Why Is Donald Trump Seeking $1 Billion In Damages From Harvard University? POTUS Escalates Dispute With A Bigger Amount Amid Funding Row

After months of unsuccessful negotiation, President Donald Trump has intensified his efforts to attack Harvard University and wants the Ivy league university to pay a settlement of 1 billion dollars to regain federal funding.

Trump Seeks $1 Billion In Damages From Harvard

A report by the New York Times that the White House had abandoned its demands against his administration for a financial payment with Harvard University (paying one billion dollars) late Monday, February 2, Trump wrote on his Truth Social, disputing the report with several unnamed sources. 

Harvard and White House officials have been negotiating a deal worth high dollars to reinstate all federal funding to the university and to terminate the continuing lawsuits against the administration. Trump had been requesting Harvard to give a broad settlement of 500 million dollars.

The Harvard Crimson reported that the university administrators have rejected any transaction that would involve cash payment and instead they were negotiating on the terms of a workforce development pact up to the tune of 500 million dollars.

Trump in his Monday post disregarded the deal with Harvard to run trade schools the White House was also reportedly nearly closing the previous deal of $500 million with CNN last fall, and deeming that proposal as wholly insufficient.

They had an idea to do a curved job training process, but it was rejected since it was entirely insufficient and, in our view, would have failed. It was just a Harvard escaping a huge cash payment of over 500 Million Dollars, which should have been much more considering the grave and major violations that they have engaged in.

In his Truth Social post, Trump also stated that the investigations of the administration in Harvard must now be criminal.

This will be a Criminal and not a Civil incident and Harvard will have to feel the aftermaths of their misconducts, Trump says.

Was Trump ready to drop his demand for a $200 million payment? 

On Monday, the New York Times reported that Trump was ready to drop his demand for a $200 million payment from the university, as long as that helped settle claims that school officials mishandled antisemitism. The story cited several people familiar with the discussions.

Trump’s dispute with Harvard University

Back in September, a federal judge sided with Harvard and restored more than $2 billion in federal research funding that the White House had frozen, a huge win for the university, though the government is fighting the decision.

Even after that, the Trump administration kept looking for new ways to put pressure on Harvard, threatening to pull research grants and using different parts of the federal government to keep up the heat.

While Harvard is fighting the White House in court, other schools have taken a different route. In July, Columbia University agreed to pay the US Treasury $200 million to get its federal funding back.

Not long after, Brown University made a deal to pay $50 million in grants over ten years to Rhode Island workforce development groups. Then, in November, Cornell University agreed to pay the Trump administration $30 million over three years.

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