By Jan Wolfe
Oct 5 (Reuters) – US President Donald Trump’s administration asked an appeals court on Monday to let it terminate more than $2 billion in grants awarded to Harvard University, a major target in the Republican president’s broader campaign against elite US universities.
During an oral argument before the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Department lawyer Michael Velchik said the federal government had the authority to withhold federal funding from Harvard to ensure it was adequately combating antisemitism on its campus.
“Harvard has said it’s taken enough steps, but does the government have to accept that?” Velchik said. “At a certain point we also get to decide what’s good enough for us.”
The court’s decision will help determine whether Trump can leverage federal funding to force change at US universities, which he says are gripped by “radical left” ideologies.
Trump, since returning to the White House, has used civil rights investigations, deportations of non-citizen students, accreditation threats and other tactics to reshape elite and public universities.
Harvard, the nation’s richest and oldest university, has fought back aggressively in court and has secured several victories, including another ruling the appeals court will review separately on Tuesday that blocked the administration from barring international students at the school.
Paul Clement, a prominent conservative lawyer representing Harvard, said the university has a right to be free from unconstitutional conditions apart from any contractual right to its grants.
“These are not claims that really depend on the contract in any particular way,” Clement said during Monday’s hearing. “They are claims to be free of retaliatory discrimination.”
Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch, one of the three judges on the panel, during Monday’s argument signaled support for Harvard’s position that the grant terminations were retaliatory.
“There are no findings, there was no investigation, there was simply an announcement: ‘we’re terminating’,” Lynch said. “Against that backdrop, it rather looks like the administration didn’t want to have to cope with what the law and facts that this case presented.”
HARVARD CLAIMS RETALIATION
Trump administration officials sent Harvard a list of 10 demands in April 2025, including ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the appointment of third-party auditors to monitor academic departments for viewpoint diversity.
Harvard President Alan Garber rejected the demands, saying “no government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Within hours of Garber’s statement, the administration said it was freezing federal grants to the university because of its alleged failure to address harassment of Jewish students during campus protests related to the Israel-Hamas conflict. It ultimately terminated about $2.2 billion in grants.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Harvard filed a lawsuit seeking to block the funding freeze, calling it retaliation for speech protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment.
In a decision last year, US District Judge Allison Burroughs said the Trump administration used “antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
The Justice Department appealed to the 1st Circuit, saying “the Government is not required to continue giving taxpayer dollars to universities that have demonstrated deliberate indifference to antisemitic conduct and discrimination on campus.”
The Justice Department also said Burroughs erred in asserting jurisdiction over the grant terminations, saying the matter should be before the Washington, D.C.-based US Court of Federal Claims, which hears contract disputes against the federal government.
The administration has separately filed three other lawsuits against Harvard, including a case that the Justice Department launched in March alleging it violated a civil rights law by failing to protect Jewish students. A judge in August dismissed that lawsuit, which had sought to claw back federal funding.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani and David Bario)
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