A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday, September 3, ordered the reversal of the Trump administration’s cuts to more than $2.6 billion in funding for research grants for Harvard University.
US District Judge Allison Burroughs sided with the Ivy League school, ruling the cuts amounted to illegal retaliation for Harvard’s rejection of White House demands for changes to its governance and policies.
The ruling delivers a significant victory to Harvard in its battle with the Trump administration, which also has sought to prevent the school from hosting foreign students and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.
The government had tied the freezes at Harvard to delays in dealing with antisemitism on its campus, but the judge said the federally funded research had little connection to antisemitism. "A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities," Burroughs wrote.
The ruling reverses a series of funding freezes that later became outright cuts as the Trump administration escalated its fight with the nation’s wealthiest university. If it stands, it promises to revive Harvard’s sprawling research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.
Beyond the courthouse, the Trump administration and Harvard officials have been discussing a potential agreement that would end investigations and allow the university to regain access to federal funding. President Donald Trump has said he wants Harvard to pay no less than $500 million, but no deal has materialized even as the administration has struck agreements with Columbia and Brown.
Harvard’s lawsuit accuses the Trump 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. It was meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment on campus.
Trump officials moved to freeze $2.2 billion in research grants the same day Harvard rejected the administration’s demands. 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 under a clause allowing grants to be scrapped if they no longer aligned with government policies. Harvard has moved to self-fund some of its research but warned it can’t absorb the full cost of the federal cuts.
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 Trump administration denies the cuts were done 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.