Trump administration moves to cut $100m in federal contracts for Harvard

The Trump administration is asking federal agencies to cancel contracts with Harvard University worth about $100 million, a senior administration official said Tuesday. (AFP/File)
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Updated 27 May 2025
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Trump administration moves to cut $100m in federal contracts for Harvard

  • President Donald Trump has railed against Harvard in an intensifying clash
  • Harvard filed a lawsuit April 21 over the administration’s calls for changes to the university’s leadership

WASHINGTON: The Trump administration is asking federal agencies to cancel contracts with Harvard University worth about $100 million, a senior administration official said Tuesday.

The government already has canceled more than $2.6 billion in federal research grants for the Ivy League school, which has pushed back on the administration’s demands for changes to several of its policies.

A draft letter from the General Services Administration directs agencies to review contracts with the university and seek alternate vendors. The administration is planning to send a version of the letter Tuesday, the official said. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

The New York Times first reported on the letter.

President Donald Trump has railed against Harvard in an intensifying clash with the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, calling it a hotbed of liberalism and antisemitism.

Harvard filed a lawsuit April 21 over the administration’s calls for changes to the university’s leadership, governance and admissions policies. Since then the administration has slashed the school’s federal funding, moved to cut off enrollment of international students and threatened its tax-exempt status.

The administration has identified about 30 contracts across nine agencies to be reviewed for cancelation, according to another administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly and provided these details on the condition of anonymity. The contracts total roughly $100 million, including executive training for Department of Homeland Security officials.

Agencies with contracts that are deemed critical are being directed not to halt them immediately, but to devise a plan to transition to a different vendor other than Harvard.

The letter applies only to federal contracts with Harvard and not its remaining research grants.


French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading

Updated 03 March 2026
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French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading

  • Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years

PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.