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Harvard University is the latest in a growing list of higher education institutions that had its federal funding targeted by the government in order to comply with the Trump administration’s political agenda. The series of threats and subsequent pauses in funding to some of the top U.S. universities have become an unprecedented tool for the administration to exert influence on college campuses. Six of the seven universities impacted are Ivy League schools. President Donald Trump vowed to pursue these federal cuts on the campaign trail last year, saying he would focus on schools that push critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content. Public school systems are targets for cuts too. Here’s a look at which universities have been pressured by the administration’s funding cuts so far. Harvard University The administration announced its antisemitism task force would conduct a comprehensive review of the Massachusetts university on March 31. The government was set to review nearly $9 billion of federal grants and contracts. Harvard is among universities across the country where pro-Palestinian protests erupted on campus amid the war in Gaza last year. Republican officials have since heavily scrutinized those universities, and several Ivy League presidents testified before Congress to discuss antisemitism allegations. The administration issued its list of demands to Harvard in a letter on April 3. The demands included a ban on face masks, limitations on campus protests and a review of academic departments biases. About a week later, those demands were expanded to include leadership reforms, admission policy changes and stopping the university’s recognition of certain student organizations. Then, on Monday, Harvard President Alan Gerber refused to comply, saying in a letter that the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Hours later, the administration announced it froze more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to the university. Cornell University The White House announced last week that it froze more than $1 billion of Cornell’s federal funding. The administration said the freeze came as it investigated alleged civil rights violations at the university. The New York university was among a group of more than 60 universities that received a letter from the Education Department on March 10 urging them to take steps to protect Jewish students or else face potential enforcement actions. The Defense Department issued more than 75 stop-work orders for research, Cornell said in a statement, but that the federal government hadn’t confirmed if the total funding freeze totaled $1 billion. Northwestern University Like Cornell, Northwestern also saw a halt in some of its federal funding last week. The amount was about $790 million, according to the Trump administration. The Illinois university did not receive an official message from the White House on the freeze despite its cooperation with civil rights investigations, according to Northwestern officials at the time. University spokesperson Jon Yates said Northwestern’s scientific research was at jeopardy because of the freeze a widespread issue for universities facing research cuts from the National Institutes of Health. Brown University The Trump administration was anticipated to pause federal grants and contracts at Brown University because of the Rhode Island school’s response to alleged antisemitism on campus, according to a White House official on April 3. The total was expected to be about $510 million in funding, according to the official. Princeton University Dozens of research grants were suspended at Princeton University without a clear rationale, according to an April 1 campus message from university president Christopher Eisgruber. The grants came from federal agencies such as the Department of Energy, NASA and the Defense Department. Before the funding pause, Eisgruber had expressed his opposition to Trump’s threatened cuts at Columbia University in an essay in The Atlantic magazine. He called the administration’s move a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research.” University of Pennsylvania Unlike the other targeted universities, the University of Pennsylvania saw funding cuts because of a transgender athlete who competed in Penn’s swimming program, according to the Trump administration. After a Feb. 5 executive order barring transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports, the Education Department launched an investigation a day later into athletics programs at Penn and San Jose State University. The Penn investigation centered on Lia Thomas, who is the first openly transgender thlete to win an NCAA Division I title and graduated from the university in 2022. Over a month later, the White House announced the suspension of about $175 million in federal funding from the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration said the halt in funding on March 19 came after a separate discretionary federal money review. The university said at the time that it wasn’t directly notified of the action. Columbia University Columbia University was the first major institution that had its funding singled out by the Trump administration. At first, federal agencies declared they were considering stop-work orders for about $51 million of contracts with Columbia on March 3. Trump had also said on social media that schools that allow illegal protests would see funding cuts. Last year, Columbia student protesters started a wave of campus demonstrations against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The protests led to tense faceoffs with police at the New York City university and the arrests of more than 100 demonstrators. University leadership faced scathing condemnations from Republicans on the protests’ proliferation, leading former president Minouche Shafik to step down. Columbia also began investigating pro-Palestinian student activists, such as Mahmoud Khalil, who was later arrested and is at threat of deportation. On March 7, the Trump administration cancelled about $400 million of Columbia’s federal funding. Columbia took some action afterward, such as expelling and suspending some student protesters who occupied a campus building during demonstrations. The university announced March 21 that it had agreed to make even more sweeping policy changes that the Trump administration had demanded. The changes included placing the Middle East studies department under supervision, hiring new safety personnel who can make arrests, and banning face masks for the purposes of concealing one’s identity. The university also agreed to appoint a senior provost tasked with reviewing several international studies departments’ leadership and curriculum. Armstrong resigned from her post the following week. The decision was met with dissatisfaction among some faculty members and a lawsuit against the cuts. But following Harvard’s defiance of the Trump administration’s demands, Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, had a new message Monday. She said that while she agrees with some of the administration’s requests, the university would reject heavy-handed orchestration that would require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution. Discussions were still ongoing between the federal government and Columbia as of Monday, according to Shipman’s campus letter. Makiya Seminera, Associated Press
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President Donald Trump‘s administration has ordered U.S. Justice Department employees not to post anything on social media related to their government work, after a wave of new political appointees took to cheering Trump and castigating his opponents online. The directive, which was emailed to U.S. Attorneys’ offices late on Monday, appears to prohibit the types of social media posts that Trump’s political appointees routinely make on their official government accounts. The change was made by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has become frustrated by some of the rhetoric being posted by political appointees, according to one person familiar with the matter. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. While the department has always placed restrictions on social media use by employees, such as prohibiting them from discussing non-public investigations or making politically-charged statements that could damage the department’s impartiality, the new policy is much broader. It restricts employees from including their department titles on any social media activity or reposting official government information such as press releases. Employees must not use any social media “in a way that damages the efficiency of the department,” the policy says. Stacey Young, a former department civil rights attorney who recently left to create a DOJ employee advocacy organization called Justice Connection, said the policy could chill employees’ speech. “The new policy represents another unwarranted attack on DOJ employees – one that stifles their free speech in their private lives and creates new ways for the administration to oust career public servants who don’t toe the party line,” said Young. Many of the department’s top Trump-appointed leaders in recent weeks have posted messages that would have run afoul of the policy, which tells them to avoid “injecting their political views into the work they perform” and refrain from making comments “in reckless disregard for the truth” about any person the department engages with, including judges. It also says they cannot post anything that might prejudice a proceeding or “heighten condemnation of an accused.” Leo Terrell, a senior counsel in the Civil Rights Division who is leading its antisemitism task force, for instance, makes near-daily posts on X about his support for Trump. “Democrats are jealous of President Trump!” he wrote on X on Saturday. Last month, Terrell shared a post on his X account from Patrick Casey, a white nationalist who ran the now-defunct Identity Evropa, that said Trump could “revoke someone’s Jew card.” Aaron Reitz, the department’s head of the Office of Legal Policy, in an April 8 post on social media accused “Dem-appointed judges” of siding with cartels to usurp Trump’s “authority to conduct foreign policy.” Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a March 27 post on X, claimed that law enforcement had arrested a “top MS-13 national leader,” referring to the street gang MS-13. The criminal complaint against the suspect, 24-year-old Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos, made no such claim, stating instead that investigators had found only “indicia of MS-13 association.” The department has since moved to drop the charges and have him deported. Ari Cohn, the tech policy lead counsel with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said while government has some authority to restrict the use of personal social media accounts to conduct official business, the new policy is so broad that it places employees at risk of being targeted for their views as private citizens. “The risk that these rules will be wielded in a partisan way to purge the DOJ of anyone who expresses a political view out of step with the leadership or administration is deeply concerning,” he told Reuters in a statement. Sarah N. Lynch, Reuters
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The 4chan website is down, and continues not to load for many users, according to Downdetector. (Downdetector is a platform that monitors online services and internet-related issues, and is essentially a crowd-sourced outage reporting tool.) This outage comes amid unconfirmed reports on social media, including on Reddit, that the internet message board was hacked. Fast Company has reached out to 4chan for comment and did not hear back immediately. The outage was first reported on Downdetector at around 9:57 p.m. ET on Monday night, and peaked soon after around 10:12 p.m. ET, when 1,265 users reported the problem. Since then, users have taken to monitoring the platform, turning Downdetector’s comments section into a virtual 4chan chat forum with some 7,464 comments already. 4chan can best be described as an image board or bulletin board site similar to Reddit, and is known for controversial, right-wing content, which some critics argue often contains hate speech. Founded in 2003 by then-15-year-old Christopher Poole, it started as a website to share anime and manga among its mostly young male audience, but has been called “a breeding ground for the far right.” A breach could potentially reveal the identities and opinions of moderators and users, which could be highly compromising, given the nature of the site’s content. As of this writing, most of the reported problems had to do with 4chan’s website (71%). Another 24% of users reported problems with the server connection, and another 5% said they could not post. Outages were registered across the country in a heat map on Downdetector. Here is a list of the cities included: Seattle Los Angeles Phoenix San Francisco Dallas Houston Minneapolis Chicago St. Louis Detroit Atlanta Tampa Boston New York Washington Users also submitted problem reports in Canada in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.
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