During the 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump vowed: “We are going to choke off the money to schools that aid the Marxist assault on our American heritage and on Western civilization itself. The days of subsidizing communist indoctrination in our colleges will soon be over.”
In less than three months, the Trump Administration has frozen or pulled more than $11 billion in federal funding from at least seven universities.
Created in February, the Trump Administration's Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism "has shaken elite American universities to their core in recent weeks," the Wall Street Journal noted in an April 14 report.
On Monday, Harvard pushed back on the task force, saying in a letter that the university is working to address antisemitism but won’t bow to the administration’s demands, which it calls unlawful.
“Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” Harvard’s lawyers, William Burck and Robert Hur, wrote.
Hours later the task force said it was freezing $2.26 billion in multiyear grants and contracts to Harvard.
The Trump Administration said Monday that Harvard’s response “reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges — that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws.”
Trump on Tuesday responded to Harvard’s decision with a social-media post that read:
Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting “Sickness?” Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!Meanwhile, The Trump Administration on Monday took its first step toward ending federal funding of National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) — informing key members of Congress that it’s asking for them to eliminate “all” such spending.
The major funding changes are contained in a “rescissions” plan, obtained and first reported by the New York Post, that pitches a clawback of $1.1 billion appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and $8.3 billion from USAID.
A memo drafted by White House budget director Russ Vought — and requested by GOP congressional leaders — accuses CPB of a “lengthy history of anti-conservative bias” and cites “waste, fraud, and abuse” at USAID.
"Formal transmission of the plan to lawmakers will start a 45-day clock for the Republican-held House and Senate to either adopt or reject the blueprint, which the White House believes will pass — unlike President Trump’s 2018 rescission plan, which failed by one vote in the Senate," The Post reported.
Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy applauded the plan Monday in a post to X: “NPR and PBS have a right to publish their biased coverage — but they don’t have a right to spend taxpayer money on it. It’s time to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
The Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism’s stated goal is to “root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” a mission that emerged from pro-Hamas protests on college campuses nationwide last year.
"But along the way, the task force is taking on university culture more broadly in ways that echo the MAGA dreams for remaking higher education—including ending racial preferences in admissions and hiring," the Journal's report said.
"The task-force leaders have unprecedented leverage, thanks to a financial assault on higher education by the Trump Administration that has no equal since the federal government began pumping money into research at universities during World War II."
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said it was within the bounds of the federal government to ask universities to make changes to campus policies in the name of achieving administration priorities.
“These universities are taking federal funds,” McMahon said. “And so if you’re taking federal funds, then we want to make sure that you’re abiding by federal law.”
The task force's first act was to threaten to cut off $400 million in federal funds from Columbia University, which quickly acquiesced to the task force’s demands.
Katrina Armstrong, Columbia University’s president who had already resigned under government pressure during funding negotiations, spent three hours being deposed by a government attorney in Washington, D.C. The lawyer grilled Armstrong over whether she had done enough to protect Jewish students against antisemitism.
As she dodged specifics under questioning, the lawyer said her answer “makes absolutely no sense” and that he was “baffled” by her leadership style.
“I’m just trying to understand how you have such a terrible memory of specific incidents of antisemitism when you’re clearly an intelligent doctor,” he said.
The attorney in the room during the April 1 deposition, a senior Health and Human Services official named Sean Keveney, is one of a handful of government officials driving the the task force that aren’t household names. Aside from Keveney, the acting general counsel at HHS, they include a former Fox News commentator; a onetime leader of the Justice Department civil-rights division; and a government procurement official who spent much of his career in finance.
Leo Terrell, a Justice Department political appointee and former Fox News commentator, was announced as the head of the task force. The longtime civil-rights lawyer and friend of O.J. Simpson, who switched political affiliations from Democrat to Republican in 2020, said on Fox News last month that, “We’re going to bankrupt these universities” if they do not “play ball.”
Driving much of the day-to-day business of the task force are Keveney of HHS; Tom Wheeler, the Education Department’s acting general counsel; and Josh Gruenbaum, a commissioner in the General Services Administration.
The antisemitism task force “is motivated by one thing and one thing only: tackling antisemitism,” said White House Spokesman Kush Desai. “Antisemitic protesters inflicting violence and taking over entire college campus buildings is not only a crude display of bigotry against Jewish Americans, but entirely disruptive to the intellectual inquiry and research that federal funding of colleges is meant to support.”
The Journal noted: "In negotiations with schools, the antisemitism task force carries a big stick. Federal funding constitutes a significant portion of the operating budget of some major research universities. Schools rely on federal contracts and grants to pay for laboratories and graduate assistants. Pell grants and federal loans help cover tuition costs for many undergraduates. Even schools with significant endowments cannot sustain prolonged periods of business as usual if the government cuts their funding."
In letters to universities, including Columbia and Harvard, the task force has cited civil-rights laws that encompass antisemitism, including Title VI and Title VII. But its tactic of targeting funding first and then beginning conversations is unprecedented, education lawyers say.
“Cutting off the funding spigot is a nuclear-type weapon of enforcement,” said Scott Schneider, an education lawyer in Austin. “It’s outside the legal system and is a remarkable exercise of executive authority.”
Beyond civil-rights laws, the task force is also wielding the club of federal contracts.
Kenneth L. Marcus, a former head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights who now runs the Brandeis Center, which fights against antisemitism, called the involvement of the General Services Administration in the task force’s work a “brilliant stroke.”
Few people think about the agency as a lever of the federal government, Marcus said, but the power to pull back contracts “brings to bear immense new potentials for influencing compliance with federal civil rights laws.”
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