In his second term, President Trump has promised to make America meritocratic again. In his joint address to Congress, he declared: “We believe that whether you are a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer or an air-traffic controller, you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender.”

The Trump administration has grown so furious with Harvard University after a week of an escalating dispute between the two sides that it is planning to pull an additional $1 billion of the school’s funding for health research, according to people familiar with the matter.  

Trump administration officials, the people said, thought the long list of demands they sent Harvard last Friday was a confidential starting point for negotiations.

President Trump and Harvard University are at daggers drawn, and the battle promises to play out on the national stage for some time. Trump wants Harvard to change its ways, not only when it comes to the lax handling of disruptive demonstrations and antisemitic harassment, but also in the matter of the university’s pervasive leftist bias. Harvard, which seemed at least tentatively open to changes in its disciplinary practices, has drawn the line at the Trump administration’s insistence on monitoring and redressing its ideological imbalance.

President Donald Trump’s administration lashed back at Harvard University on Wednesday, with the Department of Homeland Security cutting over $2.7 million in grants and threatening to cancel all student visas, according to a press release obtained exclusively by The Free Press. The move comes two days after Harvard refused to agree to a series of demands by the administration, and Harvard’s president Alan Garber said that the university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”

The US government has threatened to ban Harvard University from enrolling foreign students, after the institution said it would not bow to demands from Donald Trump's administration.

The White House has demanded the oldest university in the US make changes to hiring, admissions and teaching practices which it says will help fight antisemitism on campus.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday accused the Ivy League school of "threatening national security" and "bending the knee to antisemitism".

The NAACP sued the U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday to stop its alleged illegal effort to cut off funding to schools that use diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and prevent Black students from receiving equal education opportunities.

Educators, researchers and employees at the Department of Education say that the Trump administration’s slashing of federal bureaucracies and workforces has significantly weakened special education enforcement and killed programs meant to help students with disabilities.

Columbia University’s president had already been hounded out of office, but her ordeal wasn’t over.

Four days after she stepped down under government pressure during fraught federal funding negotiations, Katrina Armstrong spent three hours being deposed by a government attorney in Washington, D.C. The lawyer grilled Armstrong over whether she had done enough to protect Jewish students against antisemitism. 

If you visit the website for Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), you'll find a "Wall of Receipts" listing more than 7,000 federal contracts it has terminated.

Little detail is provided, besides the "savings" from each cancellation, and it's hard to determine the cost or collateral damage of all these cuts. But for some families, there has been a cost.

Harvard University announced Monday it will not agree to the Trump administration’s demands to address antisemitism on campus.

The Department of Education (ED) sent a letter to the Ivy League school April 11 demanding the school agree to a host of reforms, including adjusting and enforcing disciplinary processes, improving screening of international students for “hostile” views and auditing “programs with egregious records of antisemitism.” Harvard cited academic freedom concerns and free speech rights in its announcement rejecting ED’s demands.