Report: Trump Admin Freezes $1 Billion for Cornell, $790 Million for Northwestern
“The money was frozen in connection with several ongoing, credible, and concerning Title VI investigations”
It’s not official yet, but sources tell the NY Times:
The Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in funding for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern amid civil rights investigations into both schools, two administration officials said.
The funding pause involves mostly grants and contracts with the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Health and Human Services, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced decision.
The moves are the latest in a rapidly escalating campaign against the nation’s elite universities that has resulted in more than $3.3 billion in federal funds suspended or canceled. The other schools that have had funds frozen include Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Penn and Princeton.
MORE TO FOLLOW
The NY Post and Fox News are reporting the same:
“The money was frozen in connection with several ongoing, credible, and concerning Title VI investigations,” a Trump admin official told Fox News.
Title VI bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Both the Biden administration and now the Trump administration recognized “shared ancestry” as falling under these categories, and that is the basis for enforcement actions as to antisemitism.
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400 million here, half a billion there. 700 million here, a billion there.
Why in the world are universities getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the feds? Each?
That was my take, too. Freezing the money is good. I just can’t see any justification for ever unfreezing it!
I have a younger sis who is a cancer researcher – she and her cadre of postgraduate minions depend on Fed money funneled via the local uni to keep employed – like most other medical researchers. Don’t know how she’s been affected by this (she’s a flaming liberal, I’m not, so I’m “toxic” you see) but ima assuming her work is actually important and not just a grifter haven like USAID and other sinkholes for Fed funds. Problem is it’s quite likely her uni (Uni of Rochester, last I knew) like all the rest has gone full in on DEI and supporting violent anti-Semitic “protests” and money is the only lever the Feds have to force them to comply with civil rights law.
Many are private universities. Let them survive off of their endowments and huge tuition increases.
There are plenty of public universities that can or would do medical research and could use these grants and research dollars.
But the snobs would look down on public universities and say, “ewwww, that’s not Ivy League!”
My wife works in admin in a biomedical / mechanical research group at an Ivy. They do great work, no problem with funding them. But when you fund research, a large % goes to DEI personnel, and those departments also discriminate in hiring. The funding of useless DEI ‘eaters’ and the elimination of ‘preferences’ in hiring must also be part of the correction.
And the last thing “cancer researchers” want to do is actually cure cancer. As long as they never get to that point then the money keeps rolling in. The minute that they start to produce actual cancer cures the free money stops.
Although my sis and I might disagree on some important matters – I don’t believe she’s a grifter. Cancer is a multi-headed hydra, it’s not just one cause or cancer cell type, anyone who comes up with a universal cancer remedy would be able to write their own ticket for the rest of their career / life. There are many (past) “death sentence” cancers that are such no longer, many cancer mortalities have been reduced and more than a few death-sentence cancer types relegated to totally curable if caught early.
It would be great if there was one panacea anti-cancer pill to cure all types and severities of cancer – but lacking that folks like my sis will keep hacking away at the mortality figures as best they can.
Not the Feds
From IS the taxpayers
This is insane
Stop it!!!
Exactly what I came here to say. I’m on the hook for tens of thousands in student loans, without which my kids wouldn’t have been credentialed, and I’m also supporting colleges via income taxes?
I think the basic reason is that there is a tremendous amount of expertise at these universities that the government wants to tap into.
No more billions and billions to any of them. Their graduates can’t even define what a woman is.
which makes them eligible for the supreme court
These kind o big numbers are necessary, I think that they should be forfeit. If they have not fully complied by next year, repeat. Do not put up with even the tiniest infraction.
Correct. Immediate and 100% compliance or lose the money for the entire year. Rinse, repeat.
Is there any wonder why we are $36 trillion in debt? This taxpayer funded largess has to end now!
Hopefully this action gets the swift turnaround needed. On the other hand if these institutions choose to continue with their obstinate Civil Rights violations then DoJ Civil Rights Div can bring suits to compel compliance. Even after that there would obviously be a need for DoJ supervision and a pre.clearance regime to be established and maintained for decades to.ensure no backsliding.
Oooof. That has got to hurt.
“now the Trump administration recognized “shared ancestry” as falling under these categories, and that is the basis for enforcement actions as to antisemitism”
Democrat rules.
Democrats redefined sex, way less tenable.
So Cornell was the worst for civil rights violations. Shame on them. Now they find out that those particular civil rights violations aren’t freebies anymore.
I read a report today about a widespread freezing of pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training monies that were DEI directed. One of the faculty managers was baffled about why it was happening and then promptly explained what they were doing which was in complete opposition to the letter that was submitted to the university as to why the money was being frozen.
The article made it seem like the future of STEM was at risk. As someone who spent too many years in academia, I can tell you that 50% of the current research in this country could be dropped overnight and there would be about a 0.5% decrease in scientific advancement. A huge amount of it is busywork to justify someone’s existence. Administrators push for it to bring in indirect-cost money, which currently floats in the 50-65% range, nd which Trump has indicated will be capped at 15%. The purpose of the money is to cover overhead of that specific research, but it is spread out everywhere as a slush fund.
We are about to discover who is and who isn’t essential at these universities. I left academia back when they were starting DEI, but not calling it that. The interesting part is that they brought on faculty to “check boxes,” but now it seems that those they recruited aren’t able to carry their own weight. My guess is that 95% of the PI’s who lost their funding should not have been there in the first place, much like the 8 million illegals over the last 4 years (that we know about) shouldn’t have been here in the first place. We aren’t expelling them: we are returning them.
two words that you will be seeing more and more, ‘malicious compliance’ doesn’t matter where the money was supposed to go, the people in charge will make it hurt as much as possible, in some area you are seeing it already, e.g. park service Yosemite NP in Ca when they just cancelled reservation made a year in advance.
Need DOGE to send AI thru those records to detect incidents of malicious compliance. Firing offense, no second chance if shown. Make them straighten up and fly right for the only reason that works with them: fear.
That has been a strategy in place for, forever. When you want more money, cut the things that people want from the budget first, and keep the fluff. That way the peeps will vote back in more money. If dems were in charge of the menu, there would never be a main course, but desserts would remain intact. They cut essentials first to make it hurt. In academia it will be teachers first, administrators last. IIRC, the first time trump was in office he enacted a policy of losing two current regulations in order to add a new one. That of course can be manipulated, but if you were to make it 5 to 1, or 10 to 1, then they’d be forced to eliminate more of the ones that they want to keep. Only Dems can say “we want to enact more laws to keep government out of your lives” with a straight face.
Portland is a fascinating place these days as they try to push stuff in the face of higher taxes and more scrutiny. Everything is backfiring and the compensatory stuff can’t keep up. Right now they are trying to push through $1.3B to rebuild 3 high schools (we have 11). But, Portland State just published a paper showing that enrollment forecasts for down the road show a loss of students that will result in only 8 schools being needed to serve the community (and this include all of the illegals who may be going somewhere else). So of ocurse, the officials are going full-on challenging the validity of these enrllment forecasts (apparently science isn’t real in this case). Not only is Portland proper losing population, but the demographics of those coming here are childless millenials with no plans for kids ever. We are in a positive feedback cycle where every attempt to fix a leak causes two more.
The only growth industry in Portland these days is in the Homeless Industrial Complex sector. On a plus note there, a local rag recently published a letter from a reader calling out said publication for reporting puff pieces where the new Ritz Carleton Hotel / Condo project has gone into default with less than 8% of the 130 condos (starting at $920K for a 1BR) having sold, and ignoring the $1B a year going towards the homeless problem, with about 0% oversight as to wher and to whom that money is going. Some estimates are about $50K/yr per homeless bed (and documented spending is $50 for a tent and $50 for a sleeping bag). Meanwhile they are pulling more funds from essential services in order to justify tax hikes from the perceived loss of services.
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/04/tower-anchored-by-portland-ritz-carlton-is-85m-underwater-on-construction-loan-lender-says.html
https://www.wweek.com/news/dialogue/2025/04/07/readers-respond-to-trouble-at-the-ritz-carlton-residences/
We are at that critical point where the majority will no longer ignore the rot.
That’s a very good point about the on ground reality of how funds for ‘research’ end up outside the ‘research’. A 15% cap for administrative costs seems very fair. Due to decades long grift in shifting 1/3 or much more in many cases away from research towards bloated Univ admin it will hit hard. The neo clerisy at our Univ will howl like.stuck pigs b/c they believe they are entitled to the funds.
My two cents worth, (excluding my tax money that the government shovels to universities), because the Country has so much debt, finding ways to cut spending is common sense everywhere but DC. That said, any university that wants my tax money, should have to prove the need for it, not the capacity to absorb it. So a needs based assessment should be done that automatically excludes any university with endowments over a certain dollar figure say $100,000,000. Any grants given to universities should have plenty of strings attached on how the money can be used with strict reporting of said use. The universities with larger endowments can use their endowments to cover “research” to show good faith. When the endowments are shown to be used that way, maybe the government can reconsider restoring grants after that track record has been created and verified.
This Title VI and Title IX disputes between the Federal government and the universities are going to pit the medical and physics departments against the Liberal Arts colleges. The withheld funds are not, by and large, for the good Liberal Arts professors but for the professors that have skills valuable to the fostering of progress. It should be entertaining and enlightening.
99.999% of Studies purport to prove precisely what whoever supplied the funding wanted “proved”.
Sadly, that applies to hard sciences also.
I have a friend that’s a chemist at Dow. Back in the 90’s, looking at coming up with new product lines, they decided to buy up the rights to promising research. By the hundreds. Then they did what they should have done to start with: run their own experiments to reproduce the research. He said less than 3% were reproducible.
I think Cornell has done better than most liberal Uni’s on cracking down on antisemitism. The acting President / now President fired professors, shut down the short lived encampment, had protesters arrested (for what it is worth in indigo-Blue Ithaca) and has expelled numerous students. You do not have a daily ongoing protest or harassment of Jewish students that I can see. Anyone else see different?
the internals of lefty movement is going strong
its the visuals that they have changed,,,if they have changed it at all
I will state this as long as the issue persists: The Jewish students and professors who are claiming of being attacked and intimidated were in the VANGUARD of those attacking conservatives on campus prior to 10/7. Jewish intellectuals were the LEAD on all of the ‘intersectionality’ , and soft on crime nonsense that has turned on them. Ironically it is conservatives that stand up for Jewish students & Faculty, Jewish victims of crime, and Israel. If American Jews continue to vote to the Left, we may not be in power to save them the next time.
correct
but its exactly these acts by the left that will bring them over to maga
and I doubt that they are “claiming” when in fact they are being attacked
Statement really annoys the hell out of me. Yes there are Jews that vote progressive. I despise them. However Trump got 31% of the Jewish vote in 2024. We don’t vote in lock step like say black women.
There are plenty of Jews on here that are anti-progressive. The founder of this very site is Jewish. Yet statements like yours and many others imply that all Jews are progressive. Just stop it now.
when will they name these “Educators” as
domestic terrorists
there is no moral justification for publicly funded education
pay directly for YOUR children from your own pockets or donated money
thats called parenting
Cornell must fire all woke professors, and ban CRT.
Go woke go broke.