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Trump Administration Sends Harvard a List of Demands to Protect Federal Funds
The Trump administration sent Harvard a list of demands on Thursday that would have to be met to end a government review of $9 billion the school receives in federal funding.
The government announced the review earlier this week, which threatened to cancel all or some of the money as part of its campaign against what it views as unchecked antisemitism on campuses.
The conditions largely follow the playbook the Trump administration used to force Columbia University to comply with its demands last month, after canceling $400 million of that school’s federal grants and contracts. In both instances, the government asked Harvard and Columbia to impose bans, with few exemptions, on masking.
Pro-Palestinian students often used masks during protests against the war in Gaza to obscure their identities after many said they were harassed online when their personal information was revealed.
The Trump administration also pressured the universities to intensify efforts to hold student groups “accountable,” cease admissions practices based on race, color or national origin and revamp policies on campus protests.
Harvard would also be required to “commit to full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that enforces immigration policies, including deportations.
Although the Trump administration did not insist that a specific academic department be put under outside oversight, also known as “receivership,” as it did at Columbia, it said that Harvard’s “programs and departments that fuel antisemitic harassment must be reviewed and necessary changes made to address bias, improve viewpoint diversity, and end ideological capture.”
Earlier on Thursday, White House officials said the administration also intended to block $510 million in federal contracts and grants for Brown University, making it the fifth university known to face a potentially dire loss of federal funding.
Like many of its Ivy League peers, Brown was the site of clashes over the war in Gaza. But it was also one of a small number of universities that made deals with students to end their protest encampments in the spring, agreements that came under criticism for being too soft on students.
A spokesman for Harvard confirmed that the university received its letter on Thursday, but made no additional comment. The letter was first reported by Fox News.
The Trump administration’s letter said that Harvard had “fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence” and that it expected “immediate cooperation in implementing these critical reforms.”
“U.S. taxpayers invest enormously in U.S. colleges and universities, including Harvard University,” according to the letter. “These funds are an investment and, like any investment, are based on the recipient’s performance, not owed as a matter of custom or right.”
The letter was signed by Josh Gruenbaum, the commissioner of the federal acquisition service in the General Services Administration; Sean Keveney, the acting general counsel at the Health and Human Services Department; and Thomas E. Wheeler, the acting general counsel at the Department of Education.
On Monday, Alan Garber, the president of Harvard, said that the university had spent “considerable effort” during the past 15 months addressing antisemitism, adding that there was still more work to do.
He said that Harvard would work with the administration, but warned that canceling federal funding would “halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation.”
“Much is at stake here,” Dr. Garber wrote. “In longstanding partnership with the federal government, we have launched and nurtured pathbreaking research that has made countless people healthier and safer, more curious and more knowledgeable, improving their lives, their communities, and our world.”
The administration’s crusade against elite institutions of higher education has included the creation of a task force on antisemitism that targeted 10 colleges, including Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university.
The Trump administration announced last month that its review at Harvard would include a look at about $9 billion in federal contracts and multiyear grant commitments with the university and its affiliates, a group that appeared to include several Boston-area hospitals.
Harvard had announced a hiring freeze in early March, citing the uncertainty created by Mr. Trump’s threats to continue to slash funding for higher education, even as both public and private universities around the country have been deeply affected by Trump funding cuts.
Ryan Enos, the co-author of a faculty letter calling on Harvard to oppose the government’s attacks on higher education, said the demands were “authoritarian extortion, not serious policy goals” in a message on Thursday. He urged Harvard to reject them.
In the following weeks, the Trump administration announced actions against three more universities. That included a pause of $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania and the suspension of dozens of grants to Princeton.
Alan Blinder and Vimal Patel contributed reporting.
Just over 50 career and political intelligence staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have been removed from their roles since Bill Pulte became the agency’s acting director, Friday.
Six career and political intelligence staff were terminated and 45 were sent back to their home agencies, according to three sources familiar with the personnel moves.
Pulte has been asking deputies and other directors for suggestions about cuts. Some of the ODNI deputies pushed for more cuts, but Pulte said that the 51 was enough for now, one of the sources said.
One source characterized the cuts as thoughtful and methodical. No staffers have been removed from the counterterrorism group.
No further firings are planned for now, two of the sources said.
The cuts follow hundreds of staff reductions last year by former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who stepped down last week. Last year’s planned downsizing sought to bring the office’s headcount from 2,000 to around 1,300.
President Trump has pushed for further cuts, directing Pulte to “execute the immediate and needed downsizing of the office” in a Truth Social post earlier this month.
The office is charged with overseeing the country’s intelligence agencies and helping them coordinate with each other. It was created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which investigators widely believe was preceded by a failure of intelligence agencies to share information.
Since then, Gabbard and some lawmakers have argued the ODNI has become bloated and has added more bureaucracy to the intelligence community — worsening a problem it was created in part to resolve.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said earlier this month the office has “grown far beyond its original mandate.” Many of the office’s staff hail from other intelligence agencies but have been detailed to ODNI, and Cotton argued large numbers of them should be returned to their “home agencies.”
Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence panels, warned Pulte against making large-scale staff cuts, calling it an inappropriate course of action for an acting official without national security experience.
“While there is room to consider responsible reductions to ODNI’s workforce, any large cuts would follow on a substantial downsizing that has already occurred in 2025 and risk jeopardizing the mission of an organization explicitly created after 9/11 to prevent any future such terrorist attack,” the two Democrats wrote in a joint statement.
After Gabbard announced in May that she would resign from the post, Mr. Trump said he would install Pulte, a housing finance official, as acting director of national intelligence. He later nominated Jay Clayton, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, to serve as Senate-confirmed director.
Mr. Trump’s pick for acting director of national intelligence, who assumed the role on Friday, has sparked intense pushback in Congress. Democrats, and some Republicans, questioned the selection due to his lack of national security experience.
Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado said Sunday he’s worried that “Americans are at risk” with Pulte serving as DNI “because we have someone who’s incompetent at the head of this agency,” in an interview on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
In addition to Pulte’s lack of national security experience, Democrats have railed against the pick for his role in investigations into Mr. Trump’s political foes. Crow, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, said he’s “obviously concerned that this is somebody who’s a political attack dog, and his single biggest qualification is that he’s loyal to Donald Trump and is willing to go after Donald Trump’s enemies.” But he said more immediately, he’s concerned about Americans’ safety.
“This is a really important position. This sits atop our intelligence agencies, and by law, Congress mandated that this person have significant intelligence experience because they have to make sure that we’re keeping Americans safe, which is not what Bill Pulte is capable of doing,” Crow said.
Since Pulte’s selection, Democrats have declined to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which grants intelligence agencies broad authority to spy on overseas targets, causing the legal provision to expire earlier this month.
And as Senate GOP leaders tried to bring an end to the impasse by moving to quickly confirm Clayton as permanent director of national intelligence, the president abruptly called for Clayton’s confirmation hearing to be canceled last week.
Talks on extending FISA Section 702 were already strained, with some members of both parties pushing for stricter guardrails and arguing the program can scoop up Americans’ communications without a warrant. Intelligence officials say the program is essential to national security.
Asked whether Democrats have miscalculated, Crow said “not at all.”
“I know how important it is, but I’m unwilling to trade Americans’ constitutional rights, privacy and essential civil liberties for temporary extension to this program,” Crow said.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on “Face the Nation” that “any Democrat that shuts down FISA at a time of great peril for the United States is making a huge mistake.”
“We’re playing with fire here, no matter what side does it,” Graham said. “America needs FISA up and running.”
Andrea (left), Pablo (center), and Martin Langesfeld (right) hold a photograph of their daughter and sister, Nicky Langesfeld and her husband Luis Sadovnic, at a park in Doral, Fla., where the city named a street Nicky Langesfeld Place to honor her memory, Martin says, “as a reminder that she’ll be here with us forever.” Nicole “Nicky” and Luis were two of the 98 people killed when the Champlain Towers South condominium building collapsed in Surfside on June 24, 2021.
Meredith Nierman/NPR
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Meredith Nierman/NPR
SURFSIDE, Fla. — Just around the corner from where a beachfront condominium collapsed five years ago, there’s a makeshift memorial: a plastic banner strung up on a wood frame, with the names of the 98 victims, ranging in age from a year-old infant to a 92-year-old grandmother.
“It’s an unfortunate reminder of how big this tragedy was,” says Martin Langesfeld, locating the name of his sister Nicky, 26, and her husband Luis Sadovnik, 28. “It’s more than just names. It’s stories. It’s families.”
Two-thirds of the 12-story Champlain Towers South building collapsed just after 1 a.m. on June 24, 2021. It started when the pool deck caved in. Seven minutes later, as many of the occupants were sleeping, the tower began to fall.
Five escaped, and three were rescued from the rubble with severe injuries by first responders. Search teams evacuated residents in the remaining part of the building, which was demolished 10 days later for safety reasons.
Search and rescue personnel work in the rubble of the 12-story, beachfront Champlain Towers South condominium that crumbled to the ground on June 24, 2021 in Surfside.
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Hundreds were left without a home and belongings, and the state was forced to grapple with how it regulates structural safety.
Langesfeld is among those who’ve been pushing to improve what they consider a lax system of building oversight. His sister and brother-in-law were newlyweds, who had moved into the condo together just a few months earlier.
“A dream place, home, where you feel you’re safest is where they were killed,” he says.
He’s also frustrated there is no permanent memorial honoring the victims, while a new luxury condo is going up on the land where Champlain Towers once stood.
“It’s been almost five years and there’s no development for the memorial,” he says. “And the development for the new building is very well underway.”
The North Tower of the Champlain Towers condominium complex stands on April 27, overlooking the vacant site where its sister building, Champlain Towers South, collapsed on June 24, 2021. The collapse resulted in 98 deaths and remains one of the largest structural failures in U.S. history. A new luxury condominium complex, the Delmore, is slated for construction on the empty lot.
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Technical findings released Monday by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded the problem started about three weeks before the collapse when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed, causing cracks to grow and loads to shift to connections that were not strong enough to support them.
Investigators found “severe and widespread deviations in the building’s original structural design from the codes and standards of the day,” and that the building’s construction in 1981 deviated from the design drawings. Investigators will issue a final report later that includes recommendations for changes to standards, codes and practices to improve building safety.
To date, no one has been held criminally responsible.
But in a complex civil lawsuit, more than 30 defendants contributed to a $1.2 billion class action settlement reached just a year after the collapse to address wrongful death, personal injury and property loss claims.
“I think what was apparent to all parties, legal parties, is that it was an enormous loss,” says Coral Gables attorney Rachel Wagner Furst, co-lead counsel representing the Surfside victims.
None of the settling parties admitted liability or wrongdoing, but Wagner Furst says the litigation pointed to many factors that contributed to the scope of the disaster beyond the condo board, which was singled out in the initial lawsuit for not heeding warning signs and deferring repairs on the 40-year-old building.
She notes, “Companies and individuals who had serviced the Champlain Towers South condominium building in the years before the collapse that had arguably or allegedly failed in some way to provide proper maintenance advice or counsel, including the security company that had staffed the front desk of the building and was on duty at the time that the alarm ought to have sounded.”
Attorney Rachel Wagner Furst served as co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for the victims of the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, which resulted in a $1.2 billion settlement.
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The Surfside collapse was a wake-up call for condo associations and regulators around the country.
In the immediate aftermath in South Florida, some two dozen properties were evacuated for safety concerns. Most eventually were able to return after repairs.
The state responded by passing more stringent regulations, including new mandates for structural inspections and requiring condo associations to maintain a minimum level of reserve funding for structural upkeep.
“The Florida legislature pushed the burden to create safe housing stock in Florida onto the people who are least able to bear it, which is the Florida consumer,” says Ft. Lauderdale attorney Donna DiMaggio Berger who specializes in condominium law, and founded a group that lobbies on behalf of the more than 50,000 community associations in Florida.
She says developers also should share in the burden.
“If we wind up with the safest housing stock in the country. Bravo, well done,” she says. But “safe buildings start with the people who build them and repair them.”
Construction cranes line the skyline along the beach in Surfside, Fla., on April 27.
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No matter how well-intentioned, the building reforms could have unintended consequences, says Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
She says some buildings have been taken over by people who want to turn them into more expensive, luxurious developments.
“There’s tremendous pressure that people can’t afford these things and so they’re forced to sell,” she says. “We call it ‘condo vultures,’ and it is at our peril.”
Levine Cava says she understands that people want to live “the good life” in South Florida, but there must be balance.
“We know we live in paradise,” she says. “We also know that we need to have people of all means in our community.”
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava says her community was severely changed by this tragedy, “the pain is still very real. Many people have moved on with their lives and others are still suffering greatly.”
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That’s long been the conundrum in Florida, a trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when people flocked to the Sunshine State.
And it’s evident in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, which is becoming an ultra-wealthy enclave with a wall of condos lining the Atlantic, and more under construction. The area is adjacent to swanky shopping malls and private islands where tech titans have waterfront estates.
The Champlain Towers South property itself is soon to be home to the community’s latest luxury development, The Delmore. Billed as “expansive mansions in the sky,” the sales price of the units starts at $15 million; penthouses go for more than $150 million.
“Each penthouse has its own private pool, and that’s a glass-fronted pool that gets the view to the ocean,” says developer Jeffery Rossely, pointing to the layout on a scale model in a posh sales gallery.
Jeffery Rossely, a developer at the Dubai-based firm Damac Properties, points to a model of a luxury property called The Delmore.
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Rossely is with Damac Properties, a Dubai-based firm. This is the company’s first residential project in the U.S. Damac was the only bidder with a $120 million cash offer for the property.
“It was obviously at the time a tragic opportunity, but the courts had already ordered sale of the property,” Rossely says. “The money was required to compensate the victims.”
But the project has not received a warm welcome in Surfside. At town meetings he says his company has been accused of having blood on its hands.
A sign welcoming visitors to Surfside, Fla., stands directly across the street from the former site of the Champlain Towers South condominium. Today, a new luxury residential development called The Delmore is under construction on the empty lot where the tower once stood.
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“I didn’t understand why there would be angst for someone coming in and paying that money upfront,” says Rossely.
But in retrospect, he concedes, the project needed a different approach.
“We should have spent a bit more time on due diligence, on community reaction, rather than on the physical property itself,” Rossely says. “We went through what I would call the traditional due diligence. Maybe we should have gone through emotional due diligence, as well.”
The question now is whether people will want to live in the new building. There are no buyers yet in the pre-sale phase.
Meanwhile, the town of Surfside will light a torch at 1:15 a.m. on Wednesday, just outside the development’s fence, to remember the Champlain Towers South victims five years after the collapse.
News
Trump says proof of his allegations that vandals cut Reflecting Pool paint will be provided in court
Washington — President Trump on Monday said proof will be provided in court of his allegations that vandals “cut” a massive slit in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which he claims is the reason the paint is peeling on the recently renovated but algae-plagued project.
In an exchange with CBS News senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe, Mr. Trump insisted that vandals, rather than questionable craftsmanship, are responsible for the enduring problems following the $14.7 million sealant job. The president claimed vandals cut a 350-foot slit in the pool between the World War II Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial. Five people have been arrested for vandalism related to the Reflecting Pool, and five additional individuals were issued federal citations, according to the U.S. Park Police, although neither the company behind the project nor the U.S. Park Service has said a cut slit was responsible for the peeling.
Asked if he had proof, such as photos or video, that vandals used a knife to cut a massive slit in the pool, Mr. Trump responded: “Well, let’s put it this way, when you have a 350, I think it’s 350, not 250, when you have a 350-foot slit, from one end to the other, you think that’s proof? You think that’s proof?”
O’Keefe noted that reporters had been to the site and found no evidence of a slit.
“Well, you’d have to go see the Parks Department. They’ll show it to you, or see, see the secretary, but I saw it,” Mr. Trump said, likely referencing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. “They cut it, they cut it very violently. The same thing with the floor, they cut it, and then they lifted it. They pulled it, and that’s what it is.”
After defending the project, the president said, “We also have pictures.”
O’Keefe asked the president for evidence of his claims.
“Yeah, at the right time you’ll see it,” Mr. Trump said. “You’ll see it in court. You’ll see it in court, but all you have to do is call the Parks Department, call the Department of Interior.”
The president also suggested someone may have placed fertilizer in the water to create the algae that teams have been attempting to clear.
“If you put fertilizer in the water, you get algae, but somebody said they might have put fertilizer, they did something to create the algae,” the president said, again without providing evidence for his claims.
CBS News has reached out to the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior. So far, there’s been no response.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which received a no-bid contract to install the sealant on the floor of the Reflecting Pool, told CBS News there are “some areas” that “require repairs.”
“These areas are a very small part of the massive 7-acre project, and do not indicate a failure of the liner,” the company said. “These repairs can not be made until the pool is drained. As soon as it’s feasible for the park, the pool will be drained and AIC will be back to make those needed repairs as part of the warranty.”
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