Former White House Aide Reveals How Trump Cuts to Harvard Will Harm Cancer and Alzheimer’s Victims: ‘Playing Politics’

CNN’s NewsNight panel took on President Donald Trump’s pulling of billions of dollars in federal grants to Harvard University and recent threats to yank its tax-exempt status during a heated discussion on Tuesday night.

Host Abby Phillip followed CNN contributor Scott Jennings, defending the move by Trump, saying, “Harvard actually had a settlement already with Jewish students and agreed to a lot of reforms on how they address some of these very issues. Harvard is an independent institution, right?”

“Even the Wall Street Journal, who we’ve been quoting a lot here lately, because they looked at this and they basically said they are taking a risk here, the Trump administration, in pushing the boundaries of what they can and cannot do. Part of what the Journal is talking about here is the idea that they are going to micromanage individual universities, try to force quotas, try to force them to handle their internal affairs in a particular way, and then hold federal funding hostage as a result,” Phillip concluded.

Former Biden administration official Dan Koh replied, “And I think it’s important to outline what’s at stake with the federal funding, just to humanize it a little bit.” He added:

Previous federal funding to Harvard helped fund childhood leukemia research that increased the survival rate from 10% to 90%. It helped fund key breast cancer research that extended the lives of women by 25%. It’s just announced groundbreaking research on glioblastoma brain cancer patients. So we’re playing politics with funding that’s supposed to currently be going to Alzheimer’s victims, stroke victims, diabetes victims, and that advancement can’t wait for politics.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard President Alan M. Garber said in a statement earlier this week refusing to comply with Trump administration demands, adding, “The University will not surrender its independence or its constitutional rights.”

Trump hit back at Harvard on Tuesday, posting to social media, “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?” Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”

Watch the clip above via CNN.