The news on Monday from the Wall Street Journal that the Trump administration is moving to bar Harvard University from receiving federal funds may sound like one more salvo in the president’s long war on “liberal elites.” But it’s intended as a crushing blow, the culmination of an obsession years in the making. If carried through, it would be a wrecking ball that severely cripples one of the pillars of American progress.
Trump has been swinging at universities like Harvard since his 2016 campaign, painting campuses as hotbeds of “wokeness” and “indoctrination,” trashing them as bloated, wealthy, and out of touch with “real America.” He never cared that these institutions generate scientific discovery, medical breakthroughs, and technological innovation that touch every life in this country. For Trump, they’ve been ideological enemies first and foremost.
Harvard, Columbia, Brown, and others have become this orange Ahab’s white whale: Liberal institutions he frames as foes. Just like Captain Ahab, he can’t let go.

The latest harpoon
This move to strip Harvard of federal funds, clearly not the first and likely not the last, would choke off far more than research grants, their largest source of federal funding. It also would affect federally funded student aid, training programs, and contracts for technology. Depending on how regulators interpret it, there could even be implications for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements tied to Harvard-affiliated hospitals.
But let’s zoom in on research dollars, money that fuels essential work in medicine, public health, technology, and science. Federal money doesn’t just pay for ivory tower experiments. It pays for results, and Americans have been reaping them for decades. Your taxpayer dollars at work for your benefit.

Clean air,
longer lives
In the 1970s and 80s, Harvard’s Six Cities Study, funded by the EPA and NIH, demonstrated that fine-particle air pollution was killing Americans prematurely. You remember fine-particle pollutants, the worst component of Canadian wildfire smoke this summer? The evidence led to stricter national air standards, fewer heart attacks and lung diseases, and thousands of lives saved. Every one of us breathes easier because federal dollars went to Harvard science.

Safer food,
healthier hearts
The Nurses’ Health Study, a decades-long project, uncovered the dangers of trans fats, or partially hydrogenated oils. That research provided the scientific justification regulators used to phase them out of the American food supply, purging them from frozen pizza to fast food fryers. Heart disease rates declined, and manufacturers reformulated everything from cookies to margarine. Again, taxpayer money produced public good, with Harvard at the forefront.

A window
into the brain
In the 1990s, Harvard scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital pioneered functional MRI, a non-invasive way to watch the brain in action. Funded by the NIH, fMRI quickly became a foundational medical tool.
Today it guides neurosurgeons, helps diagnose strokes, informs concussion research, and deepens our understanding of memory and mental illness. This one hits close to home after my own stroke a couple of years ago. Medical imaging scans are part of why I’m still here to talk about it. Thank you, Harvard, for the assist, for mine and countless others.

Huntington’s leap
In 1993, Harvard researchers spearheaded the discovery of the genetic mutation responsible for Huntington’s disease. Huntington’s is a brutal inherited disorder that strips away movement control, diminishes cognition, and brings severe psychiatric symptoms, usually in middle age. The discovery of its genetic cause opened the door to reliable testing, better family counseling, and a wave of treatment research still underway today.
Harvard didn’t solve it alone, but it played a critical role in breaking the code.

Immune system fights cancer
Harvard researchers helped uncover a molecular “brake” that restricted the immune system. There are now drugs that release that brake, freeing T-cells, the immune system’s attack dogs, to attack cancer cells they once ignored. These drugs allow the body’s immune system to help treat melanoma, lung cancer, kidney cancer, and more.

COVID-19 vaccine
When COVID-19 arrived, a Harvard lab played a central role in developing and testing the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Backed by federal funding, the lab created a single-dose vaccine that didn’t need specialized refrigeration. Millions of Americans, and millions more worldwide, were protected because taxpayer-funded research at Harvard responded when the virus hit.

For discovery’s sake
Not everything translates into a pill or policy, but some discoveries lift us by expanding what we know. Harvard’s astrophysicists played a central role in the Event Horizon Telescope, which produced the first-ever images of black holes, changing our understanding of the universe. That, too, was powered by federal grants.

Why Trump attacks
So why would a president who loves to tout American greatness go to war with the very institutions producing American breakthroughs? Why drive some of America’s premier scientific minds to other countries like France, Austria, and Spain to continue the work that’s threatened here?
The answer isn’t complicated. Harvard and schools like it are liberal. They challenge his worldview. They stand as symbols of expertise and knowledge in an era when Trump has built his brand on grievance and anti-intellectualism.
It’s not about policy. It’s about politics. Harvard’s research could cure cancer and he would still rail against it, because for Trump the battle isn’t about results. Just look at how he’s turned his back on his own successful Operation Warp Speed and has now crushed important vaccine research using the same technologies, while also casting doubt on vaccines in general. No, Trump doesn’t care about results, he cares about his perceived enemies.
If Harvard were cut off from federal funding, it wouldn’t just hurt professors in Massachusetts. It would slam the brakes on discoveries that ripple outward to hospitals in rural Minnesota, to food on grocery shelves in Kansas, to clean air in every city. It would narrow the pipeline of knowledge that has long made this country the world’s leader in science and technology.
Imagine a future where the next pandemic vaccine isn’t ready when we need it. Where lifesaving cancer research doesn’t happen. Where we lose ground to other countries because we drove our own scientists away. That’s the price of Trump’s obsession.
Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick didn’t end well. He went down with the ship, and so did his crew. Trump’s fixation on universities doesn’t just threaten his coveted legacy of American greatness. It threatens to pull the rest of us under, too.
America’s universities are not perfect. They are flawed, human institutions. But they are also places where our tax dollars have returned extraordinary dividends in knowledge, health, and innovation. To target them because they don’t bend to one man’s ideology is not just shortsighted. It’s destructive and disastrous. To borrow a phrase Rep. Pete Stauber likes to use, it’s a true and malicious threat to “our way of life.”
We need to move past orange Ahab’s bluster. The question is not whether Harvard is liberal. The question is whether we want a future where American science continues to lead the world.
If we let Trump sink Harvard and other liberal research universities just because they don’t align with his vision, then, folks, grab your life jackets and head for the lifeboats, because we’re all going down with the ship.