Trump administration moves to illegally cancel all contracts with Harvard

This is where it was always headed:

The White House General Services Administration is expected to send a letter to federal agencies on Tuesday asking them to “identify any contracts with Harvard, and whether they can be canceled or redirected elsewhere,” a senior administration official told ABC News.

The move comes as President Donald Trump continues his attack on the school as the university has not complied with the administration’s demands over providing data on its international students. It comes after the president announced over the weekend that he is considering allocating $3 billion away from Harvard to other trade schools, the latest in his battle with the Ivy League school.

Harvard filed a lawsuit against the administration last week over the order that prevented the school from admitting international students.

The administration argues in the letter, obtained by ABC News, that being a contractor of the federal government “comes with the deep responsibility and commitment to abide by all federal laws and ensure the safeguarding of taxpayer money.”

Is this legal? Absolutely not:

The attempts at illegality are so brazen that they confuse and distort – it’s so openly unlawful that it confuses people into thinking he has the authority to do these things It’s like the corruption – if it’s so out in the open, it must be the case that it’s lawful Same thing here

[image or embed]— Maya Sen (@mayasen.bsky.social) May 27, 2025 at 7:47 AM

And this is before we get to the many First Amendment issues posed by the administration’s retaliatory reneging on contracts.

I’m so old I remember that Joe Biden was allegedly a tyrant for modifying student loan payments based on statutory text authorizing him to “waive or modify” student loan payments.

Great piece by Serwer on the Trump administration’s contempt for knowledge:

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.