NSF lifts hold on Harvard grants amid Trump funding fight

The first casualties of a funding freeze are rarely abstract. They are the graduate student waiting on a stipend, the postdoc holding a project together, and the lab that cannot keep a trial or instrument running while federal money sits idle. That strain eased only slightly this week, when the National Science Foundation lifted a hold on some grants for Harvard and other universities after a wave of questions over why new awards had been slowed.

The move came after a year in which federal research money became a pressure point in the Trump administration’s fight with elite universities. Harvard said the White House froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts on April 15, 2025, after the university rejected administration demands. Harvard sued six days later. By late May, the university said the government had terminated another $450 million in funding, and researchers said Harvard Medical School alone had more than 350 grants affected in that round. Faculty warned that work on tuberculosis, spinal cord injury and other fields was being disrupted, while young scientists were left without a stable path forward.

The NSF’s own role in the fight mattered because it is one of the federal government’s largest basic-science funders. The agency had already frozen new awards in May 2025, then announced a 15% cap on indirect costs for new NSF awards. A federal judge in Boston blocked that cap on June 20, 2025, calling it arbitrary and capricious. The agency’s FY2024 enacted budget was $9.06 billion, and it says it supports more than 1,900 organizations across every state and U.S. territory, giving its decisions outsized reach far beyond Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Harvard leaders have described the government-university research system as an 80-plus-year partnership that has powered major medical and scientific advances. That partnership came under intense strain as the administration targeted at least two dozen universities and made at least $11 billion in cuts, according to Harvard leaders’ own accounting. The pattern now includes legal pushback and partial reversals, but also a deeper warning for universities that rely on federal grants to pay overhead, sustain labs and keep graduate programs intact. Even a temporary pause can ripple through years of work, delaying papers, interrupting experiments and making long-term scientific planning far harder.