BOSTON (Reuters) -Harvard University urged a federal judge on Monday to order U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to restore about $2.5 billion in canceled federal grants and cease efforts to cut off research funding to the prestigious Ivy League school.
But a lawyer for the Trump administration told the judge the canceled grants reflect a government priority not to send money to institutions that practice antisemitism.
“Harvard prioritized campus protestors over cancer research,” said Michael Velchik, a senior lawyer at the U.S. Justice Department. He told the judge she shouldn’t be hearing the case in the first place, arguing the matter belonged in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which handles monetary disputes.
The court hearing before U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston lasted more than two hours, but ended without a ruling. The case marks a crucial moment in the White House’s escalating conflict with Harvard, which has been in the administration’s crosshairs after it rejected a list of demands to make changes to its governance, hiring and admissions practices in April.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based university says hundreds of research projects including ones concerning cancer treatments, infectious diseases and Parkinson’s disease will be in jeopardy unless the judge declares the grant cancellations unlawful.
The country’s oldest and richest university has become a central focus of the administration’s broad campaign to leverage federal funding to force change at U.S. universities, which Trump says are gripped by antisemitic and “radical left” ideologies.
Steven Lehotsky, a lawyer for Harvard, said the government has made wholesale cuts to research under the guise of combating antisemitism, but hasn’t identified any connection between the two.
“The administration has given no consideration to patients, the public at large and the harm of all this research being cut off,” Lehotsky told the court.
Among the earliest actions the administration took against Harvard was the cancellation of hundreds of grants awarded to researchers on the grounds that the school failed to do enough to address harassment of Jewish students on its campus.
The Trump administration has since sought to bar international students from attending the school; threatened Harvard’s accreditation status; and opened the door to cutting off more funds by finding it violated federal civil rights law.
Burroughs said she had problems with the government’s argument that it has the ability to terminate Harvard’s federal funding grants for any policy reasons.
“That’s a major stumbling block for me,” Burroughs said.
Burroughs also questioned the government’s stance that there doesn’t have to be an adversarial process to suss out whether Harvard has taken steps to root out antisemtism on campus.
“If you can make this decision, that we’re going to withdraw all this funding for reasons oriented around speech, the consequences to that, in terms of constitutional law, are staggering to me,” Burroughs said.
Meanwhile, as part of Trump’s spending and tax bill, the Republican-led Congress increased the federal excise tax on Harvard’s income from its $53 billion endowment to 8% from 1.4%. Income from the endowment covers 40% of Harvard’s operating budget.
Harvard President Alan Garber said last week that the various federal actions since Trump returned to office in January could strip the school of nearly $1 billion annually, forcing it to lay off staff and freeze hiring. The amount includes the impact of the multi-year federal grants canceled by the Trump administration.
Harvard has said it has taken steps to ensure its campus is welcoming to Jewish and Israeli students, who it acknowledges experienced “vicious and reprehensible” treatment following the onset of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza in October 2023.
But, Garber has said the administration’s demands have gone far beyond addressing antisemitism and unlawfully seek to regulate the “intellectual conditions” on its campus by controlling who it hires and who it teaches.
Those demands, which came in an April 11 letter from an administration task force, included calls for the private university to restructure its governance, alter its hiring and admissions practices to ensure an ideological balance of viewpoints and end certain academic programs.
After Harvard rejected those demands, it said the administration began retaliating against it in violation of the free speech protections of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by abruptly cutting funding the school says is vital to supporting scientific and medical research.
Burroughs, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, in a separate case has already barred the administration from halting its ability to host international students. She is expected to issue a written ruling in the funding case in the coming weeks.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond and Tim McLaughlin in Boston; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Cynthia Osterman and Nick Zieminski)
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