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In the latest escalation of its fight with Harvard University, the Trump administration is terminating hundreds more research grants to the university and its medical school, The Boston Globe reported.
Researchers in a variety of fields received funding-termination notices Thursday from a number of different federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, the Globe reported. Harvard Medical School alone saw more than 350 grants impacted.
“The scale of what happened is incomprehensible—a bloodbath for research and the wider community,” Brittany Charlton, associate professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Globe. “Entire labs are unraveling, and young scientists on training grants may be suddenly adrift. Work that could change lives—or save them—is being brought to a standstill.”
The cuts come on top of the $2.2 billion the Trump administration froze in April after Harvard president Alan Garber rejected its sweeping demands for change, and an additional $450 million frozen last week.
The Department of Justice also launched an investigation last week into Harvard’s compliance with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling banning the consideration of race in admissions, The New York Times reported. In a letter to Harvard, the justice department invoked the False Claims Act, an unusual strategy given that that law is typically applied to those who try to swindle the government.
“This investigation is yet another abusive and retaliatory action—the latest of many—that the administration has initiated against Harvard since the University was forced to defend itself from harmful overreach against higher education, including the freeze and termination of millions of dollars in funding for medical and scientific research, which will lead to devastating consequences for our nation’s health, economic prosperity, and scientific leadership,” a Harvard spokesperson said in a statement.
In an interview with The New York Times Friday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon blamed Harvard’s lawsuit over the funding cuts for the standoff between the university and the Education Department.
“It’s a little bit hard to have open negotiations when we’ve got a lawsuit pending,” she told the Times. “When you’re sitting and talking, do you have to have all your lawyers present, do all those things to make sure you’re not compromising the lawsuit?”
She indicated an eagerness to resume negotiations with Harvard, but also made clear the department has additional tools it could deploy to pressure the university to comply, noting that so far only about a third of the university's $9 billion in federal support has been canceled.
“So there is still that kind of balance as to how that money would be spent and what kind of accommodation would have to be made by Harvard in order to free the rest of that money,” she said.
