Appeals court today weighs Trump’s decision to block Harvard’s research funding

President Donald Trump’s administration will appear today, Monday, before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, at an oral hearing scheduled for 9:30 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time, to seek the revival of the plan to cancel more than $2 billion in federal research grants for Harvard University, as Reuters reports. The case is the centrepiece of Trump’s campaign against the country’s richest and oldest university, which the president has accused of being captured by “radical left” ideologies.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has used an arsenal of tools to reshape elite universities: civil-rights investigations, deportations of non-citizen students, threats to accreditation and other tactics. Harvard has fought aggressively in court and has secured several victories — including a ruling, which the administration reviews separately on Tuesday, that barred the government from preventing the university from hosting international students.

The clash began in April 2025, when administration officials sent Harvard a list of ten demands, among them the end of diversity (DEI) programmes and the appointment of external auditors to monitor viewpoint diversity in departments. Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, rejected the demands: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which fields of study they can pursue”. Within hours of this statement, the administration announced the freezing of federal grants, citing the alleged failure to address harassment of Jewish students during the protests over the Israel–Hamas conflict — and eventually around $2.2 billion were cancelled.

Harvard sued the administration, calling the measure retaliation against speech protected by the First Amendment. The case was assigned to federal judge Allison Burroughs in Boston, appointed by Barack Obama, who in an 84-page ruling last year said that the Trump administration used “antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities”. The Department of Justice appealed, arguing that “the government is not obliged to keep giving taxpayer money to universities that have shown deliberate indifference to antisemitic behaviour and discrimination on campus”. The administration has separately opened three other lawsuits against Harvard, including one dismissed by a judge in August.