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    Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Universities

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    As he finished lunch in the private dining room outside the Oval Office on April 1, President Trump floated an astounding proposal: What if the government simply canceled every dollar of the nearly $9 billion promised to Harvard University?The administration’s campaign to expunge “woke” ideology from college campuses had already forced Columbia University to strike a deal. Now, the White House was eyeing the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university.“What if we never pay them?” Mr. Trump casually asked, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussion. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”The moment underscored the aggressive, ad hoc approach continuing to shape one of the new administration’s most consequential policies.Mr. Trump and his top aides are exerting control of huge sums of federal research money to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism.Their effort was energized by the campus protests against Israel’s response to the October 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas, demonstrations during which Jewish students were sometimes harassed. Soon after taking office, Mr. Trump opened the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which is scrutinizing leading universities for potential civil rights violations and serving as an entry point to pressure schools to reassess their policies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. ‘Continues to Delay, Obfuscate and Flout’ Courts in Return of Deported Man, Lawyers Say

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      Lawyers for a Maryland man who was unlawfully deported to a prison in El Salvador assailed the Trump administration on Friday for trying to delay its explanation for how it plans to bring him back, calling the move a “stunning display of arrogance and cruelty.”“The government continues to delay, obfuscate and flout court orders, while a man’s life and safety is at risk,” the lawyers wrote in court papers filed in the case.On Thursday evening, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Trump officials needed to “facilitate” the return to the United States of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran migrant who flown from Texas to El Salvador on March 15.The officials have already acknowledged that they made an “administrative error” when they put Mr. Abrego Garcia on the plane despite a previous court order that had expressly prohibited sending him back to his homeland.As part of its ruling, the Supreme Court told the administration that it should be prepared to “share what it can concerning the steps it has taken” to get Mr. Abrego Garcia back on U.S. soil as well as “the prospect of further steps” it intends to take.Echoing the justices’ demand, Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling the case in Federal District Court in Maryland, told the Justice Department to submit to her by 9:30 a.m. on Friday a written declaration of what the administration had already done and what it planned to do in its efforts to retrieve Mr. Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. Judge Xinis also set a hearing for 1 p.m. on Friday to discuss the next steps in the case.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Administration Demands Additional Cuts at C.D.C.

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      In addition to reductions at agency personnel, federal regulators are demanding $2.9 billion in contract cancellations, The Times has learned.Alongside extensive reductions to the staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Trump administration has asked the agency to cut $2.9 billion of its spending on contracts, according to three federal officials with knowledge of the matter.The administration’s cost-cutting program, called the Department of Government Efficiency, asked the public health agency to sever roughly 35 percent of its spending on contracts about two weeks ago. The C.D.C. was told to comply by April 18, according to the officials.The cuts promise to further hamstring an agency already reeling from the loss of 2,400 employees, nearly one-fifth of its work force. On Tuesday, the administration fired C.D.C. scientists focused on environmental health and asthma, injuries, violence prevention, lead poisoning, smoking and climate change.Officials at the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Abruptly cutting 35 percent of contracts would be tough for any organization or business, said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, who advised the Biden administration during Covid.“Sure, any manager can find small savings and improvements, but these kinds of demands are of the size and speed that break down organizations,” he said. “This is not the way to do good for the public or for the public’s health.”The C.D.C.’s largest contract, about $7 billion per year, goes to the Vaccines for Children Program, which purchases vaccines for parents who may not be able to afford them. That program is mandated by law and will not be affected by the cuts, according to one senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity.But other C.D.C. contracts include spending on computers and other technology, security guards, cleaning services and facilities management. The agency also hires people to build and maintain data systems and for specific research projects. Over the past several years, contracts have also supported activities related to Covid-19, one official said.Separately, H.H.S. last week abruptly discontinued C.D.C. grants of about $11.4 billion to states that were using the funds to track infectious diseases and to support mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues.At least some of the contracts D.O.G.E. is now asking the agency to discontinue may no longer be implemented because the people overseeing them have been fired. This is not the first time D.O.G.E. asked the agency to cut funding. It previously asked the C.D.C. to cut grants to Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania, saying those institutions had failed to take action against antisemitism on campus. “Funding grants and contracts are the mechanism by which we get things done,” said one C.D.C. scientist who asked to remain anonymous because of a fear of retaliation. “They are cutting off our arms and legs.” More

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      U.S. Seeks to Calm Tempest in Europe Over Trump’s Anti-Diversity Policies

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      The U.S. State Department is seeking to quell a diplomatic tempest roiling Europe this week after American embassies in several countries sent letters to foreign contractors instructing them to certify their compliance with President Trump’s policies aimed at unraveling diversity programs.The letters, directed at companies in France, Spain, Denmark, Belgium and elsewhere that have contracts with the U.S. government, rankled European companies and officials, who are pushing back at what they described as a pressure campaign by the Trump administration to impose anti-diversity policies abroad.Late Tuesday, the State Department tried to walk back the letters, saying that the compliance requirement applies to companies only if they were “controlled by a U.S. employer” and employ U.S. citizens. That contradicted the details in the embassy letters, which said that Mr. Trump’s D.E.I.-quashing orders applied to all suppliers and contractors of the U.S. government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate.The State Department’s statement repeated much of the letters’ content. It said that American embassies and missions worldwide were reviewing their contracts and grants to ensure that they were consistent with an executive order Mr. Trump signed the day after taking office. The order instructs federal contractors not to engage in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it described as “illegal discrimination.”The State Department said that the embassy letter “only asks contractors and grantees around the world to certify their compliance with applicable U.S. federal anti-discrimination laws.”“⁠There is no ‘verification’ required beyond asking contractors and grantees to self-certify their compliance’,” its statement said. “In other words, we are just asking them to complete one additional piece of paperwork.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Millions of Women Will Lose Access to Contraception as a Result of Trump Aid Cuts

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      The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception.This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty. It derails an effort that had brought long-acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts of the world in recent years.The United States provided about 40 percent of the funding governments contributed to family planning programs in 31 developing countries, some $600 million, in 2023, the last year for which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organization.That American funding provided contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples, which is estimated to have averted 17.1 million unintended pregnancies and 5.2 million unsafe abortions, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organization. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women could die from preventable maternal deaths each year, the Guttmacher calculation concluded.“The magnitude of the impact is mind-boggling,” said Marie Ba, who leads the coordination team for the Ouagadougou Partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access to family planning in nine West African countries.The funding has been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development. The State Department, into which the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. was absorbed on Friday, did not reply to a request for comment on the decision to stop funding family planning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described the terminated aid projects as wasteful and not aligned with American strategic interest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Presses French Companies to Comply With Trump’s Anti-Diversity Policies

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      For months, French businesses have been bracing for the fallout of trade wars and tariff threats from the United States as the effects of President Trump’s “America First” policies ripple out. But this past week, the French corporate world was roiled by another type of Trump missive.In a terse three-paragraph letter sent by the American Embassy in France to French companies, executives were told that President Trump’s moves to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies would apply to any firm doing business with the U.S. government. It said it was giving them five days to sign a form indicating that they would comply.An executive order that Mr. Trump signed the day after taking office instructs federal contractors not to engage in D.E.I., which the order described as “illegal discrimination.” The letter to French businesses said the order “applies to all suppliers and contractors of the U.S. government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate.”“If you do not agree to sign this document, we would appreciate it if you could provide detailed reasons, which we will forward to our legal services,” the letter said. The accompanying form added that companies must certify “that they do not operate any programs promoting D.E.I.”The notice caused a sensation in the French corporate world and drew a curt reply from the French government.“This practice reflects the values ​​of the new American government. They are not ours,” the economy ministry said in a statement late Friday. France’s economy minister, Eric Lombard, “will remind his counterparts within the American government of this,” the statement said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On Its Website, DOGE Deletes More Than 100 Government Leases It Said Were Canceled

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      Elon Musk’s cost-cutting group dropped its total purported savings from eliminating federal office space after losing some battles within the Trump administration.Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on Wednesday sharply cut back the number of federal real estate leases it claimed to have terminated, signaling that the group is losing at least some internal battles to get rid of government office space.For weeks, Mr. Musk’s group said on its website that it had terminated more than 700 leases, and saved more than $460 million in the process.But around 1 a.m. Wednesday, the group eliminated references to 136 of those cancellations. That reduced its savings by $140 million, or almost 30 percent of the total for lease cancellations it had claimed a day earlier.Mr. Musk’s team did not give a reason for the changes. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.The deletions appeared to reflect a new dynamic within the Trump administration: Some federal agencies had taken on DOGE and seemed to have won, preserving office space that Mr. Musk’s group said they had to give up. Last week, the General Services Administration, an agency that oversees the federal real estate portfolio, said it was rescinding more than 100 lease terminations notices.In many cases, the reasons behind the reversals were unclear. G.S.A. officials said they walked back some terminations because of “feedback from customer agencies.” But in some instances, lawmakers and agency officials said they had pushed back on the cuts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Orders U.S.A.I.D. and State Dept. to Pay Funds ‘Unlawfully’ Withheld

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      A federal judge barred the Trump administration on Monday from “unlawfully impounding congressionally appropriated foreign aid funds” that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development owed to grant recipients and contractors, requiring it to pay for work completed in the first several weeks of President Trump’s term.The ruling, handed down by Judge Amir H. Ali of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, was the latest step in a winding dispute over foreign aid payments since Mr. Trump has tried to vastly shrink the nation’s foreign assistance. While forcing the administration to pay for work completed before Feb. 13, Judge Ali said the limits of the case prevented him from ordering payments on future work or restoring canceled contracts.But he left no doubt that he believed that the administration had exceeded its authority in trying to block funding, a warning that could echo through a deluge of lawsuits over Mr. Trump’s efforts to unilaterally halt spending.“Here, the executive has unilaterally deemed that funds Congress appropriated for foreign aid will not be spent,” he wrote. “The executive not only claims his constitutional authority to determine how to spend appropriated funds, but usurps Congress’s exclusive authority to dictate whether the funds should be spent in the first place.”The order on Monday prohibited the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. from implementing much of a Jan. 24 memorandum outlining plans to reorient and shrink U.S. foreign aid. It further required them to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars still owed to a constellation of groups for work completed before Feb. 13, as Judge Ali had ordered last month.The order dealt with a broad freeze on foreign aid funding that Mr. Trump put into effect the day he took office. It stopped short of the much more significant step of invalidating the Trump administration’s decision to cancel thousands of contracts through what it described as an expedited line-by-line review, after the lawsuit was already underway. Judge Ali found that the court was restrained to addressing the specific harms laid out in the lawsuit, not “supervision of discrete or ongoing executive decisions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic

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      The president’s attack on the key tenet of the Biden administration’s industrial policy has set off concerns that he may claw back its funding.As President Trump addressed Congress last week, he veered off script to attack a sensitive topic, the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law aimed at making the United States less reliant on Asia for semiconductors.Republican lawmakers had sought and received reassurances over the past few months that the Trump administration would support the program Congress created. But halfway through Mr. Trump’s remarks, he called the law a “horrible, horrible thing.”“You should get rid of the CHIP Act,” he told Speaker Mike Johnson as some lawmakers applauded.The CHIPS program was one of the few things to unite much of Washington in recent years, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worked with private companies to draft a bill that would funnel $50 billion to rebuild the U.S. semiconductor industry, which makes the foundational technology used to power cars, computers and coffee makers. After President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. signed it into law in 2022, companies found sites in Arizona, New York and Ohio to construct new factories. The Commerce Department vetted those plans and began to dole out billions of dollars in grants.Now, Mr. Trump is threatening to upend years of work. Chip company executives, worried that funding could be clawed back, are calling lawyers to ask what wiggle room the administration has to terminate signed contracts, said eight people familiar with the requests.After the speech, Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack because the criticism was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack, which he said was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.Eric Lee/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More