The Trump administration has frozen more than $1.8 billion in federal funding to Cornell University and Northwestern University amid ongoing Title VI investigations into campus anti-Semitism, administration officials said.
“Several agencies froze roughly $790M of federal funding & roughly $1.05B of federal funding from Northwestern and Cornell, respectively,” Fox News senior White House editorial producer Pat Ward reported Tuesday in an X post. The official told Ward that “the money was frozen in connection with several ongoing, credible, and concerning Title VI investigations.”
The New York Times on Wednesday confirmed the funding freeze, which involves grants and contracts from the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, and Health and Human Services.
While both Cornell and Northwestern said they have not yet received official notice of the funding cut, Cornell officials did say they received over 75 stop-work orders from the Defense Department on Tuesday, the Times reported.
The freeze comes after the Trump administration in March revoked Cornell graduate student Momodou Taal’s visa. Taal, a Gambian and British dual national, was a leader of pro-Hamas demonstrations at Cornell and repeatedly advocated for the destruction of the United States and for terrorism against Israel. He self-deported last week after a federal judge rejected Taal’s requests to block the deportation, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The Department of Education last month notified 60 universities—including Cornell and Northwestern—that they are “under investigation for Title VI violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination.” Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin at institutions that receive federal funding.
President Donald Trump, who signed an executive order on January 30 to “combat anti-Semitism” throughout the United States, has vowed to pull federal funding from schools that fail to protect Jewish students and rein in anti-Semitic protests.
The administration has already revoked hundreds of millions in federal funding from Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University and is reviewing nearly $9 billion in contracts and grants at Harvard University. Another Ivy League school, Brown University, is set to lose $510 million in funding due to its response to campus anti-Semitism and its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, the White House confirmed.
