Trump administration freezes more than $2 billion in funding tied to Harvard
The funding freeze includes $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts, according to the task force, which is a joint enterprise of several federal agencies.
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In an open letter to the campus community Monday afternoon, Harvard president Alan Garber said, 'No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.'
That message followed a Friday letter from the task force telling Harvard's leaders to agree to a lengthy list of conditions in order
to 'maintain Harvard's financial relationship with the federal government.'
The letter directed Harvard to weaken the influence of students and faculty involved in activism on university affairs. It ordered external audits of specific academic programs accused of antisemitism or other forms of bias. It told the school to reorient its admissions and hiring practices to prioritize 'viewpoint diversity' and deemphasize race, religion, and sex. It said the university must 'reform' the way it admits international students to screen out anyone 'hostile' to 'American values' or 'supportive of terrorism or antisemitism.'
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And it demanded that Harvard regularly report
various kinds of information to the federal government, including all admissions data and any rule violations by foreign students.
In
their response Monday, lawyers representing Harvard said the university 'has undertaken substantial policy and programmatic measures' during the last 15 months to fight antisemitism, promote ideological diversity, and maintain order on campus.
'Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community.
But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration,' the lawyers wrote.
It was not immediately clear which grants and contracts were to be frozen. On March 31, the task force announced a review of $9 billion in federal funding destined for Harvard and affiliated institutions, including Mass General Brigham, Boston Children's Hospital, and the Broad Institute.
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Politico
35 minutes ago
- Politico
What It Will Take to Get U.S. Citizens to Work the Farm — According to Dolores Huerta
And the 95-year-old Huerta has seen a lot. She first began lobbying the California legislature on farm labor issues when she was just 25, and she founded an agriculture workers union soon after. In her early 30s, she partnered with civil rights leader Cesar Chavez to create the National Farm Workers Association, now the United Farm Workers. For years, she and Chavez worked in tandem, delivering major victories to protect farm workers from exploitation and exposure to dangerous pesticides. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. The Trump administration is now struggling to reconcile its mass deportation efforts with the need to keep farm production going. Huerta is not optimistic about how it will all play out, though she was able to poke at Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins' recent suggestion that automation will soon replace human laborers. 'I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work,' Huerta joked. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The Trump administration has launched farm raids targeting undocumented immigrants, which has sent a chill through the labor force and industry. You've advocated for farm workers for decades. Does the current climate feel familiar, or are we in a really different place? Oh, it's a very, very different place. Because in the past, in the '50s, when we had this 'Operation Wetback,' they were not putting people in jail. They would repatriate people. They would deport them, take them to the border. Somewhere along the way, I think during Newt Gingrich's time, they started putting people in jail, but then they would let them go. It was not putting people in prisons, like we're seeing right now. 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Time Business News
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The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
Trump is undermining his own law that prevents mass atrocities
The Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018, which overwhelmingly passed across party lines in the House and Senate, institutionalizes atrocity prevention in the U.S. government. This includes legally mandating an interagency atrocity prevention coordination body, requiring training for foreign service officers on the prevention of atrocities, requiring an atrocity prevention strategy and, critically, annual reporting to Congress on the government's efforts. But this law is being ignored, to America's detriment. Democratic and Republican administrations have agreed for almost two decades that preventing mass atrocities around the world is a central foreign policy interest of the United States. In 2011, President Obama declared mass atrocities prevention a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States. In 2019, the Trump administration stated that it 'has made a steadfast commitment to prevent, mitigate and respond to mass atrocities, and has set up a whole-of-government interagency structure to support this commitment.' In 2021, President Biden said, 'I recommit to the simple truth that preventing future genocides remains both our moral duty and a matter of national and global importance.' Preventing genocides, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing is so central to America's own values, interests and security that in 2018, Trump signed the Elie Wiesel Act with strong bipartisan support. This law was groundbreaking, making the U.S. the first country in the world to enshrine the objective of presenting mass atrocities globally into national law. Yet today, this law and the work it advanced are under dire threat. What will Congress do about it? Mass atrocities are an anathema to American interests. Large scale, deliberate attacks on civilians shock the conscience. They undermine U.S moral, diplomatic, development and security interests. Preventing mass atrocities not only advances American interests, but it also strengthens our international cooperation and global leadership while advancing a peaceful and more just world. Most importantly, America should help prevent mass atrocities because it can. It has the tools and capabilities to help protect civilians and prevent the worst forms of human rights violations. It cannot do this alone, as there are many reasons why atrocities take place, but it can have an impact. And in today's world, this work is more important than ever. While the nation's atrocity prevention systems aren't perfect and there are certainly failures to point to, there has also been important progress and successes that risk being erased, making it even less likely that the U.S. will succeed at its commitment to protect civilians and prevent atrocities. 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Without these experts and the offices that employed them, the U.S. lacks the expertise and systems to, at a minimum, fulfill its legal mandate under the law, let alone to effectively prevent, respond to and help countries recover from mass atrocities. In response to this glaring violation of U.S. law, a group of former civil servants who served as the experts on atrocity prevention in the U.S. interagency wrote a shadow Elie Wiesel Act report, which was presented to congressional staff in a briefing last month. These are the people who served in the Atrocity Prevention Task Force and who, under normal circumstances, would have written the annual Elie Wiesel Act Report. Civil society also would have made key contributions, both during the writing and roll-out of the report. None of that is possible now. But the work and imperative to prevent atrocities is still critical. When it enacted the Elie Wiesel Act, Congress knew that 'never again' doesn't happen simply because good people serve in government. True atrocity prevention requires institutionalization and incentivization in our governance system in order to compete with other, very legitimate foreign policy objectives. So why isn't Congress acting when this administration has completely destroyed the ability to address these core national security issues? We hope lawmakers will read this shadow report and critically engage with the questions that it raises. Why has the U.S. government's ability to prevent mass atrocities been attacked? How does this breakdown affect U.S. interests? What does this mean for countries around the world? What can be done to protect what's left and rebuild? And what is Congress willing to do about it, in defense of the law it passed and in line with its oversight duties? To do any less is to abdicate the promise of 'never again.' The world deserves better. And so do the American people. Kim Hart was the global Human Rights team lead at USAID and part of USAID's Atrocity Prevention Core Team. D. Wes Rist was an Atrocity Prevention policy advisor in the Department of State's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Both were government employees until April and served in both the Trump and Biden administrations.
