Harvard is hoping court rules Trump administration's $2.6B research cuts were illegal
If U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs decides in the university's favor, the ruling would reverse a series of funding freezes that later became outright cuts as the Trump administration escalated its fight with the nation's oldest and wealthiest university. Such a ruling, if it stands, would revive Harvard's sprawling scientific and medical research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.
'This case involves the Government's efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard,' the university said in its complaint. 'All told, the tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: Allow the Government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution's ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.'
A second lawsuit over the cuts filed by the American Association of University Professors and its Harvard faculty chapter has been consolidated with the university's.
Harvard's lawsuit accuses President Donald Trump's administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university after it rejected a series of demands in an April 11 letter from a federal antisemitism task force.
The letter demanded sweeping changes related to campus protests, academics and admissions. For example, the letter told Harvard to audit the viewpoints of students and faculty and admit more students or hire new professors if the campus was found to lack diverse points of view. The letter was meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment on campus.
Harvard President Alan Garber pledged to fight antisemitism but said no government 'should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.'
The same day Harvard rejected the demands, Trump officials moved to freeze $2.2 billion in research grants. Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared in May that Harvard would no longer be eligible for new grants, and weeks later the administration began canceling contracts with Harvard.
As Harvard fought the funding freeze in court, individual agencies began sending letters announcing that the frozen research grants were being terminated. They cited a clause that allows grants to be scrapped if they no longer align with government policies.
Harvard, which has the nation's largest endowment at $53 billion, has moved to self-fund some of its research, but warned it can't absorb the full cost of the federal cuts.
In court filings, the school said the government 'fails to explain how the termination of funding for research to treat cancer, support veterans, and improve national security addresses antisemitism.'
The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the April demand letter was sent. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel contracts for policy reasons.
'It is the policy of the United States under the Trump Administration not to fund institutions that fail to adequately address antisemitism in their programs,' it said in court documents.
The research funding is only one front in Harvard's fight with the federal government. The Trump administration also has sought to prevent the school from hosting foreign students, and Trump has threatened to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status.
Finally, last month, the Trump administration formally issued a finding that the school tolerated antisemitism — a step that eventually could jeopardize all of Harvard's federal funding, including federal student loans or grants. The penalty is typically referred to as a 'death sentence.'
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Chicago Tribune
19 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Columbia University agrees to pay more than $220M in deal with Trump to restore federal funding
NEW YORK — Columbia University announced Wednesday it has reached a deal with the Trump administration to pay more than $220 million to the federal government to restore federal research money that was canceled in the name of combating antisemitism on campus. Under the agreement, the Ivy League school will pay a $200 million settlement over three years, the university said. It will also pay $21 million to resolve alleged civil rights violations against Jewish employees that occurred following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the White House said. 'This agreement marks an important step forward after a period of sustained federal scrutiny and institutional uncertainty,' acting University President Claire Shipman said. The school had been threatened with the potential loss of billions of dollars in government support, including more than $400 million in grants canceled earlier this year. The administration pulled the funding because of what it described as the university's failure to squelch antisemitism on campus during the Israel-Hamas war. Columbia has since agreed to a series of demands laid out by the Republican administration, including overhauling the university's student disciplinary process and applying a contentious, federally endorsed definition of antisemitism not only to teaching but to a disciplinary committee that has been investigating students critical of Israel. Wednesday's agreement — which does not include an admission of wrongdoing — codifies those reforms while preserving the university's autonomy, Shipman said. Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the deal 'a seismic shift in our nation's fight to hold institutions that accept American taxpayer dollars accountable for antisemitic discrimination and harassment.' 'Columbia's reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate,' McMahon said in a statement. As part of the agreement, Columbia agreed to a series of changes previously announced in March, including reviewing its Middle East curriculum to make sure it was 'comprehensive and balanced' and appointing new faculty to its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. It also promised to end programs 'that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotes, diversity targets or similar efforts.' The university will also have to issue a report to a monitor assuring that its programs 'do not promote unlawful DEI goals.' In a post Wednesday night on his Truth Social platform, President Donald Trump said Columbia had 'committed to ending their ridiculous DEI policies, admitting students based ONLY on MERIT, and protecting the Civil Liberties of their students on campus.' He also warned, without being specific, 'Numerous other Higher Education Institutions that have hurt so many, and been so unfair and unjust, and have wrongly spent federal money, much of it from our government, are upcoming.' The pact comes after months of uncertainty and fraught negotiations at the more than 270-year-old university. It was among the first targets of Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus protests and on colleges that he asserts have allowed Jewish students be threatened and harassed. Columbia's own antisemitism task force found last summer that Jewish students had faced verbal abuse, ostracism and classroom humiliation during the spring 2024 demonstrations. Other Jewish students took part in the protests, however, and protest leaders maintain they aren't targeting Jews but rather criticizing the Israeli government and its war in Gaza. Columbia's leadership — a revolving door of three interim presidents in the last year — has declared that the campus climate needs to change. Also in the settlement is an agreement to ask prospective international students 'questions designed to elicit their reasons for wishing to study in the United States,' and establishes processes to make sure all students are committed to 'civil discourse.' In a move that would potentially make it easier for the Trump administration to deport students who participate in protests, Columbia promised to provide the government with information, upon request, of disciplinary actions involving student-visa holders resulting in expulsions or suspensions. Columbia on Tuesday announced it would suspend, expel or revoke degrees from more than 70 students who participated in a pro-Palestinian demonstration inside the main library in May and an encampment during alumni weekend last year. The pressure on Columbia began with a series of funding cuts. Then Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student who had been a visible figure in the protests, became the first person detained in the Trump administration's push to deport pro-Palestinian activists who aren't U.S. citizens. Next came searches of some university residences amid a federal Justice Department investigation into whether Columbia concealed 'illegal aliens' on campus. The interim president at the time responded that the university was committed to upholding the law. Columbia was an early test case for the Trump administration as it sought closer oversight of universities that the Republican president views as bastions of liberalism. Yet it soon was overshadowed by Harvard University, which became the first higher education institution to defy Trump's demands and fight back in court. The Trump administration has used federal research funding as its primary lever in its campaign to reshape higher education. More than $2 billion in total has also been frozen at Cornell, Northwestern, Brown and Princeton universities. Administration officials pulled $175 million from the University of Pennsylvania in March over a dispute around women's sports. They restored it when school officials agreed to update records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and change their policies. The administration also is looking beyond private universities. University of Virginia President James Ryan agreed to resign in June under pressure from a U.S. Justice Department investigation into diversity, equity and inclusion practices. A similar investigation was opened this month at George Mason University.
The Hill
19 minutes ago
- The Hill
Why are data nerds racing to save US government statistics?
The data nerds are fighting back. After watching data sets be altered or disappear from U.S. government websites in unprecedented ways after President Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely. Their goal is to make sure they are available in the future, believing that democracy suffers when policymakers don't have reliable data and that national statistics should be above partisan politics. 'There are such smart, passionate people who care deeply about not only the Census Bureau, but all the statistical agencies, and ensuring the integrity of the statistical system. And that gives me hope, even during these challenging times,' Mary Jo Mitchell, director of government and public affairs for the research nonprofit the Population Association of America, said this week during an online public data-users conference. The threats to the U.S. data infrastructure since January have come not only from the disappearance or modification of data related to gender, sexual orientation, health, climate change and diversity, among other topics, but also from job cuts of workers and contractors who had been guardians of restricted-access data at statistical agencies, the data experts said. 'There are trillions of bytes of data files, and I can't even imagine how many public dollars were spent to collect those data,' Jennifer Park, a study director for the Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said during the conference hosted by the Association of Public Data Users (APDU). 'But right now, they're sitting someplace that is inaccessible because there are no staff to appropriately manage those data,' Park added later. 'Gender' switched to 'sex' In February, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) official public portal for health data, was taken down entirely but subsequently went back up. Around the same time, when a query was made to access certain public data from the U.S. Census Bureau's most comprehensive survey of American life, users for several days got a response that said the area was 'unavailable due to maintenance' before access was restored. Researchers Janet Freilich and Aaron Kesselheim examined 232 federal public health data sets that had been modified in the first quarter of this year and found that almost half had been 'substantially altered,' with the majority having the word 'gender' switched to 'sex,' they wrote this month in The Lancet medical journal. One of the most difficult tasks has been figuring out what's been changed since many of the alterations weren't recorded in documentation. Beth Jarosz, senior program director at the Population Reference Bureau, thought she was in good shape since she had previously downloaded data she needed from the National Survey of Children's Health for a February conference where she was speaking, even though the data had become unavailable. But then she realized she had failed to download the questionnaire and later discovered that a question about discrimination based on gender or sexual identity had been removed. 'It's the one thing my team didn't have,' Jarosz said at this week's APDU conference. 'And they edited the questionnaire document, which should have been a historical record.' Among the groups that have formed this year to collect and preserve the federal data are the Federation of American Scientists' which monitors changes to federal data sets; the University of Chicago Library's Data Mirror website, which backs up and hosts at-risk data sets; the Data Rescue Project, which serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts; and the Federal Data Forum, which shares information about what federal statistics have gone missing or been modified — a job also being done by the American Statistical Association. The outside data warriors also are quietly reaching out to workers at statistical agencies and urging them to back up any data that is restricted from the public. 'You can't trust that this data is going to be here tomorrow,' said Lena Bohman, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project. Experts' committee unofficially revived Separately, a group of outside experts has unofficially revived a long-running U.S. Census Bureau advisory committee that was killed by the Trump administration in March. Census Bureau officials won't be attending the Census Scientific Advisory Committee meeting in September, since the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, eliminated it. But the advisory committee will forward its recommendations to the bureau, and demographer Allison Plyer said she has heard that some agency officials are excited by the committee's re-emergence, even if it's outside official channels. 'We will send them recommendations but we don't expect them to respond since that would be frowned upon,' Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center in New Orleans, said. 'They just aren't getting any outside expertise … and they want expertise, which is understandable from nerds.'
Newsweek
21 minutes ago
- Newsweek
No, Trump Did Not Start the Global 'Trade War'
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. After strong growth in 2024, global trade will take a hit this year. Many point the finger at President Donald Trump. That's a mistake. The World Trade Organization said the volume of merchandise trade this year will contract by 0.2 percent. Its revised forecast "is nearly three percentage points lower than it would have been without recent policy shifts." The culprit? The trade body blames "a surge in tariffs and trade policy uncertainty." That, of course, is an indirect reference to Trump's series of tariff hikes, pauses, and pullbacks. Just about everyone thinks Trump is responsible for the breakdown of the global trade system. A banner showing a picture of President Donald Trump is displayed outside of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) building on June 3, 2025, in Washington, D.C. A banner showing a picture of President Donald Trump is displayed outside of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) building on June 3, 2025, in Washington, Associated Press, for instance, wrote that the American president declared "a trade war on the rest of the world." By doing so, he has "panicked global financial markets, raised the risk of a recession and broken the political and economic alliances that made much of the world stable for business after World War II." That narrative is superficial. It's far more accurate to say the post-war rules-based trade order is dead, but China killed it, and Trump stopped pretending it continued to exist. There had been great hope at the turn of the century that China would end long-standing predatory and criminal trade practices by joining the World Trade Organization. By and large, however, Beijing did not abandon those practices after accession in December 2001. Trump, in response to Chinese intransigence, changed the world, irrevocably. As POLITICO wrote, "The Trump administration has dealt a lasting blow to much of the post-World War II consensus around free trade and long-term cooperation." Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the just-concluded Aspen Security Forum said, "We have to recognize that we're probably not going back to exactly that system." In all probability, we're not going back to that system at all. For one thing, there is, at least at this moment, almost no domestic pressure on Trump. His policies are working. "Remember in April, after Liberation Day and the markets plunged and there was so much concern about what this would do to growth, these higher reciprocal rates, what it would do to inflation," CNBC's Sara Eisen said on July 16. "Guess what? First of all, those rates haven't panned out and while we have seen higher tariff rates across the board, what hasn't panned out either is a big surge of inflation, weakness in the economy, or a slump in the financial markets." "We saw $26.6 billion come in the month of June," Eisen said, referring to the federal government's net tariff revenue. "Of course, someone's paying for the tariffs, but it's not the American consumer." Yet can Trump, to use one of his favorite terms, keep "winning"? "There's no question that foreign-based exporters keep paying many of the new levies," Washington, D.C. trade analyst Alan Tonelson told Newsweek this month. "Import prices from major trade competitors such as China, Mexico, and Canada are down on an annual basis. In fact, for import-heavy items such as footwear, smartphones, and school supplies, prices keep falling. Strikingly, on an annual basis the per-vehicle prices of Japanese auto exports to the U.S. have nosedived nearly 30 percent." There is some bipartisan support for his general policy. "It's a big deal that you've now had two presidents of two different parties take a protectionist line," said Robert Zoellick, former U.S. Trade Representative and former World Bank Group president, at Aspen, referring to Trump and Joe Biden. "That is a very big switch in the nature of trade politics." Nonetheless, Trump needs to execute policies well. As Tonelson, who blogs on trade at RealityChek, noted, "It's reasonable to argue that Trump's tariff moves have been needlessly complicated and erratic and that domestic businesses would benefit from predictability." Yet as the trade expert also said, "most American companies have managed to navigate the turbulence." Foreign competitors have far fewer options. "The U.S. remains the largest integrated market, so no foreign leader will last long after being priced out of serving American customers," Charles Ortel, an Asia-based investor and financial writer, told Newsweek. "Meanwhile, many will rush to invest inside America so as to work around these tariffs." Trump will also have to stimulate American-owned manufacturing, best done with an expanded investment tax credit. At a time when China is fast preparing for war—"Dare to fight," is Xi Jinping's trademark phrase these days—Trump will not have much time to rebuild American manufacturing behind his new tariff wall. Time is running out for another reason: Trump's trade measures are roiling global trade, which means they are also roiling geopolitics and changing the world, as Rice suggested. "Any student of history will know the most dangerous phase is the interregnum between one world order and another," Singapore Foreign Minster Vivian Balakrishnan said at Aspen. "Are we in that interregnum? Yes, we are." Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X @GordonGChang. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
