District court judge identifies flagrant illegality of Trump administration’s shakedown of Harvard
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In a country with anything resembling a functional federal judiciary, this would be an easy case:
A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration violated the Constitution when it froze more than $2.6 billion in research funding to Harvard, striking down the freeze in its entirety and delivering the University a major legal victory.
The decision from United States District Judge Allison D. Burroughs hands Harvard a summary judgment win on core constitutional grounds, finding that the administration’s freeze orders were retaliation for protected speech. She also found that the government failed to comply with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires agencies to give notice, investigation, and an opportunity to respond before terminating federal financial assistance over civil rights violations.
Burroughs’ order vacated both the freeze orders and termination notices that Harvard received in the days after it rejected sweeping demands from the Trump administration this April as violations of the First Amendment. She also handed Harvard a permanent injunction that prevents the Trump administration from reimposing unconstitutional conditions on its funding.
“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,” she wrote in her order.
The standoff between Harvard and the Trump administration began in late March, when federal agencies sent the University a letter conditioning billions of dollars in multiyear grant commitments on a set of preconditions. In April, the administration broadened its demands — asking Harvard to restructure its governance, hiring, and disciplinary processes, subject to audits by the government.
When Harvard rejected the conditions, the Trump administration responded just hours later by cutting $2.2 billion in federal funding, then turned up the pressure by pulling hundreds of millions more. Harvard responded by suing nearly a dozen federal agencies and their leaders, saying the repeated cuts were retaliatory measures intended to punish the University for exercising its First Amendment rights.
In her order on Wednesday, Burroughs slammed the government’s conditions and argued that they had little to do with combating antisemitism — the administration’s stated justification — and “everything to do with Defendants’ power and political views.”
Burroughs also ruled that the freeze orders were “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act, stating that federal agencies had gathered virtually no evidence about antisemitism at Harvard prior to issuing them. She noted that the primary document used by the White House to argue that Harvard had let antisemitism run rampant — a report by an internal University task force — was published two weeks after the April 14 freeze.
The bad faith of the “fighting antisemitism” pretext was facially indisputable even before it was revealed that an admirer of Mein Kampf was one of the administration’s point persons.
The soundness of the decision, needless to say, will not necessarily save it from the Roberts Court’s shadow docket buzzsaw. Speaking of both the shadow docket and monuments to bad faith, Judge Burroughs took this opportunity to tell Neil Gorsuch to eat shit:
Ouch SCOTUS
[image or embed]— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen.bsky.social) Sep 3, 2025 at 1:26 PM
To get these smarmy lectures from one of the justices currently reading Article I out of the Constitution would certainly be more than I could take.