Education Secretary Linda McMahon made clear this week that the Trump administration's fight with Harvard University is far from over, and that the Ivy League institution should expect investigations, funding cuts, and federal lawsuits if it continues to run DEI programs the administration says violate civil rights law.
McMahon delivered the warning on the New York Post's "Pod Force One" podcast, hosted by columnist Miranda Devine. The Education Secretary laid out the enforcement tools at her disposal with the directness of someone who spent decades running a billion-dollar entertainment company and has little patience for institutional stonewalling.
"Having always the hammer, if you will, of investigation, of losing federal funding for research and programs, as well as having lawsuits potentially brought by the Department of Justice are certainly things that they bear in mind as well."
That line captures the administration's posture toward America's wealthiest university, and toward the broader ecosystem of elite institutions that have treated federal dollars as an entitlement while allegedly flouting the laws that come attached to them.
The backstory is substantial. President Trump signed executive orders targeting university DEI initiatives shortly after taking office in January 2025. AP News reported that those orders also required stricter enforcement of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, mandating colleges disclose foreign gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more, and targeted accrediting bodies that enforce DEI requirements.
Harvard dug in. By April, the administration had issued a list of demands. Harvard refused to comply.
In May 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services yanked $2.2 billion in federal grants from the university, alleging non-compliance with federal non-discrimination laws. McMahon then formally notified Harvard President Alan Garber that the government would no longer award any federal grants to the school. Breitbart reported that McMahon wrote directly to Garber, citing "systemic violations of federal law" and non-compliance with the Supreme Court's 2023 affirmative action ruling. Harvard has received roughly $9 billion in federal grants and sits on an endowment worth approximately $53 billion.
A federal judge ordered the $2.2 billion restored in September 2025. The administration appealed.
The conflict has only widened since. The Department of Justice sued Harvard for allegedly withholding admissions data. The Department of Education opened investigations into alleged antisemitism on campus and race-based admissions policies. Conservative legal groups filed complaints with the DOJ's Office of Civil Rights alleging Harvard is still running tens of millions of dollars' worth of taxpayer-funded DEI programming.
McMahon's warning did not land in a vacuum. Other elite universities have already moved, some voluntarily, some under pressure. The Washington Examiner's detailed timeline of the Trump-Harvard conflict noted that the administration froze an additional $450 million beyond the initial $2.2 billion and used the False Claims Act to accuse Harvard and other universities of fraud for accepting federal funds while allegedly violating civil rights laws. Harvard responded by becoming the first university to sue the Trump administration, filing two separate lawsuits, one over the funding freeze citing First Amendment violations, and another over DHS blocking international student enrollment.
Columbia University chose a different path. It settled with the administration for $220 million and scrapped policies that the government said violated Jewish students' civil rights. MIT shut down its DEI offices entirely to demonstrate good faith.
Harvard has done neither.
McMahon acknowledged on the podcast that not every university is acting in bad faith. She pointed to progress at some campuses, noting that civics institutes have been established where "civics is taught, history of our country is taught, and less of the ideology." But she was candid about her suspicions regarding others.
"However, if I'm looking at it objectively, I would bet that there are many who have just changed the name and maybe given it enough window dressing that it's passed muster for the time being."
That line should concern every taxpayer. If universities are simply rebranding DEI offices, swapping letterhead while preserving the same programs, the same staff, and the same ideological mission, then billions in federal research dollars are flowing to institutions engaged in what amounts to a shell game.
The Education Secretary was careful to distinguish between the administration's enforcement posture and a desire to defund American research. She made clear the goal is compliance, not destruction.
"It is not the goal or the desire of the federal government to take away that funding, because our research universities provide unbelievable amount of very effective and good research and invention for the country."
"So we want to make sure that that research can continue, but they just need to know that they're going to have to operate within the confines of the law to do that."
That framing matters. Critics have cast the administration's actions as an assault on academic freedom. But McMahon's argument rests on a straightforward principle: federal money comes with federal rules. Universities that accept billions in taxpayer grants cannot simultaneously run programs that the administration alleges discriminate on the basis of race, the very thing civil rights law was designed to prevent.
When McMahon appeared before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, she cited Title VI as the legal authority for withholding Harvard's funding and noted that Harvard's own numbers show conservative faculty representation at just 3%. Fox News reported that Sen. Chris Murphy pushed back, arguing the administration lacked legal authority to "micromanage viewpoint diversity on campus." McMahon drew a clear line in response, stating that the administration's demands target DEI programs specifically, programs she described as "pitting one group against another."
The podcast interview also touched on McMahon's years as president and CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, a biographical detail that her critics have long used to dismiss her. McMahon leaned into it with humor, referencing a 2003 incident on "Monday Night Raw" when the wrestler Kane hit her with a "tombstone piledriver."
"I've actually not been turned upside down and made to look as though I landed on my head yet, but there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, that is for sure."
She also recalled Andre the Giant as a personal favorite and spoke warmly about the storytelling structure of professional wrestling, protagonists, antagonists, and "some injustice that was going to have to be rectified through that match."
The parallel to her current role was hard to miss, even if McMahon didn't draw it explicitly. Harvard's administration may see itself as the protagonist in a fight over academic independence. McMahon and the administration clearly see a different story: a wealthy, powerful institution that took public money, ignored public law, and now expects to face no consequences.
The administration's appeal of the September 2025 court order restoring Harvard's funding remains pending. The DOJ lawsuit over admissions data is ongoing. Department of Education investigations into antisemitism and race-based admissions continue. And conservative legal groups have put fresh complaints on the DOJ's desk alleging that Harvard's DEI spending persists in the tens of millions.
McMahon said she hopes universities have "seen the error" in maintaining discriminatory DEI programming. But hope is not a strategy, and her podcast appearance made clear the administration has tools beyond hope, and the willingness to use them.
Newsmax noted that McMahon's skepticism about university rebranding efforts signals the administration is not prepared to accept cosmetic changes as genuine reform. If Harvard and its peers think they can wait out the pressure, rename a few offices, and carry on as before, the Education Secretary's message was unmistakable: the federal government has a hammer, and it knows where Cambridge is.
When a university sitting on $53 billion in endowment money demands that taxpayers keep funding programs the law forbids, the question isn't whether the government should act. It's why anyone expected it to wait this long.
