Trump's Fight With Harvard Takes Another Big Turn

The fight between Harvard and the White House has escalated in even more significant fashion: The IRS is poised to revoke the school's tax-exempt status, two reports say. Details:

• The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration has asked the agency to revoke the status, and CNN reports that the IRS already is making plans to rescind it.
• The move comes after the White House froze more than $2 billion in federal funding to Harvard after the school refused to cede control of parts of its operations over complaints about DEI policies and protests over the Israeli-Hamas war.
• Harvard became the first school to buck the White House demands, evidently hoping its $53 billion endowment can give it enough of a cushion to weather the fight. Losing tax-exempt status could cost it about $500 million a year, according to USA Today.

• Harvard currently has tax-exempt status as an educational organization, but Trump floated the idea of seeing it revoked earlier this week on social media, notes NPR. "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?'" he wrote on Truth Social.
• Two quotes illustrate the divide. "I'm not sure why we need to be funding people who aggressively refuse to give up a variety of values and structures that most Americans don't agree with," former GOP House leader Newt Gingrich tells the Post. But the "IRS is supposed to administer the tax rules impartially, not pursue political vendettas against exempt organizations," counters Steve Rosenthal, who was a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center think tank.

(More Harvard University stories.)