Trump administration freezes all federal research funding for Harvard The US Department of Education informed Harvard University on Monday that it was ending billions of dollars in research grants and other aid unless the school concedes to a list of demands from the Trump administration that would effectively cede control of the nation’s oldest and wealthiest to the government.
The news was delivered to Dr Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a deeply partisan, scathing letter from Linda McMahon, the education secretary, which she also posted on social media. “This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government, since none will be provided,” McMahon wrote.
The main reason for the crackdown on Harvard is the school’s rejection of a long list of demands from the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, prompted by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. McMahon also accuses the university of “a systematic pattern of violating federal law”.
As Garber explained in a message to the Harvard community last month, the university decided to sue the federal government only after the Trump administration froze $2.2bn in funding, threatened to freeze an additional $1bn in grants, “initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.
The government’s “sweeping and intrusive demands would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university”, Garber wrote.
In its lawsuit against the Trump administration, Harvard said the government’s funding cuts will have stark “real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff [and] researchers” by ending crucial medical and scientific research.
The text of McMahon’s letter, like a Truth Social post from the president, is littered with all-caps words. “Where do many of these ‘students’ come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country – and why is there so much HATE?”
“Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus,” McMahon claims.
The university recently published its own, in-depth investigation of allegations that Gaza solidarity protests had crossed the line into antisemitism, and a second that looked at anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.
But McMahon’s letter is not mainly about the claim that Jewish students feel unsafe at Harvard – a view the president, who is himself Jewish, has some sympathy with – but is filled with extended diatribes about a series of other grievances, including: the supposed far-left politics of Penny Pritzker, a member of the university’s governing board who previously served as US commerce secretary during the Obama administration; the complaints of Harvard alumnus and Trump supporter Bill Ackman; what McMahon calls the “ugly racism” of Harvard’s efforts to diversify its student body; complaints about what Fox News has termed a “remedial math” course which is intended to address gaps in new students’ math skills following the Covid-19 pandemic; accusations that the Harvard Law Review has discriminated against white authors; and two brief fellowships the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health offered to the former mayors of New York and Chicago, Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot.
In language that seemed to echo Donald Trump’s own, McMahon told Harvard’s president that de Blasio and Lightfoot, who were recruited to share their experiences of bringing universal pre-kindergarten to New York, and leading Chicago through the pandemic, are “perhaps the worst mayors evert to preside over major cities in our country’s history”.
“This is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation,” McMahon wrote.
“Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni,” McMahon wrote. “You have an approximately $53bn head start.”
Key events
Show key events only Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature
Closing summary This brings our latest edition of US politics live to an end, but we will return on Tuesday to continue to chronicle the second Trump administration. Here are some of the day’s developments:
Mass protests have been called for 14 June, when Donald Trump plans to throw himself a military parade birthday party
US intelligence officials concluded last month that the government of Venezuela is “probably not directing” the activities of Tren de Aragua gang members inside the United States. That undermines Trump’s claim that the Alien Enemies Act empowers him to deport suspected gang members.
The US Department of Education informed Harvard University on Monday that it was ending billions of dollars in research grants and other aid unless the school concedes to a list of demands from the Trump administration that would effectively cede control of the nation’s oldest and wealthiest to the government.
On Thursday at the White House, Melania Trump will host the unveiling of a US Postal Service stamp honoring the former first lady Barbara Bush, who made no secret of her passionate hatred of Donald Trump.
Trump signed an executive order ending all federal funding for what the White House calls “dangerous gain-of-function research in countries of concern like China and Iran”.
One day before the newly elected Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, visits the White House to meet Trump, Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, accused Canada of being a “socialist regime” that has been “feeding off of America” for decades.
This year’s Pulitzer prize for illustrated reporting and commentary was awarded to editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who quit the Washington Post in January to protest the newspaper’s refusal to publish her satirical cartoon depicting the outlet’s owner, Jeff Bezos – and a group of other media and technology barons – kneeling before Donald Trump and offering him bags of cash.
The White House said in a clarifying statement that “no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made” after Trump abruptly announced on his Truth Social platform last night a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, sparking widespread concern across the film industry. He apparently got the idea from a conversation with Jon Voight at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend.
TeleMessage, the communications app used by Mike Waltz, Trump’s former national security adviser of Signalgate fame (as snapped during last week’s cabinet meeting the day before he was fired), said it was temporarily suspending services following a reported hack that exposed some of its messages.
Mass protests called for 14 June, when Trump plans to throw himself a military parade birthday party Indivisible and a coalition of pro-democracy partner organizations just announced a NO KINGS Nationwide Day of Defiance for 14 June, which is both Donald Trump’s birthday and the day of a planned military parade in Washington.
The organizers write:
On June 14—Flag Day—Donald Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday. A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else.
US spy agencies say Venezuela ‘is not directing’ Tren de Aragua gang, undermining Trump’s use of Alien Enemies Act US intelligence officials concluded last month that the government of Venezuela is “probably not directing” the activities of Tren de Aragua gang members inside the United States, according to a newly declassified memo released on Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
The 7 April memo, which the foundation provided to The New York Times, undermines Donald Trump’s claim that Alien Enemies Act gives him the power to deport suspected members of the gang because they are part of a covert invasion by a foreign government.
The memo was produced by the National Intelligence Council, which includes senior analysts and national security policy experts who report to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence.
The intelligence experts found that Venezuelan security forces have arrested Tren de Aragua members and “periodically engaged in armed confrontations with TDA, resulting in the killing of some TDA members,” suggesting that the government of Nicolás Maduro see the gang as a threat, not an ally.
Trump’s ‘very strong research’ on film production turns out to have been a conversation with Jon Voight at Mar-a-Lago Earlier today, Donald Trump told reporters on the White House lawn that his plan to impose a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands”, announced on his social media platform Sunday night, was not, as it might have seemed, a poorly thought out scheme that will do more harm than good but the result of some “very strong research” that the president had engaged in “over the last week”.
Donald Trump announces tariff on movies from ‘other nations’ – video That research, it turns out, was a conversation this weekend at Mar-a-Lago with Jon Voight, and his business partner, the producer Steven Paul.
According to a press release sent to the Hollywood Reporter on Monday, Voight and Paul pitched Trump on a plan to re-shore film production through “a combination of federal tax incentives, tax code changes, co-production treaties and infrastructure subsidies for theater owners, production and postproduction companies”.
Having done his own research, Trump apparently chose to ignore the expert advice to offer incentives to film producers to shoot films in the United States, and decided to threaten them with tariffs instead.
Trump administration freezes all federal research funding for Harvard The US Department of Education informed Harvard University on Monday that it was ending billions of dollars in research grants and other aid unless the school concedes to a list of demands from the Trump administration that would effectively cede control of the nation’s oldest and wealthiest to the government.
The news was delivered to Dr Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a deeply partisan, scathing letter from Linda McMahon, the education secretary, which she also posted on social media. “This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government, since none will be provided,” McMahon wrote.
The main reason for the crackdown on Harvard is the school’s rejection of a long list of demands from the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, prompted by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. McMahon also accuses the university of “a systematic pattern of violating federal law”.
As Garber explained in a message to the Harvard community last month, the university decided to sue the federal government only after the Trump administration froze $2.2bn in funding, threatened to freeze an additional $1bn in grants, “initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.
The government’s “sweeping and intrusive demands would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university”, Garber wrote.
In its lawsuit against the Trump administration, Harvard said the government’s funding cuts will have stark “real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff [and] researchers” by ending crucial medical and scientific research.
The text of McMahon’s letter, like a Truth Social post from the president, is littered with all-caps words. “Where do many of these ‘students’ come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country – and why is there so much HATE?”
“Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus,” McMahon claims.
The university recently published its own, in-depth investigation of allegations that Gaza solidarity protests had crossed the line into antisemitism, and a second that looked at anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.
But McMahon’s letter is not mainly about the claim that Jewish students feel unsafe at Harvard – a view the president, who is himself Jewish, has some sympathy with – but is filled with extended diatribes about a series of other grievances, including: the supposed far-left politics of Penny Pritzker, a member of the university’s governing board who previously served as US commerce secretary during the Obama administration; the complaints of Harvard alumnus and Trump supporter Bill Ackman; what McMahon calls the “ugly racism” of Harvard’s efforts to diversify its student body; complaints about what Fox News has termed a “remedial math” course which is intended to address gaps in new students’ math skills following the Covid-19 pandemic; accusations that the Harvard Law Review has discriminated against white authors; and two brief fellowships the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health offered to the former mayors of New York and Chicago, Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot.
In language that seemed to echo Donald Trump’s own, McMahon told Harvard’s president that de Blasio and Lightfoot, who were recruited to share their experiences of bringing universal pre-kindergarten to New York, and leading Chicago through the pandemic, are “perhaps the worst mayors evert to preside over major cities in our country’s history”.
“This is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation,” McMahon wrote.
“Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni,” McMahon wrote. “You have an approximately $53bn head start.”
Melania Trump to host unveiling of stamp honoring Barbara Bush, who hated Donald Trump for decades On Thursday at the White House, Melania Trump will host the unveiling of a US Postal Service stamp honoring the former first lady Barbara Bush, who made no secret of her passionate hatred of Donald Trump.
In a diary entry written in 1990 that Bush gave to the journalist Susan Page for a biography, the then first lady wrote that Trump’s behavior had transformed the meaning of his name into a new word. “Trump now means Greed, selfishness and ugly,” Bush wrote.
The same year, Bush was astounded to read in a news report that Trump, in remarks at a charity dinner attended by the former president, Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy, had mocked Reagan for paid speeches he had delivered in Japan. “I see President and Mrs=Reagan in the audience,” Trump said. “Did you have to pay them $2m?”
In 2016, just before her son Jeb dropped out of the Republican presidential primary against Trump, the former first lady told CBS News: “I don’t know how women can vote for someone who said what he sad about Megyn Kelly. It was terrible, and we knew what he meant too.”
After Kelly had asked Trump to account for his past misogynistic and sexist comments during a primary debate hosted by Fox in that campaign, Trump was enraged, and later told CNN: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her … wherever.”
“He’s like a comedian, or like a showman or something,” the former first lady, whose stamp will be unveiled by the current one, said in the same interview.
Page later revealed that Trump’s first presidency shook Bush’s faith in the Republican party. Asked shortly before she died whether she still considered herself a Republican, Bush answered: “I’d probably say no today.”
Until the day she died in 2018, Bush kept a red, white and blue digital clock on her bedside table that counted down to the end of Trump’s term.
Donald Trump elected not to attend the former first lady’s funeral, although Melania Trump was there, alongside the former first ladies Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton.
Trumps signs order barring federal funding for gain-of-function research in China Donald Trump just signed an executive order ending all federal funding for what the White House calls “dangerous gain-of-function research in countries of concern like China and Iran and in foreign nations deemed to have insufficient research oversight.”
In the made-for-television photo-op in the Oval Office, Trump was flanked by his new health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Dr Marty Makary, the FDA commissioner, and Dr Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director.
Trump alluded to the claim that has become an article of faith among his supporters: that research financed by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China years before the Covid-19 pandemic, which some experts described as gain-of-function, could have led to the development of Sars-CoV-2, the deadly coronavirus that causes the disease Covid-19, in the Wuhan lab.
In 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci rejected Senator Rand Paul’s claim at a contentious Senate hearing that research carried out in Wuhan before 2017 with some support from the NIAID met the definition of gain-of-function and pointedly explained that it was “molecularly impossible” to make Sars-CoV-2 from the viruses that were used in those experiments.
Fauci did not get a chance to explain during that hearing what the scientific basis was for the determination by NIAID biologists that the experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, described in a paper published in 2017, were not subject to a temporary pause on the funding of gain-of-function research imposed during the Obama administration in 2014, which was lifted in 2017 when Trump was president.
The official White House account that shared video of the order signing on social media also said that the measure was to guard against what it called “lab accidents and other biosecurity incidents, such as those that likely caused Covid-19”.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, suggested last week that the Trump administration’s insistence that the Covid-19 pandemic started in a lab was intended to justify sweeping cuts to all biomedical and public health research. “No evidence supports a lab leak, but it’s used to justify a 40% budget cut anyway,” Rasmussen wrote.
The White House has taken down some government websites providing Covid-19 information and replaced them with a new boldly styled page dedicated to the controversial theory that the pandemic was caused by the virus leaking from a Chinese government laboratory.
Last month, the Trump administration took down the federal government websites covid.gov and covidtests.gov, which had provided basic information about Covid-19 vaccines, treatment and testing, and replaced them with a new White House page that showed Trump in front of the words “LAB LEAK” in giant letters. A headline below reads: “The True Origins of Covid-19.”
US commerce secretary says Canada’s ‘socialist regime’ has been ‘feeding off of America’ One day before the newly elected Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, visits the White House to meet Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, accused Canada of being a “socialist regime” that has been “feeding off of America” for decades.
Lutnick made his undiplomatic remarks to Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, who served as Trump’s top economic advisor during his first term when the president took pride in negotiating the USMCA trade pact with Mexico and Canada to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But when Kudlow asked Lutnick about the prospects for a new US trade deal with Canada, the commerce secretary scoffed at the idea. “Why do we make cars in Canada?” he asked. “Why do we do our films in Canada? Come on!”
Tom Perkins
Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced on Monday that she was dropping all charges against seven pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested last May at a University of Michigan encampment.
The announcement came just moments before the judge was to decide on a defense motion to disqualify Nessel’s office over alleged bias. Defense attorney Amir Makled said the motion largely stemmed from an October Guardian report detailing Nessel’s extensive personal, financial and political connections to university regents calling for the activists to be prosecuted.
“This was a case of selective prosecution and rooted in bias, not in public safety issues,” Makled added. “We’re hoping this sends a message to other institutions locally and nationally that protest is not a crime, and dissent is not disorder.”
Read more:
Editorial cartoonist who quit Washington Post over sketch of Bezos kneeling to Trump wins Pulitzer This year’s Pulitzer prize for illustrated reporting and commentary was awarded to editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who quit the Washington Post in January to protest the newspaper’s refusal to publish her satirical cartoon depicting the outlet’s owner, Jeff Bezos – and a group of other media and technology barons – kneeling before Donald Trump and offering him bags of cash.
Last week, after the Guardian reported that Trump called Bezos to complain about report that Amazon planned to list tariff costs on site, and Amazon relented to the pressure, Telnaes posted her rejected cartoon again on Bluesky.
Allow content provided by a third party?
This article includes content hosted on embed.bsky.app. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’.
In its citation, the Pulitzer board praised Telnaes “For delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity – and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”
After she quit, Telnaes wrote on Substack:
The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.
While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.
‘It is really scary’: Trump cuts will lead to more deaths in disasters, expert warns
Nina Lakhani
The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to disaster management will cost lives in the US, with hollowed-out agencies unable to accurately predict, prepare for or respond to extreme weather events, earthquakes and pandemics, a leading expert has warned.
Samantha Montano, professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy and author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis, said the death toll from disasters including hurricanes, tornadoes and water pollution will rise in the US unless Trump backtracks on mass layoffs and funding cuts to key agencies. That includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), whose work relies heavily on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), which is also being dismantled.
“The overall risk of threats and hazards occurring in the US has increased since this administration took over, while the capacity of our emergency management system is being diminished,” said Montano in an interview.
Emergency managers will be operating blindly without the data that we have become accustomed to from Noaa and other science agencies. It’s what we rely on to issue warnings and evacuation orders, and pre-position resources. It is really scary because we used to not have good weather data – and death tolls were remarkably higher.
It is difficult to know if it will be the next hurricane where the response completely fails or three hurricanes from now. But I feel confident in saying that if the cuts continue, we will be seeing higher death tolls and more devastation, absolutely. It’s beyond crazy that we are eliminating the funding for these agencies particularly at this moment where hazards are increasing because of climate change.
Chris Stein
Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp has ruled out running for Senate next year against Jon Ossoff, one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the chamber.
Kemp was viewed as a strong candidate to flip the seat that Ossoff won in 2020, given his overwhelming re-election victory as governor of the swing state three years ago. Several Republicans are said to be considering running for the Senate seat, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, the rightwing north Georgia congresswoman who is one of Donald Trump’s most ardent defenders.
“Over the last few weeks, I have had many conversations with friends, supporters, and leaders across the country who encouraged me to run for the US Senate in 2026. I greatly appreciate their support and prayers for our family. After those discussions, I have decided that being on the ballot next year is not the right decision for me and my family,” Kemp wrote on X.
“I spoke with President Trump and Senate leadership earlier today and expressed my commitment to work alongside them to ensure we have a strong Republican nominee who can win next November, and ultimately be a conservative voice in the US Senate who will put hardworking Georgians first.”
Ossoff was first elected the same year that Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia’s electoral votes in nearly three decades. But last year, Georgia voters picked Trump, and Ossoff is expected to face a competitive race for another six-year term representing the state.
If he loses, Senate Democrats could see their 47-seat minority shrink even further. The party will also be defending a seat in Michigan, a swing state Trump won last November, but are hoping to unseat GOP senators in Maine and North Carolina.
Trump is due to sign an executive order to encourage domestic drug manufacturing, according to Reuters. We’ll bring you more detail on that as soon as we get it.
The day so far
The White House said in a clarifying statement that “no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made” after Donald Trump abruptly announced on his Truth Social platform last night a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, sparking widespread concern across the film industry.
TeleMessage, the communications app used by Mike Waltz, Trump’s former national security adviser of Signalgate fame (as snapped during last week’s cabinet meeting the day before he was fired), said it was temporarily suspending services following a reported hack that exposed some of its messages.
Further evidence came to light regarding the scope of the Trump administration’s highly controversial and aggressive efforts to reach agreements with more countries to receive third-country deportees from the US. Reuters reported that Rwanda was in “early stage” discussions with the Trump administration and and according to internal federal government documents obtained by CBS News, the administration has also approached the likes of Angola, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Libya, Moldova and as mentioned above Rwanda to aid its aggressive mass deportation efforts.
A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general sued on Monday in an attempt to block Trump’s move to suspend leasing and permitting of new wind projects, saying it threatens to cripple the wind industry and a key source of clean energy.
Prominent figures in the Maga movement came out against the bipartisan IGO Anti-Boycott Act, House Resolution 867 saying it would criminalize boycotts and free speech against Israel, after which a scheduled vote on the legislation today was canceled.
Trump is scheduled to meet at the White House today with Russian American ballerina Ksenia Karelina, who was released from a Russian prison last month after spending more than a year in custody following allegations of financially supporting Ukraine’s military.
Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence received a John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Award on Sunday for his actions on January 6, when he defied Trump’s demands to overturn the 2020 election. Accepting the award, Pence said: “I will always believe by God’s grace that I did my duty that day.”
Drugmakers warned that Americans would suffer most if Trump imposed tariffs on imports of pharmaceuticals, as medications would become more expensive and potentially unaffordable for some people.
Trump announced that the 2027 NFL draft will take place in Washington DC and outlined a plan to hold it on the National Mall.