Harvard University is the latest in a growing list of higher education institutions that had its federal funding targeted by the government in order to comply with the Trump administration’s political agenda.
The series of threats — and subsequent pauses in funding — to some of the top U.S. universities have become an unprecedented tool for the administration to exert influence on college campuses. Six of the seven universities impacted are Ivy League schools.
President Donald Trump vowed to pursue these federal cuts on the campaign trail last year, saying he would focus on schools that push “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” Public school systems are targets for cuts too.
Here’s a look at which universities have been pressured by the administration’s funding cuts so far.
Harvard University
The administration announced its antisemitism task force would conduct a “ comprehensive review ” of the Massachusetts university on March 31. The government was set to review nearly $9 billion of federal grants and contracts.
Harvard is among universities across the country where pro-Palestinian protests erupted on campus amid the war in Gaza last year. Republican officials have since heavily scrutinized those universities, and several Ivy League presidents testified before Congress to discuss antisemitism allegations.
The administration issued its list of demands to Harvard in a letter on April 3. The demands included a ban on face masks, limitations on campus protests and a review of academic departments’ biases.
About a week later, those demands were expanded to include leadership reforms, admission policy changes and stopping the university’s recognition of certain student organizations.
Then, on Monday, Harvard President Alan Gerber refused to comply, saying in a letter that the university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
Hours later, the administration announced it froze more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to the university.
Cornell University
The White House announced last week that it froze more than $1 billion of Cornell’s federal funding. The administration said the freeze came as it investigated alleged civil rights violations at the university.
The New York university was among a group of more than 60 universities that received a letter from the Education Department on March 10 urging them to take steps to protect Jewish students or else face “potential enforcement actions.”
The Defense Department issued more than 75 stop-work orders for research, Cornell said in a statement, but that the federal government hadn’t confirmed if the total funding freeze totaled $1 billion.
Northwestern University
Like Cornell, Northwestern also saw a halt in some of its federal funding last week. The amount was about $790 million, according to the Trump administration.
The Illinois university did not receive an official message from the White House on the freeze despite its cooperation with civil rights investigations, according to Northwestern officials at the time.
University spokesperson Jon Yates said Northwestern’s scientific research was “at jeopardy” because of the freeze — a widespread issue for universities facing research cuts from the National Institutes of Health.
Brown University
The Trump administration was anticipated to pause federal grants and contracts at Brown University because of the Rhode Island school’s response to alleged antisemitism on campus, according to a White House official on April 3.
The total was expected to be about $510 million in funding, according to the official.
Princeton University
Dozens of research grants were suspended at Princeton University without a clear rationale, according to an April 1 campus message from university president Christopher Eisgruber. The grants came from federal agencies such as the Department of Energy, NASA and the Defense Department.
Before the funding pause, Eisgruber had expressed his opposition to Trump’s threatened cuts at Columbia University in an essay in The Atlantic magazine. He called the administration’s move a “radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research.”
University of Pennsylvania
Unlike the other targeted universities, the University of Pennsylvania saw funding cuts because of a transgender athlete who competed in Penn’s swimming program, according to the Trump administration.
After a Feb. 5 executive order barring transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports, the Education Department launched an investigation a day later into athletics programs at Penn and San Jose State University. The Penn investigation centered on Lia Thomas, who is the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I title and graduated from the university in 2022.
Over a month later, the White House announced the suspension of about $175 million in federal funding from the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration said the halt in funding on March 19 came after a separate discretionary federal money review.
The university said at the time that it wasn’t directly notified of the action.
Columbia University
Columbia University was the first major institution that had its funding singled out by the Trump administration.
At first, federal agencies declared they were considering stop-work orders for about $51 million of contracts with Columbia on March 3. Trump had also said on social media that schools that allow “illegal protests” would see funding cuts.
Last year, Columbia student protesters started a wave of campus demonstrations against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The protests led to tense faceoffs with police at the New York City university and the arrests of more than 100 demonstrators.
University leadership faced scathing condemnations from Republicans on the protests’ proliferation, leading former president Minouche Shafik to step down. Columbia also began investigating pro-Palestinian student activists, such as Mahmoud Khalil, who was later arrested and is at threat of deportation.
On March 7, the Trump administration cancelled about $400 million of Columbia’s federal funding. Columbia took some action afterward, such as expelling and suspending some student protesters who occupied a campus building during demonstrations.
But two weeks after what Education Secretary Linda McMahon called a “productive meeting” with interim university president Katrina Armstrong, the university announced March 21 that it had agreed to make even more sweeping policy changes that the Trump administration had demanded.
The changes included placing the Middle East studies department under supervision, hiring new safety personnel who can make arrests, prohibiting protests in academic buildings, updating student discipline policies and banning face masks “for the purposes of concealing one’s identity.” The university also agreed to appoint a senior provost tasked with reviewing several international studies departments’ leadership and curriculum.
Armstrong resigned from her post the following week.
Some faculty members immediately decried the decision. Groups such as the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers also filed a lawsuit on March 25 against the Trump administration for the funding cuts.
