President Trump on Friday once again threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University.
"We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!" he wrote on his social media platform.
In April, Trump made a similar threat against the university, as his administration accused Harvard of failing to protect Jewish students during last year’s campus protests against the war in Gaza. “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting 'Sickness?'”
It’s not clear, however, if Trump’s threats are anything more than that. An administration official told The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s threats are not an order to the IRS to take action.
Still, Harvard University President Alan Garber pushed against Trump’s words, saying a revocation of tax-exempt status would be “highly illegal” and a threat to higher education.
“If the government goes through with a plan to revoke our tax exempt status, it would…be highly illegal unless there is some reasoning that we have not been exposed to that would justify this dramatic move,” Garber told the Journal. “The message that it sends to the educational community would be a very dire one, which suggests that political disagreements could be used as a basis to pose what might be an existential threat to so many educational institutions.”
Harvard sued the Trump administration in April after the administration froze more than $2 billion in funding for research, saying the funding freeze was illegal.