WASHINGTON – President Trump claimed late Monday that his administration wants $1 billion from Harvard University to settle federal probes of the Ivy League school, rejecting a New York Times report that he had dropped demands for payment.
“Strongly Antisemitic Harvard University has been feeding a lot of ‘nonsense’ to The Failing New York Times,” Trump began a lengthy post on Truth Social. “Harvard has been, for a long time, behaving very badly!”
The Education Department has been threatening to withhold federal funds from Harvard and several other universities over issues including anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on the Jewish state.
This past July, Trump claimed that the Cambridge, Mass. institution “wants to settle” after Columbia University agreed to pay a more than $220 million fine to resolve civil rights violations.
A month later, the president publicly charged Education Secretary Linda McMahon to accept “nothing less than $500 million” from Harvard.
“Don’t negotiate, Linda,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting. “They’ve been very bad.”
Finally, on Sept. 30, 2025, Trump claimed Harvard would spend about $500 million to launch and operate trade schools in exchange for the unfreezing of $2.4 billion in frozen grants.
The president appeared to reject that arrangement Monday night, writing: “They wanted to do a convoluted job training concept, but it was turned down in that it was wholly inadequate and would not have been, in our opinion, successful. It was merely a way of Harvard getting out of a large cash settlement of more than 500 Million Dollars, a number that should be much higher for the serious and heinous illegalities that they have committed.
“This should be a Criminal, not Civil, event, and Harvard will have to live with the consequences of their wrongdoings,” Trump went on. “In any event, this case will continue until justice is served … We are now seeking One Billion Dollars in damages, and want nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University.”
Harvard did not immediately respond to the president’s statement.
With an endowment of $56.9 billion as of fiscal year 2025, Harvard has opted to challenge the federal funding freeze while still in talks about a settlement.
In September, a Boston federal judge found the administration had “impermissibly retaliated against Harvard for refusing to capitulate to the government’s demands” — despite also acknowledging the university was “plagued by antisemitism.”
The Trump administration “specifically and repeatedly linked the coordinated funding cuts to Harvard’s decision to ‘fight,’” US District Judge Allison Burroughs wrote in her 84-page ruling.
“That ‘fight’ (Harvard’s decision to speak out and litigate its case in the courts and the marketplace of ideas), however, is indisputably protected by the First Amendment.”
