The battle between Harvard University and the Trump administration escalated sharply this week, when the administration acted to terminate billions in federal grants to the university. The roughly $2.2 billion, which the administration had previously frozen, was being clawed back grant by grant, in addition to another $450 million announced this week. In response, the university filed an amended complaint as part of its legal challenge against the White House.
Unlike other cancellations in recent months targeting research focused on topics like LGBTQ health, race, or Covid-19, these sweeping terminations seem unrelated to research content and instead zero in on the institution at large and its response to campus antisemitism. Michael Baym, who runs a Harvard Medical School lab researching antibiotic resistance and bacteriology, was shocked to receive a notice on Monday evening saying an NIH grant supporting his lab was terminated.
“I think the reasoning behind this termination had more to do with the Harvard name as a symbol of elite academia than the content of our research,” Baym said. “I think this is entirely for symbolic value. It’s hard to see who in the United States benefits from cutting medical research.”
The additional terminations exacted a damaging blow to the medical school. “Nearly all of HMS’s active, direct federal grants have been terminated” after the university received letters from a slew of federal agencies this week, Kristin Bittinger, dean for faculty and research integrity, wrote in an internal HMS memo.
“It is with great regret and sadness that we deliver this deeply unsettling news,” said the memo, which was also signed by Rachel Cahoon, chief research administration officer. “These actions by the federal government are difficult to fully comprehend for all of us that care deeply about the work of our researchers and the positive impact their discoveries make on humankind.”
A similar grim message came from the dean of the faculty at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Andrea Baccarelli. The government has canceled nearly all of the school’s grants, he wrote in an email to affiliates, and he said he expects any remaining awards to be terminated within weeks. Baccarelli added that he and his team would be restructuring the school’s financial model, a move he described as a “necessary transition to a more sustainable research enterprise.”
Harvard’s amended lawsuit against the Trump administration, filed Tuesday, now includes the new grant terminations and names 10 federal agencies as defendants, including the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.
Those additions came just hours after the government announced the $450 million in grant cancellations. When reached for comment, a Harvard spokesperson directed The Chronicle to the U.S. Department of Education’s Tuesday press release announcing the cuts. In that release, the federal task force to combat antisemitism accused Harvard of failing to address race discrimination and antisemitism on campus, and said the $2.2 billion was canceled “last week.”
“Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination,” the task force wrote in the statement.
The additional cuts don’t bring any “wildly new” legal arguments to the table, said Neal Hutchens, a lawyer and professor of higher education at the University of Kentucky. But they do strengthen the university’s arguments that grant cancellations will harm Harvard and its affiliates, and that the administration’s actions defy due process, violate the First Amendment, and skew from legal standards under the Administrative Procedure Act, he said. Grant terminations may be a more solid action in which to poke legal holes than funding freezes or pauses, he added.
“The most recent actions essentially bolster the legal arguments of Harvard,” Hutchens said. “Harvard can point to this as a further ratcheting up of a pattern that … the administration has just intensified in trying to bring [retaliatory] pressure against Harvard.”
Harvard this week announced it would allocate $250 million from its central budget to help cover the losses in research funding. That sum won’t be enough to cover the scale of federal funding Harvard typically receives for research, acknowledged the university’s president, Alan M. Garber, and its provost, John F. Manning, in a statement to the community on Wednesday. But “we will mobilize financial resources to support critical research activity for a transitional period as we continue to … identify alternative funding sources,” they wrote. Garber also announced he will take a 25-percent pay cut, a gesture The New York Times noted is symbolic compared with the nearly $3 billion at stake for Harvard.
Now there’s even a broader sense of that fear and anxiety, since now it’s the institution as a whole being targeted.
The additional cuts came a day after Garber issued a letter to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon refuting the administration’s claims that Harvard is a partisan institution that has allowed antisemitism, liberal indoctrination, and race-based discrimination to fester on its campus. A week prior to that letter, the administration moved to freeze all future grants to Harvard.
McMahon wrote at the time that “Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided.”
The standoff began in April when Harvard refused to comply with a list of extraordinary demands from the Trump administration, a prescription Garber said would have represented governmental overreach, violated the First Amendment and other statutes, threatened Harvard’s academic freedom, and undermined its educational mission. After the university refused those demands came the $2.2 billion freeze and Harvard’s ensuing lawsuit.
Since then, federal grants to Harvard have been frozen, said Bryn Austin, who chairs the department of social and behavioral sciences in Harvard’s School of Public Health. But now, there are “mounting numbers of people” receiving official termination notices from federal agencies. Up until now, the government has been “not communicating, but also not paying,” Austin said. “It’s absolutely clear that the administration has stopped paying on its contracts that it has made with Harvard University.”
Within the School of Public Health, the climate “has already been one of anticipatory anxiety and fear” because of the school’s equity-related work, said Ariel Beccia, an instructor of epidemiology whose NIH grant was terminated in March. “But now there’s even a broader sense of that fear and anxiety, since now it’s the institution as a whole being targeted.”
Baym, the bacteria researcher who received a grant-termination notice Monday evening, posted on the social-media platform Bluesky that not only was his primary NIH grant terminated, but also his other major grants, through the National Science Foundation. Those NSF grants, he learned Wednesday, were on a list of terminated grants sent to the university, he said.
In a notice sent from NSF’s division of grants and agreements to Garber on Monday, Jamie H. French, the division director, wrote that “The agency has determined that termination of certain awards is necessary because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals. NSF understands that Harvard continues to engage in race discrimination including in its admissions process, and in other areas of student life, as well as failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias.”
Baym also shared a screenshot of the NIH termination notice. His grant was canceled “due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and well-being of Jewish students,” the notice said.
Baym and his lab had been working for years on the project the NIH grant had funded, he said, and recently earned a competitive renewal. Now, it’s been “cut for cheap political reasons,” he wrote on Bluesky. The administration, he added, is “trying to hurt Harvard by destroying my research.”
