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{shortcode-e64d65eabc2c8945c17364f3d09655b667e30e03}awyers for the federal government filed a 2,000-page administrative record late Monday evening, giving a new window into the government’s process for terminating research grants to Harvard — and revealing that the Department of Government Efficiency helped facilitate the operation.
The files were submitted by government lawyers as part of an administrative record published one week ahead of oral arguments in Harvard’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s funding freezes. The documents — including dozens of messages between government officials about Harvard’s grants, as well as tables identifying hundreds of grants for termination — show new details of how White House chose grants for the chopping block.
Emails showed that DOGE, the government cost-cutting group, helped terminate five NASA federal awards to Harvard through a rapid effort that identified grants for cancellation within days. The point of contact for the group’s involvement was Alexander Simonpour, a longtime Tesla engineering manager who followed Elon Musk to DOGE.
The effort began on April 30 when an official from the General Services Administration, which helps other federal agencies acquire the resources they need, asked Simonpour to find the current outlays and unspent funds for 22 NASA grants to Harvard by the end of the day.
A day later, Simonpour sent an email instructing several NASA officials to determine which of the 22 contracts were “mission critical.”
He sent another email one week later asking the team to “finalize” the list of grants NASA felt comfortable canceling.
“Once we have a list of grants that we deem are okay to terminate, we need to update the template letter that’s attached and send it to the WH for review,” he wrote.
The administrative record, which was heavily redacted, leaves unclear whether the NASA officials began reviewing the contracts before Simonpour’s follow-up message on May 8. But the ensuing email chain that day showed a rapid back-and-forth between government officials as they raced to finalize the list of grants for termination.
Hours after Simonpour’s midday email, Harold “Trey” Carlson, the acting chief of staff for NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center, emailed agency officials at 5:18 p.m. saying that NASA would be “pressing” forward with the cancellation of five grants to Harvard. He said the White House had imposed a 5 p.m. deadline — which the NASA team appeared to have blown past.
In a later email, Simonpour said the five grants had been identified after an internal review by NASA’s leadership team, referred to as the “A-suite,” based on their “mission impact.”
A series of emails between Simonpour, NASA officials, a Department of Justice attorney, and Josh Gruenbaum — the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service and a key leader of the administration’s campaign against Harvard — followed Carlson’s May 8 message as the group finalized the letter notifying Harvard about the terminated NASA grants. The exchange took place over the next several hours and lasted until at least 11 p.m. that evening.
The letter was sent by the following afternoon, May 9.
A NASA spokesperson wrote in a Wednesday statement that the agency was reviewing contracts in compliance with Trump’s February executive order that created DOGE and “additional White House guidance.”
Spokespeople for the other federal agencies that cut grants to Harvard, as well as for the University, did not respond to requests for comment.
Though the record didn’t contain as detailed information about the process for canceling grants at other federal agencies, some seemed to take a similar approach to NASA. Jeremy Lichtman, a senior adviser on government efficiency at the Department of Agriculture, emailed USDA officials on May 8 saying that the GSA had instructed the group to review several grants for termination.
Lichtman also noted that the terminations were “awaiting final greenlight from the White House.”
The funding cuts to Harvard began after the University rejected demands from the Trump administration on April 14. Hours later, the government’s joint task force on antisemitism — a body of GSA, Education Department, and Department of Health and Human Services officials that has hounded universities — announced a freeze on $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard. Researchers began receiving termination notices the next day.
Harvard sued over the freeze, describing it as retaliatory and unconstitutional. University lawyers have argued that the funding cuts were closely directed by the White House, citing internal communications that showed that White House officials reviewed termination letters and gave agencies deadlines for cuts.
Now, many of those documents — some of which Harvard excerpted in an earlier filing — are public. So are the scores of boilerplate termination notices sent to Harvard researchers.
In a signed declaration, Gruenbaum wrote that the GSA was tasked with “facilitating” other agencies’ review of Harvard’s federal grants after President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing agencies to combat antisemitism with all means at their disposal.
The Department of Health and Human Services was quick to slash funding to Harvard. Robert F. Foster, the deputy general counsel at HHS, emailed colleagues on April 14 saying that the agency was targeting 658 individual grants collectively worth $2.172 billion in awarded funding — or $1.286 billion in undisbursed funding. Foster specified that Harvard-affiliated institutions, such as the Brigham Women’s College, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute would not be affected.
The National Science Foundation followed suit on April 18, canceling grants with messages that said the projects were “not in alignment with current NSF priorities.” The agency continued terminating grants through May.
On May 6, the NIH began terminating grants over alleged race-based discrimination in Harvard’s admissions processes and “other areas of student life,” including the work of the Harvard Law Review.
The Law Review had become the subject of a civil rights investigation just two weeks prior, after authors accused the publication of discriminating based on race and gender in article selection and journal membership. (The paper has said publicly that it “does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication.” Similarly, it has denied selecting editors based on race as such.)
On May 9, NASA and the USDA Forest Service announced their funding freezes. Three days later, the Department of Defense terminated nearly 200 of Harvard’s grants for projects ranging from science education to quantum nanophotonics.
That same day, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Education all pulled funding from the University — arguing that each project “no longer effectuates” the agencies’ priorities.
By May 13, the Defense Department had announced the termination of nearly 60 of Harvard’s grants, totaling around $50 million. Even so, the agency kept paying Harvard scientists to continue working on at least one research project — which the government said in a separate Monday filing was exempted from termination after internal objections.
On paper, the University has lost nearly $3 billion in federal funding from the Trump administration’s campaign — though significant amounts of award money may already have been paid out by the time the government put the cuts in place.
The documents released Monday show that stated rationales for the cuts ranged widely, but they largely amounted to some combination of accusations that Harvard failed to properly address antisemitism on campus and discriminated in its admissions processes.
Several agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the USDA, specifically cited Harvard’s task force report on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias. Over hundreds of pages, the report describes a campus environment rife with fear and exclusion for Jewish and Israeli affiliates. Both agencies — in nearly identical language — decried the “severe harassment” depicted in the report in their May 6 and 9 letters.
The justification for the Trump administration’s funding cuts has become a flashpoint in the University’s lawsuit to keep its federal funding. And the administrative record provides the most complete account so far of the reasons officials cited as they terminated Harvard’s grants.
Harvard’s central argument is that the government violated its First Amendment rights by axing federal funding after University President Alan M. Garber ’76 publicly denounced the administration’s sweeping demands in April, which included turning over disciplinary records on student protestors, dismantling diversity programming, and changes to hiring practices.
The University also contends that the government acted unlawfully by failing to follow the correct procedure for terminating grants under Title VI of the Civil Rights Law — the grounds, the University argues, the government relies on for the terminations.
Harvard has asked the judge overseeing the case to issue a summary judgment, or a ruling without a full trial, in order to force the government to turn over the billions in federal dollars it has frozen.
Just hours before filing the administrative record, lawyers for the federal government submitted a counterproposal for summary judgement in their favor — arguing that Harvard must pursue relief through the Court of Federal Claims, which typically deals with monetary claims against the U.S., because the case involves “money damages.”
And in their filing, lawyers for the government contended that — while Title VI was nominally invoked in some of the termination notices sent to the University — the funding freezes all fall under a statute that governs when federal grants can be suspended or terminated.
“Title VI is not the only available route through which the Government could terminate its grants and contracts with Harvard University and limiting the Government’s actions in this way would ignore the plain text of the contracts at issue here,” the government lawyers wrote.
Harvard has pushed back against the government’s logic.
Oral argument will be heard by the judge overseeing the case, Allison D. Burroughs, in a Boston courthouse next Monday.
—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.
—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.
—Staff writer Laurel M. Shugart can be reached at laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com. Follow them on X @laurelmshugart.
