Judge Dismisses Trump Administration's Antisemitism Lawsuit Against Harvard, But NIH Funding Still Down 18%

US District Judge Richard G. Stearns, a Clinton appointee, dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit against Harvard University on Thursday, ruling the government had failed to prove the school violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, according to CNN.

The lawsuit, filed in March, sought to halt $2.6 billion in federal grants and force Harvard to repay millions already disbursed. The administration argued Harvard let "hostile antisemitism and anti-Israeli conduct" fester on campus, pointing to incidents mostly clustered around the 2023-2024 school year following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.

Stearns wrote the incidents were "too isolated and episodic" to support the government's claim of an ongoing pattern of discrimination. The judge noted the administration could only point to three additional incidents in the two years since. Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department's assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the administration disagrees with the ruling and is weighing next steps. She said the department's Civil Rights Division has an "extensive and active portfolio of antisemitism enforcement" nationwide, including indictments and settlements.

Harvard was the first university to sue the Trump administration and has prevailed multiple times, unlike Columbia and other schools that cut settlement deals. A federal judge previously ruled the administration violated Harvard's First Amendment rights when it froze more than $2.2 billion in grants across multiple agencies last year.

But winning in court hasn't meant winning the war. According to a New York Times analysis reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer, Harvard's National Institutes of Health funding is running about 18% behind the average pace under the Biden administration. Through June 30 of this fiscal year, the NIH gave Harvard 309 awards worth $200 million, down from an average of roughly 440 awards worth $246 million over the same nine-month stretch from 2021 to 2024.

Unlike the earlier, very public funding freeze that got struck down in court, this slowdown looks like ordinary grant review, making it far harder to challenge legally. Harvard's 2026 funding is actually running ahead of last year's frozen pace, but still well below historical norms. Other major research universities have seen similar reductions, the Inquirer noted, so it's not clear how much of this is Harvard-specific versus a broader NIH pullback.

Separately, the Pentagon on Monday ordered 30 universities, including Harvard, MIT and Johns Hopkins, to audit their research partnerships with 130 foreign institutions, most of them Chinese, according to TIME. Schools that don't terminate "problematic" partnerships within two weeks risk losing eligibility for future federal research funding. Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering, said the Department of War has "zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security."

The Pentagon has not publicly named which universities received the order or what specific partnerships triggered it. The South China Morning Post reported that higher education representatives accused the Pentagon of implying wrongdoing without presenting evidence, and that repeated requests to the Pentagon for details went unanswered. The list also reportedly includes Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, NYU, and multiple University of California campuses.

A federal jury convicted former Corning scientist Ji Wang last year of stealing Pentagon-funded research files for a China-backed business, and Arcadia, California mayor Eileen Wang resigned in May after admitting she'd acted as an unregistered Chinese government agent. Concerns about Chinese exploitation of U.S. research funding have produced actual convictions. The Chinese embassy in Washington countered that the U.S. is "politicising" academic exchange and should "abandon the Cold War mentality," a predictable response from an interested party but not one that resolves whether these specific 130 institutions pose the risk the Pentagon claims.

Harvard's exposure remains substantial even after Thursday's court win. The Wall Street Journal, as reported by Breitbart, estimated Harvard could lose close to $1 billion a year if Congress raises the endowment tax to 8% from 1.4% (a $240 million hit), if international enrollment and financial aid losses materialize ($110 million), and if the $700 million in slashed research funding stays cut. Harvard's endowment sits at $53 billion, but more than 80% of it is donor-restricted, meaning the school can't simply raid it to cover shortfalls without inviting lawsuits from donors.

Harvard has already frozen new hires and says it's working to increase "viewpoint diversity and intellectual openness" on campus. A senior White House official told the Journal the school gets no money back until it ends what the administration calls discriminatory practices, adding that "the private sector is welcome to step in and support Harvard."

The Justice Department has not said whether it will appeal Stearns' ruling. The Pentagon's two-week deadline for universities to sever "problematic" China partnerships has not yet passed, and it remains to be seen which partnerships, if any, will be terminated by the deadline.