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On Thursday, President Trump singed his executive order tying federal funds to support for free speech. Surrounded by adoring college students with stories of trigger warnings and reprisals they suffered for handing out Valentines, the White House free speech show went off without a hitch.

Despite all that pomp, however, the actual text of the executive order has even less substance than the president’s speech. Indeed, it’s little more than a glorified reminder that colleges and universities are indeed bound by the First Amendment if they’re public and by their stated commitments if they’re private.

But for all of its lightness, or perhaps because of it, the text includes some pernicious language hinting at the government overreach it authorizes.

As the order reads, “the heads of covered agencies shall, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, take appropriate steps, in a manner consistent with applicable law, including the First Amendment, to ensure institutions that receive Federal research or education grants promote free inquiry.”

As free speech advocate and University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer warned, the order “would reproduce in Washington exactly the type of on-campus ‘speech committee’ that would be a natural and dangerous consequence of the position taken by many advocating for the limitation of discourse on campuses.”

Indeed, by giving various agencies seemingly wide latitude to legislate what free speech or free inquiry might mean — neither is defined in the order — Trump has created a bureaucratic tangle.

With every agency from Defense to Agriculture to Energy potentially coming up with their own separate guidelines, reporting requirements and other methods of assessing if an institution promotes free inquiry, all the administration has done is made it more costly and difficult to apply for and receive federal funding and, likely, further muddied the waters on campus free speech.

Additionally, when it comes to private institutions, although this many not have been his intention, Trump leaves open the possibility that a failure to live up to any promised free speech or academic freedom, as interpreted by the federal government, might render researchers ineligible for funding. In practice, that could essentially ban private religious institutions from receiving federal research dollars. Even, if the Trump administration did not apply the order as such, another administration easily could.

By sticking the heavy hand of the executive into the campus free speech debate, Trump might have scored some quick points with conservatives. In the long run, however, giving federal agencies, run by political appointees, the power to define and assess acceptable discourse in higher education does little to make colleges and universities into the centers of academic freedom that Trump claims he wants them to be. The only thing he is protecting is government red tape.