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Updated September 8, 2025, at 12:25 p.m.
{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}he National Institutes of Health began allocating some grants to Harvard in July to comply with a federal court ruling. But Department of Government Efficiency officials have quietly blocked all the funds at the last mile, withholding money because the University has not reached a settlement, according to four people familiar with the matter, including NIH staff.
The NIH resumed issuing some grants in mid-July to schools, including Harvard, that had been barred from receiving federal dollars under April guidance, according to an internal memo obtained by The Crimson. But officials from DOGE, the government cost-cutting group, used their control over the NIH’s payment system to keep the money out of researchers’ hands.
DOGE officials allowed funds to flow to Columbia University and Brown University — but only after the schools struck multi-million dollar deals with the White House in late July, according to one person familiar with the matter.
The only other school that DOGE has completely blocked from receiving NIH-approved funds is Northwestern University, which has also not yet struck a deal with the White House, the person said.
The extent of DOGE’s role in quietly obstructing NIH grant disbursements to universities — even after the agency was legally compelled to begin restoring some awards in July — has not been previously reported. And it suggests that, even in the absence of a formal stay or injunction, DOGE may use its power over federal payments to continue to quietly sidestep the Wednesday ruling that directs the Trump administration to reinstate the more than $2.7 billion in federal grants to Harvard that the administration froze or terminated in the spring.
Cornell University, which has also not settled, has seen its funding only partially limited. While the main campus in Ithaca, New York, is under restriction, its New York City-based medical school — the Weill School of Medicine — has been able to draw down some funds, the person said. (Weill is institutionally separate from Cornell and uses a different federal grant identifier.)
Of the four other schools that have drawn Trump’s ire, the University of Pennsylvania received funds after settling on July 1, and Princeton University has continued to get NIH payments without DOGE restrictions — though it is unclear whether any of its frozen funds from April involved NIH grants, according to the person.
Duke University and University of California, Los Angeles — who were targeted in the most recent round of cuts in late July — still received NIH disbursements in August, the person said, likely because those drawdowns covered expenses incurred in July before the cuts. The restrictions, and DOGE’s involvement, would be more likely to show up starting in September, based on the NIH’s typical payment schedule.
No guidance has been given to employees at the NIH on restricting future UCLA or Duke grants.
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The NIH began issuing notices of award — official documents that authorize grant funding and signal that money should be available — to Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell University, and a number of other public institutions around July 3, according to an internal email obtained by The Crimson.
That move — reversing earlier guidance that imposed sweeping funding pauses — came in response to District Judge William G. Young ’62’s ruling against the Trump administration’s attempt to block billions of grants for research it deemed out of alignment with its political priorities.
Young ordered the restoration of $783 million in federal funding for fiscal year 2025 — a portion of which, totaling millions, was allocated to Harvard — before the Supreme Court stayed the order nearly two months later. (The total multi-year funding pool affected by Young’s ruling included $3.8 billion in grants, many of which were partially paid out before the freeze. According to a Crimson analysis of court filings, Harvard was awarded more than 140 grants within that pool, with a combined multi-year value exceeding $60 million.)
Harvard expected the grants listed in Young’s ruling to flow back to researchers, according to a person familiar with the matter, even though the White House had imposed a block on all Harvard grants as part of its initial funding cut in April.
But the funds never arrived, and the Harvard School of Public Health wrote in an August post on its institutionally-run news site that the NIH was continuing to “block disbursement of any funds to Harvard University.”
According to one person, Harvard has been unable to access any funds from the NIH since April because of the restrictions imposed by DOGE through its oversight of the NIH’s payment system, including in the two-month period in which Young’s ruling mandated that grant awards listed in the ruling be resumed.
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Harvard has drawn down $0 from the NIH since the cuts began in April, while researchers at Northwestern have received some small disbursements from the agency for AIDS-related research.
The University received $488 million from the NIH in fiscal year 2024, accounting for more than 70 percent of Harvard’s federal funding last year.
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
DOGE, which was established by an executive order in January, swiftly wreaked havoc on federal institutions — slashing funds, taking control of sensitive databases, and laying off agency employees en masse. After its billionaire leader Elon Musk feuded with Trump and then stepped away in late May, the group’s employees were distributed across the federal government in permanent posts, embedded in agency-level “DOGE Teams.”
The controls on NIH payments are part of a DOGE review process called “Defend the Spend,” which adds an additional layer of oversight requiring both the grant issuer and recipient to justify a grant before it is formally paid out. If a grant does not align with administration priorities, DOGE can block the payment.
DOGE first obtained control of the Payment Management System, a multi-agency platform used to track and release federal grants, shortly after the Trump administration returned to power. But it turned its eyes to the NIH in April, when three DOGE officials — Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, and Zachary Terrell — met with chief grant management officers at the NIH to demand changes, according to one person.
It is unclear which officials are currently involved in overseeing grants awarded by the NIH through the PMS. (Coristine — known by his online nickname, “Big Balls” — left DOGE and moved to the Social Security Administration in June. An attempted carjacking in August left him injured and provoked the Trump administration’s deployment of federal troops in Washington, D.C.)
The NIH terminated the majority of grants to Harvard in May, under directives from the Trump administration, after the University defied White House demands it blasted as “unmoored from the law.” But since at least July, grant payments have been unilaterally withheld by officials from DOGE — and without the review of grant management within the NIH, according to the person.
While District Judge Allison D. Burroughs’ ruling on Wednesday does not directly mandate a change to that process, Harvard could argue that the Trump administration is in contempt of court if DOGE continues to block payments.
As of Sunday, Harvard researchers were still unable to draw down funds, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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Samuel R. Bagenstos — who served as the general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services under the Biden administration — said a DOGE-controlled grant review would not be a legal mechanism to disobey the court order.
“They do not have the right to use a grant review process to evade the District Court order,” Bagenstos said. “If this continues, it sure looks like something Judge Burroughs would want to look at for contempt.”
But the White House has kept information about what happens to university funding after NOAs are issued tightly under wraps, according to two staffers at the NIH, who added that guidance is rarely put in writing.
The behind-the-scenes suppression of grants to Harvard shows DOGE’s extensive involvement in the White House’s effort to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement money — and extensive policy concessions — from universities. Columbia and Brown only began receiving payments after settling with the government, even though the NIH had resumed awarding their grants weeks prior.
The Trump administration, which has vowed to appeal Burroughs’ decision, has not indicated that it will back away from its efforts to force Harvard toward a settlement. The two parties have been in talks since June and were reportedly drawing closer to an agreement that would have required Harvard to pay $500 million to vocational education programs. But Burroughs’ ruling last week could throw a new wrench in the negotiations if Harvard sees a serious path to retaining its funding.
Despite the ongoing negotiations, the Trump administration kept up its pressure on Harvard over the summer. Federal agencies subpoenaed the University, formally accused it of violating Title VI, threatened its accreditation, and launched an investigation into patents worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those came on top of a slew of earlier actions against Harvard — including the multibillion dollar funding freeze, attempts to revoke its ability to host international students, and threats to its tax-exempt status in April.
Bagenstos said that DOGE’s involvement as a middleman in the PMS could create a long-term, undercover system to enable the “political manipulation” of federal funding.
“It’s likely to slow things down and create an opportunity for manipulation to the payment process to reward the administration’s friends and punish its enemies,” he said. “It sure looks like, once again, this is the administration using its tools of grant making in a very retaliatory way.”
—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.
—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.
—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.
