Trump considers redirecting US$3 billion in Harvard grants to trade colleges
Harvard has said funding cuts are unconstitutional. Most of the funding is for biomedical research, not usually done at vocational colleges
US President Donald Trump said on Monday he is considering taking US$3 billion of previously awarded grant money for scientific and engineering research away from Harvard University and giving it to vocational colleges.
Trump, a Republican, has frozen some US$3 billion in federal grants to Harvard in recent weeks, complaining that it has hired Democrats, “radical Left idiots” and “bird brains” as professors.
Harvard, a private university, has sued to restore the funding, saying the cuts are an unconstitutional attack on its free speech rights, and unlawful.
Most of that grant money is appropriated by Congress for the National Institutes of Health to disburse to fund biomedical research after a lengthy application process by individual scientists, work that is not typically done at vocational colleges, known in the US as trade schools.
It was not clear whether Trump was referring to Harvard grants his administration has already frozen.
Harvard has said it was told that virtually all of its federal grant awards were revoked earlier in May, in a series of letters by the NIH, the US Forest Service, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defence and other agencies.