US President Donald Trump said yesterday he is considering taking $3 billion of previously awarded grant money for scientific and engineering research away from Harvard University and giving it to trade schools.
His comments on his social media platform Truth Social come less than a week after his administration sought to block the Ivy League school from enrolling foreign students as part of Trump’s extraordinary effort to seize some government control of US academia.
Trump, a Republican, has frozen some $3bn in federal grants to Harvard in recent weeks, complaining that it has hired Democrats, ‘Radical Left idiots’ and ‘bird brains’ as professors. Harvard, a private university, has sued to restore the funding, saying the cuts are an unconstitutional attack on its free speech rights and unlawful.
Most of that grant money is appropriated by Congress for the National Institutes of Health to disburse to fund biomedical research after a lengthy application process by individual scientists, work that is not typically done at trade schools.
It was not clear whether Trump was referring to Harvard grants his administration has already frozen. Harvard has said it was told that virtually all of its federal grant awards were revoked earlier in May, in a series of letters by the NIH, the US Forest Service, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defence and other agencies.
The letters each said the grants were being suspended because they ‘no longer effectuate agency priorities’.
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment yesterday. The White House did not respond to questions about the specific funds Trump wants to repurpose or how it could be reallocated to trade schools under the law.
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