The Trump administration is halting research funding to Princeton University and reviewing about $9 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard University, the latest escalation of the government’s cuts to scientific research.
The actions aimed at Princeton and Harvard follow cuts to fellow Ivy League institutions Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, which were hit with $400 million and $175 million in cuts, respectively.
On March 31 and April 1, Princeton “received notifications from government agencies including the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Defense Department suspending several dozen Princeton research grants,” Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber said in an April 1 message to the university community obtained by Fierce Biotech. “The full rationale for this action is not yet clear.”
Eisgruber did not disclose the total value of the terminated grants.
Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, M.D., Ph.D., sent a similar message to his university on the night of March 31.
“Earlier today, the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism issued a letter putting at risk almost $9 billion in support of research at Harvard and other institutions, including hospitals in our community,” Garber wrote. “If this funding is stopped, it will halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation.”
Harvard, Princeton and Columbia have been targeted by the administration due to alleged failures to address antisemitism on campus. In a March 10 announcement, the Department of Education published a list of 60 universities that are “presently under investigation for Title VI violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination,” which included the three schools.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Fierce Biotech.
In their messages, both Eisgruber and Garber pledged that Princeton and Harvard are committed to fighting antisemitism.
“Princeton University will comply with the law,” Eisgruber wrote. “We are committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we will cooperate with the government in combating antisemitism. Princeton will also vigorously defend academic freedom and the due process rights of this university.”
Harvard has taken measures to address antisemitism, Garber wrote in his message. “For the past fifteen months, we have devoted considerable effort to addressing antisemitism,” he said, including strengthening rules and disciplinary approaches and bolstering education and training efforts around antisemitism.
Faced by earlier threats to its federal funding due to alleged failures to combat antisemitism, Columbia has already taken steps to acquiesce to the Trump administration’s demands, including new restrictions on protests and the wearing of face masks. Despite this, there has been no public sign that the $400 million in canceled funds has been restored.
The cuts to Columbia are also being challenged in court by the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers.
Among the research caught in the crosshairs of Columbia’s slashed funding is the Center for Solutions for ME/CFS, a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-backed initiative to understand the biology underpinning myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. The center’s director told Fierce Biotech in March that while the field is ripe for clinical trials, the lost funds have ground the center's work to a dead halt.
Columbia did not respond to a request for comment from Fierce Biotech.
Penn, meanwhile, was subjected to its funding cuts due to the university allowing a transgender athlete to compete on the women’s swimming team in 2022, President J. Larry Jameson, M.D., Ph.D., said in a March 25 statement.
The federal Office of Civil Rights (OCR) reached out to Penn for information after President Donald Trump signed a Feb. 5 executive order meant to “keep men out of women’s sports,” Jameson said.
“In our response, we affirmed that during the 2021-2022 season, we followed NCAA rules and applicable law as they existed then, and that we now comply with the NCAA policy and the law as they exist today,” Jameson added.
Despite this response to the OCR, Jameson said, faculty at seven different Penn schools received stop work orders, including “research on preventing hospital-acquired infections, drug screening against deadly viruses, quantum computing, protections against chemical warfare and student loan programs.”
The Trump administration has previously stated that it is “immutable biological reality” that there are two sexes, male and female, and that the administration “rejects gender ideology.”
This view on sex and gender has been decried as unscientific by experts. Gender is a social construct that has always varied across time and societies, according to the World Health Organization.
And about 2% of people are born with intersex traits—such as sexual anatomy, reproductive organs, hormonal patterns or chromosomal patterns that don’t fit into the typical binary framework—according to the United Nations Human Rights Office.
Scientific research in the federal government has also been targeted by the Trump administration. The Department of Health and Human Services conducted massive layoffs starting April 1, with about 10,000 employees set to be affected across the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH and more health agencies.
About 1,900 scientists, including elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, researchers at every Ivy League university and multiple Nobel Prize winners, have signed a public statement calling on the Trump administration to “cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science.” The scientists warn that “the damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.”