The Trump administration on Friday slashed additional grants to Columbia University totaling approximately $30 million, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
The administration is in the process of reviewing the totality of Columbia’s $5 billion in federal funding, and the fresh round of cuts comes on the heels of the administration’s decision to cancel $400 million in grants and contracts to the Ivy League school announced earlier this month.
At the time, the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said the initial cuts constituted "the first round of action" and that additional cuts were expected to follow as the review continued.
The $30 million in grants came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which took action as a member of the task force, and the administration is reviewing further cuts across other agencies as well, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Among the Columbia faculty members impacted by Friday’s cuts is Jeanine D’Armiento, the chairwoman of the University Senate Executive Committee, who has played a leading role pushing back against the school’s modest efforts to discipline students involved in disruptive and frequently anti-Semitic protests. Grants supporting D’Armiento’s work account for approximately $2 million of the $30 million cut Friday, according to a person familiar with the situation.
As the de facto leader of the University Senate, one of the bodies that metes out discipline to students, D’Armiento has played a key role in the events that have roiled the Morningside Heights campus over the past year.
As hundreds of student activists occupied the school’s south lawn last spring, ultimately forcing the cancellation of in-person classes and the university’s graduation ceremony, D’Armiento told former Columbia president Minouche Shafik and one of her advisers, Dennis Anthony Mitchell, that Shafik must engage in "dialogue" with the students, "including them in even the planning and discussions around the rules that will ultimately govern them," according to text messages obtained by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
"She is clearly and closely connected to the students who are leading the protest," wrote Board of Trustees vice chairwoman Wanda Holland-Greene to co-chairwoman Claire Shipman. "She says that we are fighting an ideological battle (anti-war) with logic (threats of discipline). What I heard her say is that we need to either speak to their idealism or prepare for their continued and coordinated escalation."
During a May 3, 2024, University Senate meeting, meanwhile, D'Armiento shut off the microphone of her colleague, Columbia professor Carol Ewing Garber, as Garber said there were "groups who are supporting terrorists" on campus.
"There is danger in that statement," D'Armiento responded. "I am trying to take our community a level down and that word is not going to do it. Maybe I broke the rules … but I cannot allow that kind of thing in a time like this."
The Trump administration on Thursday sent Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong a detailed letter addressing the cuts and outlining a series of steps that the university must take in order even to enter into discussions with the administration about the restoration of lost funds.
"This letter outlines immediate next steps that we regard as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government," it read.
Those steps include the enforcement of existing disciplinary policies, the imposition of a mask ban that would allow the university to identify protesters, and the adoption of a plan to reform the school’s admissions process.