they can get involved.
In the future, the USSA would benefit from striving to become as autonomous as possible. The best way would be to develop a reliable membership fee system where each student under the USSA’s umbrella pays a small annual USSA fee when they pay their tuition. This is the automatic membership fee model that higher education student governments in Canada and elsewhere have, which has allowed them to avoid reliance on non-student entities or donors with fluctuating interests and funding directions. USSA should lobby for any legislation that prevents such a membership fee system from being implemented to be changed. Moreover, the USSA should help US state and local student governments gain autonomy from their higher education institutions so students in the US are not hindered by unelected non-student vetoes and other undue interference.
