Harvard scores big win over Trump as judge overturns billions in funding cuts
A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday ordered the reversal of the Trump administration’s cuts to more than US$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 has also 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.
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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.