Harvard University filed a lawsuit on April 21, 2025, against the Trump administration to block the freezing of billions of dollars in federal funding.
The legal action intensifies the conflict between higher education institutions and President Donald Trump’s administration.
Harvard’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, claims the Trump administration has broadly attacked research funding at major universities.
The university argues the government is withholding federal funds to gain control over Harvard’s academic decisions.
Harvard University President Alan Garber said the institution will continue fighting hate and following anti-discrimination laws while claiming the government wants “to control whom we hire and teach” rather than working with Harvard on anti-semitism issues as civil rights law requires.
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Prof Garber wrote in a message to the Harvard community earlier this month.
The lawsuit names several federal officials as defendants, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary; Linda M. McMahon, the education secretary; Stephen Ehikian, acting administrator of the General Services Administration; Attorney General Pam Bondi; and other administration officials.
The Trump administration began reviewing $9 billion in federal funding for Harvard in March and later gave the university a list of demands, including banning masks and eliminating all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
After Harvard rejected these demands on April 14, 2025, the administration froze $2.3 billion in funding.
Government officials plan to freeze an additional $1 billion in research funding to Harvard, according to administration officials who spoke anonymously.
This funding mainly comes from the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s primary agency for biomedical and public health research.
The freeze has caused immediate stop-work orders affecting Harvard’s federally funded research projects on tuberculosis, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), and radiation poisoning.
Harvard officials said the funding freeze will greatly impact the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which gets nearly half its total budget from federal research grants. The school announced major budget cuts last week.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields responded to the lawsuit with a statement that the “gravy train of federal assistance” to institutions like Harvard was ending.
“Taxpayer funds are a privilege, and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions required to access that privilege,” Fields said.
The Trump administration has also paused funding for other universities including Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, Northwestern and Brown over campus protests.
The administration has framed its campaign as fighting against anti-semitism, but has also targeted programs and teaching related to racial diversity and gender ideology.
Harvard is the first university to sue in response to Trump’s crackdown, though some Harvard faculty members and Columbia University professors have filed separate lawsuits against the Trump administration, citing similar grounds to those Harvard outlined on April 21, 2025.
