In a brief filed on Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, the federal government outlined its arguments for suspending Harvard’s federal research funding—shifting its primary focus from civil rights to contracts.
The brief asks the court to reverse a ruling by U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in a suit Harvard filed in April 2025, after the government unilaterally halted more than $2 billion in federal research grants and contracts. The government had argued that Harvard was ineligible for those grants because of alleged civil rights violations against Jewish and Israeli students, which it said violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In a ruling last September, Burroughs restored Harvard’s access to the funding, saying the Trump administration had violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act and calling the government’s argument “a smokescreen” for an ideologically driven vendetta.
The government continues to make a civil rights argument in a separate case that it filed this March in a U.S. district court, which was assigned to the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns, J.D. ’76. (Harvard called that suit a “retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government” and outlined many steps it has taken to address antisemitism.)
But in this week’s appellate brief, the government focuses on a different argument that it had floated in Burroughs’s courtroom: that the case is merely a contract dispute. The brief posits that federal grants are contracts that can be broken if they no longer align with government priorities, and that the case therefore belongs in a different jurisdiction: the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
“Nothing in Title VI precludes the Government from entering into or enforcing contractual terms that provide for termination based on agency priorities,” the government brief contends, “including based on a determination that a grant recipient has abetted antisemitism.”
That line of reasoning has potentially enormous implications. The government is arguing that it has a right to tie funding appropriated by Congress, and allocated through federal grant programs, to executive branch policy priorities—and that it can impose conditions or suspend that funding if universities don’t comply with those demands. If the court agrees, the resulting legal framework would give the government significant influence over all universities, not just Harvard. And it would move the debate over the future of thousands of federally funded grants to a court that does not typically consider constitutional issues such as protected speech and that does not have the power to issue injunctive stays in legal proceedings.
The government’s brief addresses some other aspects of Burroughs’s ruling. It argues that Harvard’s First Amendment claims are spurious, even as it acknowledges that some of the demands the government made in an April 11, 2025, letter to Harvard—such as government oversight of hiring and admissions, and changes to University governance—would indeed impinge on the University’s protected speech.
“Even if some proposals contained in the April 11 letter implicated protected conduct,” the brief states, “the overwhelming majority of the proposals did not.” Harvard’s brief in the case is expected in July.
