Harvard University secured a major legal victory on Wednesday when a federal judge sided with the Ivy League school in its lawsuit against the Trump administration, overturning a freeze on more than $2 billion in federal research funding.
Judge Rejects White House Argument
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled that the administration’s freeze—justified publicly as a measure against antisemitism on campus—was instead a politically motivated assault on higher education.
“A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” Burroughs wrote in her opinion, as reported by CNN.
She emphasized the freeze had jeopardized critical research, including projects on Lou Gehrig’s disease, suicide prevention for veterans, and radiation exposure monitoring for NASA astronauts. “There is no obvious link between the affected projects and antisemitism,” Burroughs said.
