Obama-Appointed Judge Blocks Trump’s Freeze On Harvard’s Federal Funding

BOSTON (Reuters) — A federal judge on Wednesday ruled U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2 billion in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the prestigious Ivy League school.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, in Boston marked a major legal victory for Harvard as it seeks to cut a deal that could bring an end to the White House’s multi-front conflict with the nation’s oldest and richest university.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school became 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. Burroughs, however, said that the Trump administration used allegations of antisemitism on campuses as “a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

Three other Ivy League schools stuck deals with the administration, including Columbia University, which in July agreed to pay $220 million to restore federal research money that had been nixed because of allegations the university allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.

As with Columbia, the Trump administration took actions against Harvard related to the anti-Israel protests that roiled its campus and other universities in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

Trump during an August 26 Cabinet meeting demanded Harvard pay “nothing less than $500 million” as part of a settlement. “They’ve been very bad,” he told Education Secretary Linda McMahon. “Don’t negotiate.”

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.

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 in Gaza.

But Harvard President Alan Garber has said the administration’s demands went far beyond addressing antisemitism and unlawfully sought 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 accused the Trump administration of retaliating against it in violation of First Amendment free speech protections by abruptly cutting funding the school says is vital to supporting scientific and medical research.

Burroughs in a separate case has already barred the administration from halting its ability to host international students, who comprise about a quarter of Harvard’s student body.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Amy Stevens and Lincoln Feast)