Attorney General Ford Supports Harvard University’s Challenge to the Trump Administration’s Retaliatory Federal Funding Freeze

Carson City, NV — Today, Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford announced he has joined a coalition of 21 attorneys general in filing an amicus brief in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, supporting Harvard University’s motion for summary judgment in litigation against a number of federal agencies for their unlawful cancellation of more than $2 billion in federal funding to the university

“The attack on Harvard University’s funding stream is both a destructive attempt to hobble one of our nation’s premier learning institutions and a glimpse at how the Trump administration will handle dissent,” said AG Ford. “For the sake of higher education around the country and right here in Nevada, I cannot sit idly by while this attack continues.”

In the brief, AG Ford argues that the administration’s punitive and unlawful funding freeze, which poses an unprecedented threat to Harvard, would have devastating spillover effects on the amici states’ economies if their research institutions were targeted in the same way.

Research spending at universities injects money directly into local economies. For example, research spending at UNR added $194.1 million to the Nevada economy in fiscal year 2024 alone. In addition, Nevada and the other coalition states point out that targeting funding in this way would trigger impacts including a loss of opportunity and training for researchers; a potential “brain drain” in which targeted states would lose talented researchers to institutions in other countries; a harm to intellectual property and business development; and a harm to local and state economies.

Joining AG Ford in submitting this brief, which was led by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, are the attorneys general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

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