Brown, along with 17 other colleges and universities, submitted a request to file a friend-of-the-court brief on Friday, supporting Harvard’s suit against the Trump administration’s cuts to the university’s research funding. This comes after the Trump administration stated in April that it was planning to freeze $510 million in Brown’s federal research grants.
Harvard sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in late April over a freeze in billions of dollars in federal grants. In the filing, they called for a stop to the freeze and the overturning of “unconstitutional demands” detailed in letters sent to the university prior to the funding cut.
The universities’ Friday motion asserts that “the federal funding terminations challenged in this lawsuit inflict grievous harm that extends well beyond Harvard University,” claiming that eliminating funding at Harvard negatively impacts the “entire ecosystem” of academic research.
As of April, at least $8 million in grants to Brown researchers have been canceled by the Trump administration, while staff at the National Institutes of Health have been instructed to pause all funding to Brown. The University also took out a $300 million loan in mid-April, less than two weeks after the White House announced plans to freeze portions of Brown’s federal research funding.
In May, Brown and 12 other universities filed a lawsuit against federal research cuts from the National Science Foundation. This move followed a lawsuit filed by Brown and eight other universities in April against funding cuts from the U.S. Department of Energy and a similar February lawsuit filed by Brown and other universities against cuts from the National Institutes of Health.
In the Friday filing, the universities stressed the importance of their research, calling their work “vital to American competitiveness and leadership.”
They argued that research universities have used federal funding resources to conduct research that has “advanced scientific knowledge, safeguarded national security, strengthened the American economy and saved countless lives.”
Cornell and Columbia were the only Ivy League universities that did not sign on to the brief. In March, Columbia conceded to many of Trump’s demands in the hopes of restoring federal funding.
The University and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cate Latimer is a university news editor covering faculty, University Hall and higher education. She is from Portland, OR, and studies English and Urban Studies. In her free time, you can find her playing ultimate frisbee or rewatching episodes of Parks and Rec.
