Grand Theft America / Receipt power-2025-04-03-white-house-orders-hhs-to-pull-hundreds-of-e768447
White House orders HHS to pull hundreds of millions from Harvard, congressional disclosure says
By April 3, 2025, the White House had ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to pull hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding from Harvard University, according to a whistleblower disclosure filed with Congress by a former Justice Department civil rights attorney assigned to the federal antisemitism task force, which states that HHS's acting general counsel described the order to her.
What happened
The account comes from a whistleblower disclosure submitted on behalf of Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney of nearly a decade in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, one of the DOJ attorneys temporarily assigned in March 2025 to the HHS Office for Civil Rights to work on Title VI investigations run by the DOJ-created interagency task force. The disclosure states that HHS Acting General Counsel Sean Keveney told her the White House had ordered HHS to pull hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard, prompting Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to call the White House to explain the negotiations. Keveney said he believed Harvard would settle because they are "over a barrel," and showed her proposed settlement terms that included MOUs with police, installing a provost to oversee curriculum, ending DEI programs, placing endowment money in trusts the government could seize, and investing in programs in Israel. The disclosure anchors the exchange with "By April 3, the political pressure intensified"; it does not date the order itself, which the account places earlier.
Why it matters
Funding is the lever, and the disclosure describes it being pulled on direction from the White House rather than on a finding: the filing states that extraordinary funding freezes and sweeping proposed settlement terms were pursued before any completed investigation had established Title VI violations. A settlement term placing a university's endowment in trusts the government could seize would move an independent institution's money under state control by negotiation rather than by law, which is what makes this a record of how an independent check is brought to heel rather than a dispute about campus policy.
Receipt details
- Phase 1
- Silence the watchdogs
- Bring universities to heel with funding threats
