US official pleaded to keep Harvard national security grant, court records show

In one round of funding cuts last month, the Department of Defense terminated grants and contracts with Harvard researchers working on military projects.

A day after the Pentagon informed Harvard of those cuts on May 12, Department of Defense leaders announced the decision to military officials, according to a memorandum filed by Harvard’s lawyers in federal court in Boston on Monday.

Then DARPA’s director of contracting “pleaded” with her superiors to reconsider, according to the motion.

The director, who is not named in the filing, urged her superiors to save a grant connected with the AMPHORA program focused on emerging biological threats. The program involved research teams at several institutions. But the Harvard group “is currently the top performing team on the AMPHORA program,” the director said in a message quoted in the Harvard filing.

The team had reached a “critical juncture” in a project that was “outpacing the state-of-the art and provides a novel leap-ahead capability to the force,” the director said, according to the filing.

“Inadequate knowledge of the biological threat landscape poses grave and immediate harm to national security,” she continued.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the cancellation of the military grants, according to the Harvard filing. A White House spokesperson referred questions to the Department of Defense, which did not respond to a request for comment.

The memo filed on Monday was part of Harvard’s request to US District Judge Allison D. Burroughs to issue a summary judgment in the lawsuit. Harvard needs the court to reverse the funding terminations by early September, its lawyers argued. That’s because of a Sept. 3 deadline to file paperwork that would make the funding cuts final and potentially irreversible, according to the filing.

The Monday filing showed the breadth of the Trump administration’s cuts. The funding terminations affected grants and contracts from the US Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Homeland Security, Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services. The White House circulated a template to all agencies and instructed them to use it to cancel Harvard funding, the government records show, according to the filing.

The Trump administration cut funding for a multisite tuberculosis research program, a project developing “an advanced chip designed to measure NASA astronauts’ radiation exposure during the upcoming Artemis II mission to the Moon,” and research on Lou Gehrig’s disease, according to the filing.

The lawyers described the Trump administration’s approach as “shoot first, aim never” and said the termination of the DARPA grant was part of the administration’s “thoughtless and retaliatory strategy.”

The White House, Harvard’s lawyers said, is punishing the school over its refusal to comply with a sweeping set of demands sent to Harvard leaders in April.

Those demands would have placed Harvard’s admissions and hiring practices, as well as certain academic divisions, under federal oversight.

The Trump administration has accused Harvard of failing to protect Jewish students from discrimination and harassment, discriminating against white people and men in its hiring and admissions, and cultivating a campus culture that is intolerant of conservative viewpoints.

“Given what’s happening at Harvard, especially under this leadership team, we are making the decision to get out of business with them for now. Harvard can’t seem to comprehend or acknowledge the severe and alarming civil rights issues on its campus,” Josh Gruenbaum, a member of the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, told the Globe last week.

Gruenbaum, a top official at the US General Services Administration, signed several of the letters from the Trump administration announcing the Harvard funding cuts.

In their filing Monday, Harvard’s lawyers wrote that the Trump administration had presented the university with an unacceptable and illegal choice: “submit to federal control over its viewpoints, governance, academic programs, students, faculty, and staff or lose every dollar in federal funding.”

Many legal experts, including some conservatives who are sympathetic to the Trump administration’s goals, have said that elements of the administration’s Harvard campaign appear to violate federal laws and regulations.

Harvard president Alan Garber has said he agrees with some elements of the Trump administration’s critiques of Harvard, including that the school needs more ideological diversity. He has also called antisemitism at Harvard a “serious problem.”

But Harvard’s lawyers argued that the Trump administration is ignoring “the dozens of steps Harvard has taken and committed to take to address antisemitism and bias.” Harvard has changed the way it enforces rules related to campus protest, adopted a definition of antisemitism supported by the Trump administration, and commissioned extensive studies on campus antisemitism and Islamophobia.

In an interview with the Globe in April, Garber expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s motives. “Attacking our research enterprise in the name of attacking antisemitism really gives rise to skepticism about what the goal is here,” he said.

Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com.